Honors 221: Human Behavior & Evolution

 

Evolution → "Survival of the Fittest". That was my thought process when someone mentioned evolution. By the end of this class, I learned that survival of the fittest was a redundant statement) and revovled only around Darwin's theory of evolution.

 

My favorite aspect of this class was being able to choose a topic related to evolution and plan and execute an independent research project with three other team members. Our group chose to replicate a study done by Dr Erik Postma from the University of Zurich. Postma looked at if there was a relationship between attractiveness and performance in professional cyclists (his paper can be found here), while our group chose to see if there was a relationship between attractiveness and performance in ultramarathon runners. The main difference between Postma's study and our study was that the headshots of the cyclists he used were professionals, while our ultramarathon runners were ordinary civilians who happen to have a passion for running. Although our results differed from Postma's study and we found no correlation between attractiveness and performance, I actually found this more interesting because there was no immediate explanation for why our results were different.

 

For those interested, I have included a copy of our presentation below.