2.) Shivering is a short term adaptation, due to the muscles in your body shaking which then warm your body up.
- Red cheeks is a facultative adaptation, due to the temperature of our skin falling below 10 degrees celsius. Thermo stress plays a roll to how people react to the cold, such as age and fitness level is the way our bodies react differently to the cold.
- A developmental adaptation would be a large body mass. People who have a large body mass tend to stay warmer than those that don't have a large body mass. Throughout the different seasons throughout the year the bigger person is always warmer then the small bodied person.
- A cultural adaptation is clothing, because having warmer clothing you will necessarily stay warmer. Warm clothing for the cold weather would be considered by wearing a warm jacket and warm pants and a pair of warm gloves.
3.) The benefit through the study of human variation through environmental characteristics is getting to view how we adapt to things in different ways. Information can definitely be useful, such as to being capable of understanding why people adapt to things in certain ways.
4.) The way we would use race to better understand variation on the adaptations, would be to showing and comparing each race and how each race reacts differently to other races. It is a way of showing how each race adapts to the environment, and it is a good way to know what human variation and how each is different.
Hypothermia is indeed the dropping of the core body temperature, but why is this dangerous to the human body? What happens to the body (organs, tissues, blood, brain) below that optimal temperature of 98.6 degrees? Why can't it function well at lower temperatures? A little more detail would have been helpful to your reader.
ReplyDeleteCorrect on your short term adaptation.
For your facultative trait, remember that adaptations need to help the body address the stress in some way. So how do red cheeks help with cold stress?
Red cheeks are a symptom of the body's adaptive response but not the adaptation itself. When dealing with cold temperatures, the body will respond (using a facultative response) by using "vaso-constriction", meaning the capillaries constrict, limited the flow of blood to the skin's surface, helping to retain heat held in the blood closer to the core of the body, minimizing heat loss. But if this goes on too long, you will get tissue death in the skin, so eventually, the body will start alternating between vaso-constriction and vaso-dilation, switching back and for between closing and opening the capillaries to retain heat and keep the tissues alive. The red cheeks are evidence of the vasodilation period, with blood returning to the face to resupply the tissues. The vasocontriction/vasodilation is the adaptation. Red cheeks are just a clue that this process is happening.
More mass isn't really the issue for the developmental trait. It is having less surface area for any given mass. This produces a rounder body shape. But how does this help with cold stress? How does it keep the body warmer? Check out Bergmann and Allen's rules in the background information provided in the assignment folder.
Good cultural adaptation.
More knowledge is always better, but how can we use that knowledge? Can it be applied in any way beyond just understanding? Can we use this information to create better tools, clothing and housing to help us survive cold weather? Can this information have any medical applications?
Does race really "adapt" to the environment? What is race? Is it a biological trait?
No, race has nothing to do with biology or genetics. It is a social construct, a human-generated system of organizing and classifying people into artificial groups based only upon external phenotypic expressions. Unlike the environment, race has not causal relationship with human variation. It does not cause our adaptations, it only groups them. Without that causal relationship, race has no explanatory power. It can't explain why we vary, as the adaptive approach can. You cannot use race to understand why humans vary. Only the adaptive approach can do that.
You mentioned cold cheeks are a facultative adaptation but did not explain further how they benefit an individual in a cold environment.
ReplyDeleteAlso, for the developmental adaptation you mentioned large body mass. Although stature does play a role in retaining heat, there is something to distinguishing large body mass from a squat stature. Certain populations that have lived in cold environments for generations may be predisposed to a squat stature, but since body mass can be effected by diet, it could be completely unrelated to the temperature of one's environment.