Human Variation and Race
Human Variation and Race
- Cold is an environmental stress that negatively impacts humans homeostasis. Our bodies react negatively to a change of temperature that's very different from our bodies. Specifically in cold, there is a constant threat of hypothermia. This results in humans having to adapt against the cold, or the end result could be death.
- Short term: One adaptation is to start shivering. This automatically warms up the body to keep the blood circulation within all parts of the body.
- Facultative: People living in colder climates will often eat fattier, high dense foods, resulting in a faster metabolism.
- Developmental: Over the course of several generations, it's seen that many people who live in cold climates have more blood in their bodies than those who have lived in the heat. They also develop body changes, including often becoming more compact, with shorter limbs and often being shorter and stouter than those in a warm climate.
- Cultural: One of the cultural changes is the clothing you wear. Most people will often wear lots of layers to protect your body. This can include jackets, hates, scarves, thermal wear, and gloves.
3. I think the best thing that helps with our understanding is both for adaptation and understanding. The more knowledge we have in similarities from one person to another, the more likely we are to accept one another. There is also a benefit of adaptation, so we may understand and expect something in advance to living there. For example, if you lived on the beach on the West Coast, through our understanding of adaptations, you could expect what will happen to you if you decided to live in the Rocky Mountains.
4. Although race is not technically real, the biggest thing you could understand from the cold are the types of people who live and have adapted to those climates. However, the understanding of environmental adaptation is far more important. It is better to understand how humans have evolved through the Earth around them rather than determining the genetic variation of their skin.
Okay, but can we get a bit more biological here? What happens to the human body when the internal temperature drops below 98.6 degrees? Why can't the body function well below this optimal temperature?
ReplyDeleteAdaptations:
Good short term adaptation.
A facultative adaptation is defined as the turning on or off of our genes to produce an adaptive response. Does this describe the action of eating fattier foods? The increase in metabolism is factulative, but not a change in diet. Another example would be vasoconstriction and, ultimately, alternating vasoconstriction-vasodilation to limit heat loss while attempting to avoid tissue death.
Developmental: Yes on body shape. How is that related to Bergmann and Allen's rules and how does this work? I haven't heard of the "more blood" example before. Cold stress impacts blood flow but not the amount of blood in the system. Can you offer a link to the source for this claim?
Cultural: Good example.
I agree there is a social benefit to this approach. How could knowing how human bodies adapt to an environment help us prepare for that environment? Most of these adaptations (cultural aside) are biological/physiological/genetic in nature and we have no control over them. So understanding them won't help us adapt in the least. I agree 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?
"Although race is not technically real"
A number of students have said this in there posts and a clarification is necessary. Race is not a "biological" concept. That said, it is a very real socio-cultural concept, for good or for bad. The question here isn't whether race is real. The question is whether it is useful in understanding human variation.
"It is better to understand how humans have evolved through the Earth around them rather than determining the genetic variation of their skin."
A couple of things: First of all, race goes beyond skin color. It can include hair type, eye color, body shape and facial traits.
Second, is this an issue of the environmental approach being better? Or is it an issue of it being *possible* to use the environmental approach, where as it is NOT possible to use race to understand human variation?
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.