Shenk argues that "Few adults come close to their true intellectual potential" (34). As a theme of his book, Genes x Environment play a huge role in shaping a human being's athletic ability. Shenk points out that "In Jamaica... small children showed up for a Saturday morning youth track practice. That was impressive... With that level of intensity baked right into the culture, it's no surprise that Jamaicans have for many decades produced a wealth of aggressive, ambitious young sprinters" (109). Thus, Shenk concludes that "Mind is the most athletic part of any Jamaican athlete's body" (110). Using this information, do you think it is possible to train a group of people to become driven athletes in a certain sport? Just like the Ted Williams example used throughout the book, can there always be a few people that have the will and desire to become the greatest athletes in a particular sport? If so, can anyone be the best at any given sport if they start training in childhood? Could you or I have been the greatest quarterback in the NFL if we had that desire as a small child? Try to relate ecological terms and ideas, for example operant and classical conditioning, in your response. Maybe explain how taxis, kinesis, habituation, etc. can be used to possibly train kids to become great athletes if possible. Relate to the biology unit of ecology and theme of regulation.
Josh LeVay (blevay@comcast.net)
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ReplyDeleteShenk points out the idea of plasticity and that that human brain has a “built-in-capacity to become, over time, what we demand of it” (Shenk 36). Different people have different potentials for learning, which can be dependent on their socio-cultural influence. The fact that Jamaicans are capable of becoming top-notch runners doesn’t account for the possibility that a random selection of people can easily become as good of runners due to different types of environmental stimuli people are exposed to. Ted Williams’ development into an astounding baseball player also suggests that the mind and its plasticity can develop a person’s way of thinking. While some people may display the genes for the ideal NFL quarterback, the incentive to practice as Ted Williams did and the conditions of societal influences can hinder or help an individual. If one of us were to become a quarterback, the extent to which we can be considered a NFL quarterback is dependent partly on genes, but especially by the mind’s incentive to become an NFL quarterback.
ReplyDeleteIn the Campbell textbook, we learned the importance of classical conditioning and operant conditioning on animals. Ivan Pavlov demonstrated classical conditioning by how a dog could associate the ringing of a bell to food being given after. B.F. Skinner demonstrated operant conditioning’s idea of reinforcement and punishment by training a rat through trial to obtain food by pressing a lever. However, animals are also prone to cognition and problem solving and by using awareness and reasoning, animals of the same species can learn from one another through observation. The fact that animals are prone to many types of learning suggests that people have the incentive to learn based on the mind’s processing of the environment. Learning helps animals adjust to the environment in many ways. For example, pill bugs undergo negative taxis in response to light and are more suitable in environments consisting of moist and dark areas. Many animals have even adjusted to the stimuli of alarm calls and able to respond to them. With habituation, if an animal continuously hears the alarm call and there is no eminent danger, the animal will lose responsiveness to the alarm call because the animal has become aware of the alarm’s irrelevance through learning. Learning for humans occurs in many ways, but the mind’s response to learning is different for each person.
Regulation is important theme of biology that relates to “deliberate practice” (66). If you or I were to try to become football player through continuous practice, gene regulation could account for developmental growth that leans towards the ideal football player. Considering how many of us have the same genes, committed work towards football can lead to the activation of certain genes in response to certain stress. Due to the mind’s incentive to be a football player, the body has the capability to activate certain genes that were repressed and can accelerate the physical development of muscles that football players use. Without regulation, Ted Williams’ continuous practice towards baseball would never have made him into a pro baseball player because certain genes did not react to the environmental stress that put strain on specific muscles of the body.
In Hye-Jung Han’s journal article, “SATB1 reprograms gene expression to promote breast tumor growth and metastasis,” the biologist experiments on the genome organizer SATB1 and its influence on increasing the rate of cell division of breast cancer cells. The biologist states how in many people, breast cancer occurs due to some environmental stress considering breast cancer isn’t being passed on to offspring. Han finds that SATB1 reacts to only cancer cells in speeding up cancer cell division by experimenting on cancer and normal cells in vitro. Han’s experiment clearly suggests how gene regulation to increase the cell division of cancer cells can be due to the unidentified learning by the body of the harmful reaction that breast cancer has on the body.
-Trish Chari (trishtennis@gmail.com)