1) How does our body store that extra energy? Read 6.15 and 6.16 in your book, and the preceding pdf presentation, and tell me how extra energy is stored in the human body and why it's stored in the form that it is. Do we store our extra energy in the form of sugar, protein or fat? And what's the logic behind the way our body stores this abundance?

2) Why do we reproduce, anyway? Because we don't live forever and we have this burning compulsion to keep our genes alive (Why? that's the subject of our next Discussion!). So in a perfect world, we'd reproduce at will and we'd get to keep all of our genes in the gene pool. And essentially, that's what a bacteria does. Splits in half, keeps all its genes around. Whereas humans (just as an example) undergo great risks and social complexities all to earn the right to pass 50% of our genes down. Why? What's the trade off? Why would we want to "share" our offspring's genetics with another organism (our mate)?

Talk about the pros and cons of both sexual and asexual reproduction.

3) In this discussion we're going to think about human emotions. Why? Because humans have them, and most of the qualities that humans have are things that we've evolved to have because they've been critical in our survival. I think part of the fun of science is taking something pretty ordinary that we take for granted - like being happy or sad or annoyed or falling in love - and looking at it from a new perspective. In this case, an evolutionary perspective.

Human biology is the result of millions of years of evolution. A lot of the traits we take for granted have evolved because they helped us survive and reproduce over our evolutionary history.

Consider an emotion that you would describe as “rational” – and an emotion you would describe as “irrational”. What are some potential reasons that humans might have evolved these emotions?

Here's an example: an emotion I'd consider rational would be happiness. We tend to experience the feeling of being happy when we have exactly the kind of food we've been craving, when the person we like seems to like us back, when we find or earn money, and when our bedrooms at night are just the right temperature for a good night's sleep. And this makes sense to me because what we call "happy" is an emotion that makes us want to repeat whatever we're doing. Eating good food, finding a mate, finding resources (money, food, the perfect apartment/shelter) - all of those things helped humans to stay alive. We now associate those experiences with good feelings that we've labeled "happiness". Seems rational to me.

So what about more complex emotions? Is jealousy rational? Anger? Selfishness? Sympathy? Fear? Embarrassment?

1) How does our body store that extra energy? Read 6.15 and 6.16 in...