This course serves as a primary vehicle for meeting learning outcomes for the domains of science and social science. The official outcomes are listed later in this packet. I expect you to hold me, and yourselves, to those standards. This is a course in science and social science, combining understandings from many scientific, and social scientific, disciplines, but primarily ecology, anthropology, sociology, and economics. It is organized into five parts.
Adaptation is the key idea in explanation of the ecological relationship of animals to their niche .
We study the history of human adaptation. We begin with an overview, an anthropological and historical review of the development of the human economy, through its various pre-industrial forms to the development of mechanized industry. Human economic activity is discussed here as cultural and ecological adaptation, and subject to ecological laws, such as the Laws of Thermodynamics. Culture , either material and artistic, is seen as the primary vehicle for ecological adaptation, and in the case of artistic culture, a creative format through which humans explain the world to themselves and each other. This is a general summary of the human ecological approach.