Ian's Thoughts

  Disease-  One disease that I have studied quite a bit is diabetes. Type II diabetes is growing at an alarming rate around the world, In 2018 the CDC estimated that 26.9 million people in the United States alone had been diagnosed with diabetes (RHIhub 2019). What is more alarming, however, and what may give clues about what is causing this disease is the prevalence of type II diabetes in rural areas, at 12.6%, compared to urban areas at 9.9% (RHIhub 2019). It is well known that a large risk factor for type II diabetes is being overweight, or obese. Rural areas have a higher amount of overweight and obese people than urban areas, which may be partly due to it being harder to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables in rural areas compared to urban areas (RHIhub 2019). One study done by the US Diabetes Prevention Program showed that the best way to prevent or slow diabetes is through proper diet and exercise. The study found that increasing the amount of physical activity and decrea...

 Speciation      Speciation, or the act of a population branching off and becoming their own species through evolution, is something that's hard to have a definitive timeline on in my opinion. Speciation in my mind can happen fast or over a long period of time. The tricky part is deciding when their genetics have changed enough that they become their own species. For this you might look at phylogenetic trees to see where the branching off occurred, how far down that branch they are, and if any other species or types of the same species still exist. In a situation where a population's environment gets changed rapidly and stays in the new different conditions, it makes sense that the organisms in the population that are able to survive and adapt to the new changes would produce offspring that is very different from the normal organisms of a species in their normal habitat. In this case, I would expect speciation to happen much sooner than if there was a gradual change ...

 Pipefish      Something evolving like this is very interesting. In most species that have a courting ritual, the male is the elaborate sex that has things like big pretty feathers or something like that to use in courting. However, in pipefish, it is the female. One hypothesis that might explain this weird change is the fact that male pipefish are the ones that carry the eggs and children. Perhaps in species where it is the male that takes care of the offspring, this is the case. Off the top of my head, I know that seahorses also have the male carry the young, so it would be interesting to do research and see if the female is the one courting the male in that species as well. As far as how something like this would evolve in the wild, that's a hard question to answer. Maybe the females had a trait that allowed them to be more successful fighting off predators or other things like that that males would typically do in other species, so they took on a lot of the tradi...