Human Variation Blog post
Anthropology 101
1. Cold weather can be harmful and deadly. When a person goes out in freezing temperatures, they put themselves at risk of catching hypothermia and frostbite. Hypothermia is an illness where the individual's core body temperature is lower than 95 degrees F. Sufferers begin to shiver and have mental confusions due to lack of body heat and if not treated, it can cause the heart to stop beating. Frostbite is a condition where skin exposed to cold temperatures, freeze over and grow patchy and numb. In major cases, the exposed skin freezes completely and all sensory from that part of the body is cut off. This leads to body parts such as fingers and toes to have to be amputated for the better of the individual.
2. Developmental adaptation
It's been studied that people from colder climates have bigger body masses than those that live in warmer climates. This is due to the fact that in cold weather, an individual needs more energy to keep warm and having a bigger body helps with that. With a bigger body, individuals have more back-up sources to keep them going and use in emergency survival situations.
Cultural adaptation
Drinking or eating warm foods and beverages is a cultural way of fending off freezing weather. It warms the individuals body up and keeps them protected inside. Having warm foods won't help protect the outer side of the body, but it is a common method in cultures like America that help warm up the body.
Facultative adaptation
The winter season isn't everybody's favorite season since people usually get runny noses or colds during the period. But there is a secret effect that colder climates have on people that prevent them from getting infectious diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness. Since our bodies are working more to keep us warm and well, the cold air pushes our bodies harder and increases the cells that prevent us from harmful viruses. Instead of making us sicker, the cold weather is actually making us stronger and more resilient.
Short-term adaptation
In colder weather, there is a tendency for us to want to go to the bathroom more often. This occurrence happens because our bodies are trying to pump more blood in and it builds pressure in our kidneys. To reduce the pressure, our bodies respond by disposing of excess water, which is turned into urine and exits out the body.
3. I believe that studying other cultures is a helpful thing for us. The great thing about understanding different cultures is how we can learn from them and maybe absorb some of their traditions into ours. It is a common practice in America that brings people closer. And becomes beneficial to our society. One of the benefits of going against the cold that our culture learned about was the amount of body weight the groups living in colder areas had. This informed us about the importance of good eating and it is advised that during the winter, that we need to eat better to conserve body heat.
4. I can study the cultures of other races that live in harsh, cold weather and see differences in the way we deal with the cold and how they endure it. A sample of this is the Eskimo culture. Their villages are located in cold climates and they are used to living in it. Unlike people in warmer climates like Americans living in California, they have developed a resistance to the cold both through genotypic and phenotypic traits. Although it is possible to study humans through race, it shouldn't be the main way to understand them. Instead, we should observe the way they live, behave and communicate to learn about them. Studying human variations like this gives us better knowledge of how people from other countries and cultures can be similar to each other but at the same time different when it comes to adapting to their environments and how they evolve from it.
Very good description of the problems of cold stress, but note that shivering is actually an adaptive response, not a problem in and of itself.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to review the adaptations in the order laid out in the guidelines.
For the short term adaptation, keep in mind that an "adaptation" must help the body deal with the cold stress in some way. So how does going to the bathroom more often help the body maintain it's body core temperature? In short, it doesn't. As described, I'm not really sure why our bodies should be pumping more blood into our kidneys in cold climates, so that needs to be explained. I haven't hear this one before.
But there was no need to go farther than your textbook and the Canvas activities to find answers for this. A classic short term adaptation to cold stress is shivering.
Again, I've never hear the example you cite for your facultative response, and even assuming it is accurate, I don't understand how it could be a "facultative" trait. A facultative trait involves the turning on or off of genes to produce a response of some sort. The classic example for cold stress is vasoconstriction, which closes off capillaries near the skin's surface to prevent loss of heat from the blood stream through the skin.
On the right track of your developmental trait, but it isn't the issue of mass that is key. It is the relationship between mass to surface area. Rounder bodies (such as those possessed by the Inuit) have less surface area per unit mass than do long lean bodies (such as with the Masaai), which means less chance of losing body heat through the skin's surface and retaining more heat in the body core. Review the concepts of Bergmann and Allen to better understand these principles.
Okay on your cultural adaptations. You can also use clothing and housing structures for this adaptation.
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?
For your last section, when you start talking about genotypes, you are no longer dealing with race. You are just using the adaptive approach and layering race over it. To answer this question, you first need to explore what race actually is. Race is not based in biology but 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.
Hi Renee - I liked you explanation regarding Hypothermia. I also chose Cold to discuss in my blog, but did not think to bring up this point. The bathroom link was also interesting, how the additional blood being pumped by our bodies puts pressure on the kidneys. I had always wondered why that was so.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post!
Nancy Alfaro
Hello! Your post was very informative. I enjoyed reading your adaptation examples because they thoroughly address certain adaptations that have allowed people to survive the colder climates. It was surprising to read how we use the restroom more frequently when cold or that we are less likely to contract certain viruses. Additionally, I was interested in the fact that people who live in colder parts of the world weigh more than those in warmer climates. As you stated, this allows people to better retain heat and it also gives them a better chance at survival.
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