Human Variation & Race Blog
1) Heat negatively impacts our survival in many ways such as: as the earth grows mosquitoes will migrate further north and south spreading disease, warmer oceans mean stronger hurricanes, droughts and heat waves will be more common and water will become short in supply, the food supplies will be wiped out as the land becomes too dry for crops and animals wont survive, economic costs of treating diseases and rebuilding cities after natural disasters will do a lot of damage.
2)Individual differences in metabolism, hormone levels, physical activity, body size and shape all play a significant role in how efficiently an individual responds to hot climates. People evolve to meet environmental needs.
Cultural adaptation: People who live in warm areas have darker skin tone and body hair.
Developmental: higher skin temperature, good diet, physical shape.
Short term: sweating/sweat glands to lower body temperatures in the heat.
Facultative: someone living in warm climate may develop calluses on their feet.
3)The benefits of studying human variation is that by studying the various sample populations over periods of time we can evaluate the environmental stressors that affect populations.if we took one samplepopulation from one environment and moved them to an entriely different environment we would be able to notice and observe different types of adaptations for that specific environment.
4)Race could only be used to classify certain kinds of groups from certain geographic locations. We can see how a certain race of people have developed and evolved over time. This would be very useful in learning about your own culture or ancestors. Howver studying the environmental influences of a group is better because we can see patterns of human evolution to outside stressors. We can see how people adapt and change in different climate changes fir example.
Good discussion on the benefits of this approach and the issue of racism.
ReplyDeleteYour discussion on the stress didn't really address the biology of it. You addressed other external, environmental factors, but no how heat can take a human body out of homeostasis.
Regarding your traits, your cultural traits are actually biological/developmental traits. Cultural traits would have been external to the body, like tools of some sort.
How does higher skin temperature and calluses help with heat adaptation?
You have some interesting ideas (and great images) but a little more explanation and clarification would have been helpful.
Hey cmdailor
ReplyDeleteI found it very interesting your example of using a sample of the population and moving them to an entire different environment to see the adaptations that would occur. We can relate that to the early humans and see how they adapted to their new environments as they migrated and evolved. You had a couple of spelling errors in your final paragraph but I agree with everything you said about race and geographic location, great post!
-Tyler
I did not know that living in higher climate areas would cause people to get calluses on their feet. Im supposing that this is to protect their feet from the hot ground but am not positive. I did my blog on the cold temperature so it is nice to see the differences from cold to hot climates. Good job!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading about the impact of heat in our every day lives and how behaviors and looks variate from the areas which we are at, one thing that i liked is that you showed changes in our looks and body physics due to our geological location, awesome job.
ReplyDelete