The Best in My Field

CHARLES DARWIN (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882)

Since I don't really have a physical anthropologist to look up as a "god" in my field, I decided to write about Charles Darwin, one of the most famous biologists of all time, because even if he is not directly from my field of studies, he has made big contributions to anthropology with his work in evolution of the species.

Darwin was an english naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection. In his book On The Origin Of The Species (1859) he established evolutionary descendant with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. He examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent Of Man, And Selection In Relation To Sex (1871), followed by The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals (1872).

Darwin's theories have reached not only to anthropology, but to sociology and psychology too. But the interpretation of his biological theories haven't been always a complement to social theories in a good way thou. The natural selection theory, for example, brought support to racist theories in the 19th century. On the other hand, Darwin's theories have been a good support to cultural materialism. So, for good or bad, a lot of social theories are based on darwin's ones, and that is the importance that he has to me, because in other words, his theories, specially the ones about evolution, have given the necessary tools to anthropolgy to step in scientific fields as physical anthropology to study human evolution and culture from a different perspective.

The picture above is the first sketch of an evolutionary tree of life ever done, by Darwin when he was 28 years old, in 1837, trying to figure out a way to explain his theories. The sentence "I think" can be read in the upper side of the draw.

My Career

I decided to study Physical Antropology becouse is a career that is a mix of different areas. These are, social and cultural vision, medical knowledge and arqueologycal methods. Other reason is that I like investigation and whit this I can descover and resolve some problems in actual and ancient.
Professionals contribute to society of differents ways. First, someone investigate genetics deceases and how these are present in different populations. Other professionals have been dedicated to osteopathology, that are asociated whit life ways, and they make use of this knowledge to help people in prevention of this posibilitates of get a pathology. Finally, they contribute to re-built the prehistory and hystori, showing us, how did people live in that time.
Tools that need to continue working are tecnology to work some samples. We need continue stdynd becouse the cience progess and we must stay preparated to physical antropology advance.
My favourite subject is genetics, becouse I can study microsamples that will show me differents changes in the populations. Genetics is a area very complete, where biologycal evolution can ber described for this area, becouse of, other component, like natular selection, associated to wheather, depredation, demography, etc, are more difficult of investigated.
Physical Antropology is a science that must continue working and developing, becouse it can give us some much answer of differet byological process.

This is the photograph that I like!

This picture was taken by a friend on Easter holidays in San Esteban two years ago. It shows children playing in a playground, that was built by a group of friends and I, in a poor suburb of that city.
We thought this proyect to make local children happy. Before the construction of the playground, this place was a very ugly and contaminated landfill. It was a hard job to make that place look as pretty and enjoyable as you can see in the picture. those kids were really excited after we were done with the construction.

This picture remember me all the trouble we had to go through in order to get this place running, because, like I said before, it wasn't easy. We had to get permission from the community first, then go to buy all the construction's materials to start working on it and we only had one weekend, so it was a pretty tight schedule. It took us two days to get the playground ready for the big opening.
We were 12 happy hardworker-friends looking to all those kids playing and laughing on their new game's place, and that was the most amazing moment of all.

We had a lot of fun working as a team, specially knowing that we were going to make others happy with our work.
All this made me feel that if you really want to do something, it is possible to make it happen.
I'm very proud of what we did.

So now you know why this picture is so special to me, and those children smiling are the best :)