Human Variations and Race

The one environmental stressor I am going to discuss is HEAT.  In a hot environment, heat causes food to obtain bacteria faster, which will spoil the food that is needed for survival.  In addition, the populations in a hot environment tend to have longer limbs or appendages that help them release heat faster to keep the body cool through evaporative cooling. Heat can be fatal if the core temperature of a human body reaches above 105 degrees Fahrenheit.  This is called hyperthermia.

Humans have adapted to heat stress in four different ways:

Short-term adaptation is how the body cools itself through evaporative cooling and by drinking fluids like water to help replenish the water lost from perspiration.

Facultative adaptation is the body size or                                                       an individual or weight.

Developmental adaptation is how the legs, arms and other appendages grow longer in hotter climates

 
 Cultural adaptation would be the use of the air conditioner or spices to help slow down the spread of bacteria

The benefits of studying human variation are beneficial to understand how the body reacts to different environmental stressors.  This type of study leads to advances in technology that assists humans to be able to adjust to these types of environments.  Before the invention of the air conditioner, individuals in the United States did not live in the deserts of Arizona or the plains in Texas in big numbers.  If studies were only done in one type of environment, how do we know why populations in extreme heat are taller and thinner than individuals in colder climates or the why there is more of a population in certain environments.  This information can be used to know what type of materials to use when building shelter. 

I would use race to understand why individuals migrated to other parts of the world.  Environmental influences is a better way to understand human variation because race does not have a genetic basis or a characteristic, trait or gene to distinguish individuals between races.

Language Experiment

Part 1 – Mr. Silent

I found this part of the experiment easy.  The reason is that there was more than one person, so they did most of the conversing and I really did not have to do much. At first, they would ask me questions or for my opinion and I would just laugh and makes gestures and some facial expressions.  After a while, they started to get frustrated and would leave me out of the conversation.  They came back around and started to make conversation that required less complex responses, so I did not feel left out. I believe if it were just one other person that it would have been a more difficult in the sense that trying to communicate with that one person would bring more challenges.  Those challenges would be if that other individual would understand my non-verbal gestures to be able to continue the conversation or just get frustrated and walk away as my partners did. The culture that has the advantage would be the one that has spoken language to communicate complex ideas.  We live in a complex society that has television, computers, and sports and many other activities that require the use of many words to communicate these ideas about what we do in life.  If we had lived in the Neanderthal era, communication without language would be easier, since the only thing we would had to worry about was food and shelter.  The speaking culture’s attitude would be of power because they will be able to communicate with more ease and are easier to understand.  I say this because when I was not able to communicate I felt powerless where I could not get my point across by using non-verbal communication. Individuals in our culture that have trouble communicating would be those that speak a different or foreign language. The affects would be about the same as in this experiment. The individual that speaks the foreign language would have difficulty and would not try to interact with others that speak English. That individual would live in a community that speaks his or her language, so the interaction would not be so frustrating.

Part 2 – Mr. No Embellishments

I was only able to last a few minutes of only using speech for communicating. This was difficult for me because I use a lot of facial expression and hand movements when I talk.  You pretty much have to be a robot, since they are motionless and talk in a monotone voice.  My partners were greatly affected because they are used to me having more vocal intonation and using hand gestures and facial expressions.  They could not tell if I was being serious or had any emotion and said, “It seemed like we were talking to a brick wall.”  The use of sign says a lot about the way we use our language and is very important to communicate non-speech language to communicate effectively. Without this technique, this world would be dull that everyone would be monotonous and emotionless.  Imagine nobody laughing or getting excited about something that just happened.  I think that everyone has a certain degree of difficulty reading body language.  You have to know the individual to read their body language correctly because there is not one definition for a type of body movement and everyone reacts differently. The adaptive benefit would be that the individual would fit into any type of crowd and be able to communicate effectively. In a chemical environment would be a benefit to not reading body language, for the fact that most of the body language means that the individual is near death.