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 :)

Web Site

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

I knew this web site, becouse genetic's teacher show me when I had a homework. Since that time, pubmed has been a very important tool to my knowledge like physical antropology.

PubMed is a web site of Medical Information. It's a service of US National Library of Medicina and National Institutes of Health . Here you can find different articles from a lot of journals. These journal publish papers that are very important becouse they show us progress of the different sciences associatted whit the medicine. This information is a great help becouse provide relevant evidence like for example genes that are involved in some deseases or relationships between animals and human that delivery information from evolution of diferents species.
I usually visit this web site to look for molecular information of deseases humans, nucleotyde secuences and background of any subjects.

Camera

Camera is a piece tecnology. It takes a pictures, and in the time it had changed in size, tecnology and quality. My first camera I got it when I was a child and it was a present from my parents. That camera used roull film.

Actually I have a Digital Camera and I use it when a I go to interesting place. I prefer take a picture from natural views or cultural built. I use it sometimes, when I want capture a beautiful or important moment in my life. I like camera becouse whit it I can capture beatiful imagen and important moment for me. This piece of tecnology is very important, becouse, whit it we can capture historic moments and diferent place that we can't enjoy or know becouse are faster. It's very important this tecnology becouse is a approach of different place that we can meet it.

First Post - Presentation.-

Hello, my name is Pamela Cañas Encina. I was born in September twenty sixth and I am twenty two years old. I'm studying Physical Anthropology in the University of Chile. I'm actually in fourth grade. I study in Santiago, but I live in Los Andes, a town which is one hour away from Santiago.
Besides study, I enjoy doing outdoors activities and sports like playing basketball, I also like to hang out with my friends and go to parties or to the cinema to watch a movie.
This is my first blog and I hope to be improving my english through the creation of this space.
Since I have never had a website before, I will also learn to build one by myself through the creation of this blog. I like the idea of having a blog because I think it is a good way to express some of my ideas out, about any subject given in classes.