Human Variation & Race Blog
1.
Cold is one of the following environmental
stresses that have negatively impacts to the survival of humans by disturbing
homeostasis.
2.
Identify 4 ways that humans adapt to cold
·
Short Term Adaptation: Drink and eat warm food
to produce heat to your body.
·
Facultative Adaptation: Limiting activity to the
warmest place.
·
Developmental Adaptations: Humans in colder
climates tend to be shorter, larger, have shorter limbs.
·
Cultural adaptations: Put more insulating and
warmer clothes or warm fires place.
3.
Benefits of studying human variation from this
perspective across environmental clines is important because you can track the
movement of traits, and environment to help surviving in harsh environment.
4.
How would you use race to understand the
variation of the adaptation.
·
The race variation show the important of
variation in adaptations, such as an example for cold, form experience
comparing my cousin from Thailand who is Asian compare to my Caucasian friend.
My cousin feels the cold easier than my friend. The way my cousin would adapt
toward the cold weather would be wearing more layer of warmer clothes than my
friends
Hi Paul,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your pictures and examples of ways humans adapt to the cold. I agree with your statement that says it is important to study human variation in environmental cline because it helps us to survive in harsh environments. I agree with this. We would not know that fire keeps us warm if we didn't look further into it.
The first section asks you to explain the stress of your choice. How does cold stress negatively impact the human body? What problems does it cause that must be addressed by adaptations? How does it disturb homeostasis?
ReplyDeleteShort term adaptations are physiological, not behavioral. What immediate physiological adaptations do our bodies exhibit in response to cold stress?
Facultative adaptations are physiological changes that require the turning on or off of a gene or group of genes. Activity wouldn't fall under this category.
Good identification of the developmental adaptation. Can you explain why people in colder climates have shorter bodies and limbs?
Okay on your cultural adaptation.
Okay on the benefit of the adaptive approach.
What you are describing in the last section is just the adaptive approach, not the use of race to understand human variation. Is race at all useful for understanding human variation? How is race determined? Is it biological or cultural? Objective or subjective? These questions need to be asked in order to understand why race cannot be used to understand human variation.