Reflection

~What have you learned so far? Not in the sense of what did we cover in class, but where have you personally have had some real breakthroughs or changes in your understanding?

    -I think one of my biggest breakthroughs was really learning and understanding the concept that evolution is not linear and not always a species diverging from another. There are many factors that affect evolution and it’s not as simple as I used to think it was. Incorporating gene flow, mutation rates, genetic drift, reproductive fitness, and natural selection into evolutionary thinking has greatly "updated" some original conceptions I had. I have also had some breakthroughs when working in RStudio as it is still a great struggle of mine. I am now able to understand more of my errors when coding along with interpreting graphs. 

~If you go back to your original blog post where you defined evolution, how would you change it? How has your understanding of evolution changed since then?

    -Evolution is not as simple as I used to think it was. It’s not always beneficial and its not always linear. Many factors are involved in evolution while it can be random, it can also be kind of planned through the driver of evolution which is natural selection.

~What concepts are you still struggling with? Where do you think you need additional help and clarification?

    -I struggle with understanding the language of coding in RStudio. I was very confident at the beginning of the semester that it would “click” in my brain because I have a lot of experience in computers however that’s not the case. I also still struggle with interpreting the figures in RStudio sometimes but that is improving over time. I think the fact that not all the same “rules” apply to every species can make interpreting data difficult.

~Now that you have studied some of the basic concepts, what are you curious about? What are the things you are wanting to learn more about?

    -I want to learn more about Covid-19 as I loved the discussion, we had in class on Tuesday the 12^th. I also want to learn more about human evolution and our ancestors. Id like to know more about how we evolved from the Neanderthals and homo erectus and so on. I know very little about the human lineage so I hope we can do an RStudio assignment over it.

PS- The meme is me right now. 

PPS- Please ignore the formatting errors. Blogger has really been messing up on me lately.