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.
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.
I hadn't thought of cranial capacity as an adaptation to climate, but in a way, it is an adaptation which helps in nearly every climate, because it allows for cultural adaptation. But I wonder, were you able to find any evidence that heat was a factor in the development of larger cranial capacities? It's certainly possible, it seems, because when we were developing larger cranial capacities, food and heat were probably the two greatest factors driving our development.
ReplyDeleteI agree that heat can make things difficult, but can you explain further how in particular it threatens homeostasis?
ReplyDeleteSweating is a short term adaptation. How does it help maintain homeostasis?
Skin tone is not an adaptation to heat. It is a develpmental adaptation to solar radiation (and tanning is a facultative adaptation to solar radiation as well). Can you think of a facultative adaptation to heat?
Your suggestion about brain size is an interesting one. Brain size didn't arise so that we could be cooler. It arose for a large number of contributing factors, but not for cooling the body. Body shape, slim with long limbs and lots of surface area (skin) for heat distribution, is a good example of a developmental adaptation to heat stress.
Regarding section three, the question was with regard to the productiveness of the adaptive approach, not race.
Very good point in section four regarding the genetic closeness in the races. This is true across modern humans in general. To that point, race is often defined by skin color, but similarity in skin color is not a measure of close genetic relationships. Similarities in skin tone between Andean and Tibetan populations doesn't accurately reflect that they are not as closely related as Andeans to other South American populations.