Human Variation & Race Blog

1. I chose (a) heat.  Heat can make everything more challenging. For example, if person needs to work outdoors. If it is extremely hot outside, the person may find themselves sweating more, aggravated because of heat irritation and increasingly difficult to concentrate on the work they want to perfrom.

2. Sweating for short term

Facultative adaptation would be the skin tone. The pigments in a person’s skin plays a role in reflecting or absorbing sun light.

Developmental adaptations would be our cranial capacity. With humans advancing in technology thanks to our complex and evolving brains, we have invented air condition to keep us cool.

Cultural adaptations include Arabic people wearing turbans to stay cool.

 

3. We can compare how different races deal with similar problems. For example how to Arab and Chinese people cope with heat.

4.  It is difficult to use race to understand variation of adaptations. Since most races are very similar genetically. Rather studying environmental influences is a better way to understand human variation because we can identify the reaction to a stress. For our heat example, it would be during high heat, human population have learned to stay hydrated, use protective clothing and avoid or reduce activity during high heat hours.

Language Blog

Part 1.

I underestimated the difficulty of this task.  When I first stared this assignment, I thought because my partner and I had know each other so well, it would be easy to conduct this assignment. However, when I wanted to get my point across without being able to speak proved very difficult.  I was using signs, body language and my partner was speaking to me. We established a system of elimination, where i would have a signal for yes that was raising right hand and no by raising the left.
At first my partner found the task humorous and was having a lot of fun not achieving anything. Then gradually he became more sync with me. His method of communication with me remained verbal.
If my partner and I represented two different cultures meeting for the first time, the culture which could converse verbally definitely would have the advantage of communicating complex ideas. The attitude of speaking culture would be feeling superior to the culture that did not use symbolic language.
2. Speaking for 15 minutes without any "feel" to it made me sound like a robot. It felt like I wasn't real and the conversation didn't sound normal. I could not speak this way for the entire 15 minutes.  My partner disconnected periodically. At times he didnt understand the true meaning or the intentions of my speech because my tone was lacking any kind of emotion. I would say the importance of non-speech language techniques are just as important as speaking verbally. They add emotion and make it more interesting, our body language tells what kind of attitude we might be having at the moment and gives the audience a sense of our personality. Presumably there might be some people who have a harder time reading body language than others, the reasons could very from being mentally challenged or not being able to see clearly.