The Peabody Museum

During my time at Yale, I visited The Human Footprint exhibit at the Yale Peabody Museum. The exhibit focuses on how humans and their environment have shaped each other over millions of years. It presents human evolution as a complicated process involving many species, tools, environments, and extinctions. The gallery has replicas of early human fossils and animals our ancestors interacted with. Human evolution isn’t a linear process, it’s composed of many different adaptations appearing in response to our environments.

One part of the exhibit that stood out to me was how much scientists could learn from physical evidence. A skull or tool may seem small, but the details reveal how ancient humans lived. Early human relatives developed traits like walking upright, making tools, and having larger brains, but these adaptations did not appear at the same time. The stone tools were especially interesting because they showed that technology has been part of human survival for millions of years. Today, technology is represented by phones or AI, but the earliest technology was a sharpened stone. Technology has always been a way humans adapt.

The Human Footprint also showed that survival was never guaranteed. Some human relatives lived for millenia but eventually died out. A trait can be useful in one environment but when conditions change, that trait can be disadvantageous. The exhibit connects this idea to the present by diving deeper into how humans are still changing the world. The gallery includes examples like humans contributing to the extinction of giant moa and agriculture changing the genetics of corn. Visiting the exhibit helped me understand human evolution as a story of adaptation to environments. Like Darwin’s observations of small differences in organisms, the exhibit showed that science begins with paying attention to details. 

The Thinking Game

While at Yale Young Global Scholars, I watched the documentary The Thinking Game, which follows Demis Hassabis and DeepMind as they progressed towards breakthroughs in AI. One of the biggest challenges Hassabis and his team encountered was protein-folding. Their solution, AlphaFold, revolutionized research. Scientists went from having a handful of reliable models of proteins to having access to models of every protein imaginable. 

This documentary was especially interesting because I had used AlphaFold before in my own research. I studied the evolutionary relationships between Dipcericin A, Diptericin B, and Diptericin C using phylogenetic trees, and AlphaFold modeling. Before doing this research, I mostly thought of biology and computer science as fields that barely overlapped. However, watching this movie and conducting my own research has taught me that those two fields often help the other advance. In this case, AI transformed research permanently and for the better. 

Research is becoming more interdisciplinary. Biology, computer science, artificial intelligence, and statistics are no longer completely separate fields. In order to study peptides, I utilized programming and AI. Future research will depend on people who can connect different areas of knowledge and scientists will need to understand not only the organism or molecule they are studying, but also the technology being used to study it.

The Thinking Game showed me that AlphaFold represents a larger shift in how scientific research is done. My own project on Diptericin showed me a small example of that shift. By combining biology with technology, I was able to study insect immune peptides in a way that would have been much harder without computational tools. Discoveries like AlphaFold are not just impressive because they use AI, but because they help scientists ask deeper questions about life, evolution, and the structures that make biology possible.

Revising a Research Paper

        One part of writing a research paper not often talked about is the revision stage. After spending so much time researching, writing, editing, and formatting, it can feel like the paper is in its final form. However, it is rare that your first submission is your published version. Oftentimes, your paper will get feedback to help make your research paper stronger and more coherent. 

At first, reviewer comments can feel overwhelming. Seeing a long list of suggestions and questions can feel like the whole paper needs to be rewritten. In my own research paper on Diptericin, I received comments on parts of my reasoning, figures, citations, and explanations of my research methods. Some comments may point out major issues like unclear reasoning or problems with how data is interpreted. These comments take time because they require rethinking a section and going through the logic more carefully. 

Other comments are smaller but still important. These may include fixing citations, relabeling a figure, or changing the wording of a sentence. Although minor issues may not change the main argument of a paper, they still affect how professional and understandable the final version feels. A paper can have strong reasoning, but if the details are messy, its trustworthiness suffers. Tracking changes is also important because it shows honesty in the revision process by making every edit visible.

What helped me work through the pages of revision comments was realizing I needed to take things one step at a time. I organized comments that were related to each other or corrected the same section so I didn’t have to rework a section more than once. Sorting them into categories makes the process feel more manageable and more like a checklist of improvements rather than a giant problem. 

Revising a research paper also taught me patience. It can be frustrating to return to a paper after thinking it was done, but revision is where the real improvement happens. Each comment forces the writer to look at the paper from the reader’s point of view. Revising helps to make the research paper easier to understand. Detailed research methods are also important because they make the work reproducible, allowing someone else to understand and follow the same process to verify the results.

Dating Fossils

One of the most fascinating parts of studying anthropology is analysing fossils and determining how old they are. In Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, Wood explains that understanding the age of a fossil reveals details about how our ancestors lived and evolved.

One of the first methods to age fossils was looking at the surrounding rock and dirt. Generally, older sediment is found deeper in the earth and younger rocks are closer to the surface. This idea is called the law of superposition. If a fossil is found inside a certain layer, scientists can often assume it is around the same age as that layer of rock. However, this method is not foolproof as erosion and caves can move fossils or mix old and new sediments together.

As technology advanced, scientists discovered more absolute methods to date fossils. In East African fossil sites, many bones are found between layers of volcanic ash. These ash layers can be dated using potassium/argon or argon/argon dating because radioactive elements decay at a steady rate. Researchers also utilize palaeomagnetic dating, which analyzes changes in the earth’s magnetic field recorded in rocks. By comparing the magnetic pattern in sediments to known magnetic records, scientists can estimate the age of the fossils.

Other more specific methods help date fossils from different time periods. Ostrich eggshell dating uses changes in amino acids over time. Electron spin resonance and uranium series dating are often used for sites too old for radiocarbon dating but not old enough for potassium/argon dating. This plethora of techniques show that fossil dating is a careful process that combines geology, chemistry and biology to piece together the timeline of human evolution.

When I was younger, my family visited Salt Lake City in Utah and my brother and I had the opportunity to dig up fish fossils. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough to handle fossils so the most interesting specimen I dug up was fish poo. I remember being jealous of my brother, on the other side of the field, discovering fish bones while I uncovered their feces. Nonetheless, the trip inspired my fascination for archeology, and later anthropology.

Natural Selection

One of the most important ideas explained in Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction by Bernard Wood is natural selection as it explains evolution. Darwin’s most influential contribution was not just stating that evolution existed, but explaining a possible mechanism.

Natural selection begins with variation and the notion that no two individuals are exactly the same. Some may be faster, stronger, or smaller, leading them to be better suited to their environment. These differences may be small, but they can create an edge that becomes vital when resources are limited and competition is fierce. If one individual has a trait that helps it survive long enough to mate, that trait will be passed down to its offspring.

Over time, useful traits will become more common in a population. This is due to individuals with those traits living longer and passing them on to future generations. Darwin connected this idea to artificial selection, where humans choose certain traits in plants and animals. He theorized that nature could “select” traits as well.

Natural selection helps explain why there are so many diverse organisms and how they are so well adapted to their environment. It also supports the branching in the Tree of Life, where different species are connected and evolve into different directions. Understanding mechanisms like natural selection is vital when exploring theories like convergence. Thus, the discovery of natural selection helped reveal that comparing features like the morphology of a subject is not always the most accurate method to determining evolutionary relationships. Learning about natural selection makes evolution feel less sudden and more like a slow process built on small differences.

Learning from Nature

Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction by Bernard Wood encompasses many topics, but my favorite is about how scientists have viewed how humans fit into the natural world. In Ancient Greece, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle suggested that nature was one system. However, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the idea that man was one with nature was lost until 16th and 17th centuries. As science developed, researchers began utilizing methods like induction, which began with observations that were tested with experiments, rather than deduction, which began with unproven beliefs, to understand where humans fit. Thus, human origins became something that could be studied through fossils, anatomy, geology, and eventually genetics.

Charles Darwin is arguably one of the most important figures in this shift of thinking. Influenced by other thinkers like Charles Lyell, who wrote about geology and how slow the earth changes, Darwin began to theorize about how minute changes over extended periods of time could also shape living things. Darwin noticed that animals and plants were not exactly alike. Even within the same species, individuals had small differences whether it be their beak was more stout or that they were different colors. These variations mattered because only the most well adapted survived in nature. Food and space were limited, so some had features that helped them live longer and reproduce successfully.

Reading about the development of the idea that humans are part of nature and Darwin’s journey helped me understand that science begins with paying close attention to the world. In classes like AP Biology and AP Chemistry, the importance of not leaving anything unquestioned is stressed. Darwin’s work with observing small details led to his theory of natural selection. By studying animals and the world around him, he helped change how people understood life and humanity’s place in it.

Analyzing Phylogenetic Trees

        Phylogenetic trees are one of the most useful tools a scientist can use for understanding evolutionary patterns. At first, they look complicated and confusing, with branches clustered everywhere and seemingly random numbers on lines. However, once you learn how to read them, they become a great visual way to understand relationships between species. In my paper, I used phylogenetic trees to compare diptericin sequences across different fly species.

A phylogenetic tree reveals how closely related different sequences are. Sequences that branch close together are more similar, while sequences separated by longer branches diverged more severely. For example, if several Diptericin copies from the same species appeared in a tight cluster, that pattern suggests recent duplication. If copies from one species appear in different parts of the tree, that suggests an older and more complicated evolutionary history.

I also compared gene trees to species tree. A species tree shows the evolutionary relationships between the fly species, while a gene tree shows the relationships between the Diptericin sequences. These trees are not always identical. A gene can be duplicated, lost or evolve at different rates. This nuance is why analyzing both trees is essential for researchers to uncover patterns.

In my paper, I concluded that it is likely that Diptericin B was the most widely conserved paralog and was likely the most similar to the ancestral form of Diptericin. Diptericin A and Diptericin C appeared in more scattered groups that showed duplication in certain lineages, suggesting that the gene evolved differently in different species. 

Analyzing phylogenetic trees made me realize that evolution is much more complicated than one branch from ancestor to modern species. A tree can show conservation, duplication and divergence, all at once. In the case of Diptericin, the trees helped reveal how a small protein changed across insects and how these changes reflected different evolutionary pressures.