Review of Animations
I clicked on the periodic table as well as the metabolic pathways links and found both very interesting. Periodic table is something we are familiar with. The metabolic pathways is interesting, but all the chemistry jargon make it a little difficult to understand. The urea cycle confirmed what we learned in pathology, urea is made in liver and not in kidneys. I'd like to revisit the links again at the end of the course, may be by then I'll have a better understanding of what all the terms mean.
Do our ends justify our means?
In the span of history, with the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms, men have learned how to defend for themselves, how to make the most out of scarce resources and most importantly, how to survive. With the evolution of time and changes brought by the industrial revolution, survival is no longer a concern for most people. People want more than just survival, they want to accumulate wealth, assets, material goods and whatever it is, the bigger, the better, the more, the merrier. And so, through technology and intelligence, mankind have achieved its goal. For most people, they now have easy access to all kinds of food and material goods, yet all this has come at a price. One decade into the 21st century, and we've already had to deal with so many alarming natural disasters, not to mention the man-made disasters fueled by greed. In the past, productivity was regarded more highly than sustainability, but in the wake of all the recent major disasters, it seems we should now once-again be concerned with survival and this time, not about how to get more to survive, but how to cut down and conserve.
I love the point you make about how now our survival depends not on how much we can get but how much we can do with out or rather how much we can give back. It flips the notion of survival as a selfish fight to one of sharing and giving. Simple and profound indeed!
ReplyDeleteGreat post!
ReplyDeleteI agree, it seems we are constantly having to worry about or survival. I question a lot of times if anything at all is even safe to eat, drink, or even do. Hopefully, there will be a change in the general population as a whole and we will be able to make the changes necessary to make all this madness stop so that we can continue to live and survive comfortably without taking what we need, but also giving back.
When you look at the course of history from an evolutionary standpoint you can see that, as you have said, we have obviously thrived in our ability to survive. Unfortunately we have operated from a consciousness that has ignored each other, our health, and our environment. But yes now we have to pay for what we have done and what we have consumed. How will we do this? Are we able to do this? We definitely cannot undue what we have done, and now I agree that our evolution and survival is dependent on our ability to be flexible and change according to the current reality. I agree that this change involves consuming much less, especially if we are to continue with any grace at all.
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