Human Variation and Race Blog

Environmental Stress: Cold

1.  The environmental stress of cold weather negatively impacts the survival of human beings through its disruption of homeostasis.  This disruption severely effects the human body because the body is used to being heated to a particular temperature, and severe decreases from this target temperature causes tremendous stress and trauma to the human body.  The cold weather thus makes it much more difficult for the various organ systems of the human body to function properly.

Short Term Adaptation:  An example of a short term adaptation to the cold would be shivering.  Shivering works to temporarily stop one's body from feeling cold by feeling warmer as a result of the constant muscle movement that shivering produces.  However, once a person stops shivering the unpleasant cold feelings return.


Facultative Adaptation:   A facultative adaptation to the cold weather would be the human body's response to urinate as to remove fluids from one's body as to lower the person's temperature.  The reason that this works is because the human body sends blood to the kidneys so that the person's organs will warm up.  With all this blood inside of the kidneys, the organ is forced to expel the urine to make room for the extra blood.


Developmental Adaptation:  A developmental adaptation to the cold would be for people's bodies to store more fat so that their bodies would be able to retain more heat.  The extra layers of fat causes for more heat to be stored inside of a person's body.


Cultural Adaptation: One cultural adaptation that human beings use to adapt to the cold weather is heavy, thick clothing.  Human beings have adapted their clothing styles over thousands of years so that their bodies can be warmed by the thick clothing inside of cold climates.
 


Some benefits to studying the human adaptations to the cold weather would be that anthropologists and scientists can understand the causes for the genetic differences of humans in cold and warm climates, as well as perhaps to understand why people shiver and do random behaviors that some people might not understand the reason for.  This information can be used in a productive way so that people can develop better clothing products to warm people's body and ward off the negative effects of cold weather.  They can also use this information to better understand the human body's response to cold weather so as to develop better insulation products for homes.

I would say that one could study race to compare the adaptative responses of someone of African ancestry, for example, to someone of Eskimo ancestry.  However, simply using one's skin color or race to classify a person is a poor way to classify somebody, because most races originate from a specific environment, and thus the reason a particular race would exhibit certain characterisitics is all due to their environmental stressors.  For example, a group of Asians that has existed for thousands of years in a warm environment would display a different ability to adapt to the cold weather than would a group of Asians who have lived in the cold for thousands of years.

Language Blog

I found this experiment to be tough, mainly because of how awkward it felt trying to have the conversation without using any words or sign language.  It was tough to think of something to have a "conversation" about without using words, and it took us (my brother and I) about six minutes or so before we had a good enough flow in terms of him understanding my expressions for us to have a "conversation".  I noticed that my brother tried to "dumb" down his questions or statements, so that it was much easier for him to gauge my response, such as by asking yes or no questions, or asking about how I felt about things, so that I gave a facial expression corresponding with my feelings.  My brother also messed around with me a little bit, as he joked with me while I couldn't respond to him verbally.  If two cultures met and one could speak verbally but one could not use symbolic language, I would say that the question of "who has the advantage in communicating complex ideas" would be dependent on whether or not the non-symbolic culture could understand the language of the opposite culture.  If they did, then obviously the speaking culture could communicate complex ideas easier.  However, if the speaking culture communicated in a language that the other could not understand, then I would say that the non-symbolic culture would have an advantage, as facial expressions and body language are universally understood symbols, as opposed to a single language which only a portion of the world understands.  I would say that the speaking culture might view the non-symbolic culture as primitive or less intelligent/less advanced, due to their inability to communicate on the same level as the speaking culture.    In terms of the real-world interactions between those who can speak easily and those who have trouble speaking, I think that many times those who speak easier try to "baby-talk" or try and dumb down their speech, much like my brother did in our conversation.  I don't think that those who are doing the "baby talk" are intentionally trying to be condescending, but they most likely feel quite frustrated in the fact that the other person's poor speaking ability makes conversation difficult, and thus feel that "baby talk" is the easiest answer.

I was definitely not able to last the 15 minutes communicating exclusively via speech, as my partner and I couldn't stop laughing due to how awkward it was and how odd it felt.  Obviously the difficult part of this was keeping a totally straight face and using no vocal inflections, as I felt kind of like a robot.  My partner didn't have nearly as much trouble as the first part of the exercise, except sometimes he couldn't understand whether or not I was being sarcastic about things due to the lack of expression in my voice and face.  Going off this, I think that this experiment is a great example of how important things like vocal inflection and facial expressions are in our daily conversations, as well as how important they are in terms of things like sarcasm and jokes that we tell, which occur in practically every conversation.  I think that certain vocal expressions and facial expressions are universal as well.  Clearly people who are blind cannot read body language, and I'm sure that that disability clearly hinders their ability to communicate quite a bit, despite the fact that they can still speak and hear clearly.  The adaptive benefit to reading body language would perhaps be to understand whether or not an animal in the wild was a predator or ready to attack based on whether or not his body language looked aggressive.  Perhaps it also works for mating purposes, so that a person could tell whether or not a perspective mate was conveying feelings of mutual attraction.  I'm not so sure that there are many scenarios where it would be advantageous for someone to be unable to read body language, but I can see many scenarios where it would be advantageous for the opposite person to be unable to read one's own body language.  For example, if a person were going to try and sneak up on somebody and perhaps kill them or try and arrest them, it would be good to not be able to convey one's anxiousness.