Human Variation and Race
A normal healthy individual's body temperature is about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. When the body senses it is too cold the hypothalamus will send signals to your muscles to shiver and create warmth to maintain homeostasis. Climates that are extremely cold come with the risk of the body going into hypothermia. This is a life threatening drop in core temperature to subnormal levels. Hypothermia occurs when the core body temperature drops to 94 degrees Fahrenheit, thus disrupting the body's ability to maintain homeostasis.
There are many cultural adaptations that humans have used to adapt to this stress. One of them is drinking alcohol to keep warm. This increases blood flow to the body's extremities and provides a feeling of warmth.
Another adaptation that humans have used is insulated clothing to stay warm. In cold climates it helps the body keep in heat wearing windbreaker jackets, hats that cover the ears, mittens to cover the hands and thermals under their clothing. By covering the areas that can lose heat, it helps the body stay warm and prevents heat from escaping as quickly.
Even if the temperature of the day is set to be cold, we have learned that to try and stay warm, our activities can be done during the warmer times of the day. Instead of going out early in the morning or later at night when it is dark, going when the sun is out if possible can help prevent being out in the coldest part of the day.
Some societies have decided that a good way to adapt to cold climates, is to sleep in groups with their bodies pushed up against each other. This is done in order to minimize heat loss during cold months. An example of this is done in Inuit culture in the Artic.
The benefits of studying human variation in traits across environmental clines is that researchers can find patterns in the traits and how those traits are expressed in various environments.An example of this can be found in the text in regards to lactose tolerance. The interaction between culture and biology became important to human adaptive responses and this interaction was responsible for the change in allele frequencies.
In order to use race to understand the cultural adaptations of responding to the cold, you would take a race that lives in a cold climate and see if they fit in with these adaptations. Then we could say that particular race that lives in the cold has adapted to the climate. It is a stretch to try and understand this way because everything is a broad generalization. The study of environmental influences on adaptations is a better way to understand human variation than race. We can use scientific research to find patterns in certain traits and see how they have evolved in different generations over time.
Hi Ariana, I thought your post was interesting, I liked the pictures that you put on it. You listed great ways on how people keep themselves warm during the winter. Your right that wearing sweaters, hoodies, and other warm clothing will help you to stay warm. I wear a thick sweater when it is winter time and that surely helps keep me warm.
ReplyDeleteHello Ariana,
ReplyDeleteI love that you showed a picture of how they keep themselves warm, and that's a very good adaptation that works. I'm confused as to why you only mentioned cultural adaptations and none of the rest. You listed great ways to stay warm in cold environments, but not much about the different adaptations to survive in cold environments. I make sure I'm very warm when I know I'm going to a cold place, because the cold literally stresses me out!
You can't use race to influence human variation, because race has nothing to do with the way we adapt to different environment. If it's too hot and you faint, the cause was environmental stress not the race of the individual. Nice post, good Luck on the rest of this course!
Hi Emmesha,
DeleteThank you so much for your feedback on my post! I misunderstood the assignment for number two where it says explain four ways which humans have adapted to this stress using one specific adaptation from each of the different types. Instead of one adaptation from each of the four categories I used four ways from one category. Thank you also for another perspective on why we can't use race to influence human variation. It was difficult for me to come up with and seeing the way you explained made me feel like duh I don't know why that didn't come to mind!
Shivering is an actual physiological adaptation to cold stress, i.e., a short term adaptation. This first section was for explaining why cold stress is harmful to the human body by impeding homeostasis. Why can't the human body function below that optimal level of 98.6 degrees? What happens to the circulatory system and the organs? Offer your readers more information here to help them understand why adaptations to this stress are so important.
ReplyDeleteAs you indicated in your comment above to Emmesha, you misread the second section and only discussed cultural adaptations. On that point, not that drinking alcohol is NOT adaptive. In fact, it is dangerous, as it doesn't actually help the body retain heat. It actually gives the illusion of warmth, while fractionally reducing the body temperature. It also reduces your mental ability to figure out a way to get yourself out of the cold, increasing the likelihood of dying. Clothing and group sleeping are accurate examples.
Here are some of the other adaptations:
Short term: Shivering (partial credit)
Facultative: Vasoconstriction
Developmental: Short, squat body shapes (Bergmann and Allen's rules)
I don't disagree that knowledge is always useful, but can you identify a way this knowledge can be useful in a concrete way? Can knowledge on adaptations to cold climates have medical implications? Help us develop clothing that retains heat more efficiently? Can we develop new means of home/building construction that might help increase heat retention? How can we actually use this information in an applied fashion?
In your final section: Is that actually using race, or are you just using the adaptive response and layering race over top of it? Can you really use race to explain human variation? Understand that it is perfectly acceptable to answer this question with a "no".
To answer this question, you first need to explore what race actually is. Race is not based in biology but is a social construct, based in beliefs and preconceptions, and used only to categorize humans into groups based upon external physical features, much like organizing a box of crayons by color. Race does not *cause* adaptations like environmental stress do, and without that causal relationship, you can't use race to explain adaptations. Race has no explanatory value over human variation.