Human Variations & Race
1) Cold - The negative effects of the freezing cold can vary between frostbite and hypothermia. Both are not good and will cause death and other health problems if a human were to end up with either. You know you are in danger when you begin to get body shivers/chills and might not experience piloerection, or may experience vasoconstriction, but not increased thyroxine production. When exposed to extreme cold conditions your body will begin to lose heat and will begin to freeze faster than you can produce essential body heat causing health problems or in some cases death. Eventually, the exposure to the freezing cold will use up all your body's stored energy which leads to it shutting down or struggling to “stay on”.
2a) Short term - A short term adaptation would be your body producing more heat in response to entering a colder climate. If you're from a naturally warmer place and you visit the snow or somewhere else where the climate is different your body will begin to produce more heat to try and keep your body warmer. It will only occur for a short period or until your body has gotten used to the new climate. Just as if it was hot and your body produces sweat to help cool it off this time it produces heat to keep it functioning properly. Another example would be your body adapting to the ocean when you first jump in as the water will naturally be colder and your body will need to adjust to it for a couple of minutes, this is another example of short-term adaptation.
2b) Facultative - A facultative adaptation would be your skin tanning or getting darker due to the UV-radiation exposure from the sunlight. Your body/skin will begin to go under changes meaning get darker to help itself repair the damaged skin but also provide a new layer of protection against the sun and its rays. Why is this facultative? You might ask, well it's because the tan will disappear after a couple days to 2 weeks of being away from the sun which allows your skin to peel and return to its original color. A helpful way to help mitigate the burns from the sun would be to throw on sunscreen to prevent cancer and still keep the tan going. You will only experience this during summer and not in winter as the sun's rays are not as harmful.
2c) Developmental - Developmental adaptations occur overtime and not right away inside of a human. They are born with the natural developments that either their parents or individuals in the family tree have evolved. An example would be the lung capacity of humans who live in high altitudes. The individual's family must have been living all their lives in order to make it valid. If they or another family was just visiting for a week and got used to the altitude that won’t count. Naturally a higher altitude population will have better, more suitable lungs in order to live and survive and be able to breathe/take in the oxygen correctly at a higher level of elevation. Again, these individuals and their families must have grown up or been born here for it to count as developmental. A normal sea level human lungs won’t be as strong or be fitted for a higher elevation like the others who are born there will be.
2d) Cultural - Cultural adaptations can be many things like changing one's diet or the way they dress in order to stay warm or cool or have the necessary nutrients in order to survive in a different cultural land. Two examples could be if someone is moving from a hotter climate to a colder one naturally, they will want to bring or buy warmer clothes to stay warm and eat more to sustain/have more energy to keep the body functioning properly (in other words diet). Cultural adaptations are more the example of traveling to a different climate rather than being born to be equipped for it. Most people experience this when going on trips to different areas of the world that are different from where they are from. This is one of the few adaptations that doesn’t involve genetics or traits of any sorts.
3) Having knowledge about human/genetic variations can help us understand some of our similarities and differences, origins or where we came from, and our evolutionary past. We can even go as far as trying to solve illnesses or diseases by going back to see how and when the problems first occurred and fix them. Also, seeing how everyone's bodies are different either because that was the way they were born, or they developed these traits over time not right away. We can also see how their immune systems/bodies handle certain problems and see if we can develop those skills/attributes.
4) Race could play a role in understanding variation adaptations but most likely won’t be as accurate as actually studying environmental influences and using them to understand human variation. The only way race could play a part is maybe the way the body handles hot and cold temperatures but even still you could make an argument that it falls under one of the variations. The actual study can help us understand where the changes occurred in that human evolutionary tree to figure out when the changes started and why/how they did. It provides actual evidence and an explanation on why the changes occurred and why they keep happening. It can even help us debunk myths surrounding human diversity and shed light on how human variations are actually distributed around different parts of the world.
Hello Richard,
ReplyDeleteI did not think some cultural adaptations would be to migrate to another region and found it very interesting. It is similar to how some animals like birds migrate north in the winter to find better nesting conditions for their eggs as conditions are much better in the equator. I do find it interesting how we can study genetic variation in people to understand the different immune responses to certain diseases. The constant presence of certain diseases could be the reason to why Africans have much higher resistances and to why they had a lower covid burden than other people.
I've provided two sample posts on my blog, one for solar radiation and one for high altitude, as those always seem to cause some confusion for students. Check there, not just for information on those two stresses, but to review information regarding the final prompt regarding race.
ReplyDeletehttps://thevalgusangle.blogspot.com/
Intro: Mostly what you are describing here are ways the body attempts to solve the problem of cold stress. Those are all adaptations to cold stress and should have been left for the second prompt. The question here is just why this stress is dangerous to human survival? What happens to the body when the core body temperature drops below the optimum temperature of 98.6 degrees? Why can't it function well below this temperature?
Short term: Yes, it would be adaptive in the short term to generate heat... but how does the body do this? That is what you needed to explain here. The answer is: Shivering.
Facultative: Tanning IS a facultative response but to *solar radiation* stress, not to cold stress. An example of a facultative adaptation to cold stress is vasoconstriction.
Developmental: Yes, larger lung capacities is an adaptive response to high altitudes, but your chosen stress is cold stress. A developmental adaptation for cold stress would be body shape, as explained by Bergmann and Allen's rules. Take some time to review those concepts.
Cultural: Good.
Benefits: Overall, good. We can also use this information to create tools and practices that better help us adapt to cold stress in our daily lives. Can this approach help us develop clothing that retains heat more efficiently? Can we develop new means of home/building construction that might help increase heat retention?
Race: "...Race could play a role in understanding variation adaptations..."
Can it? Understand that it is valid to answer this question with a distinct "no". It was necessary to try to figure this out before addressing the rest of the prompt.
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.