Human Variation & Race

I chose the environmental stress of a cold climate. This environmental stress negatively impacts the survival of humans by disturbing homeostasis. When humans experience cold climates, they will have an increased metabolic rate, they will shiver, and they will experience vasoconstriction. If these things don’t help, they might even experience hypothermia or even death.

Four ways that humans have adapted to this stress are by short term, facultative, developmental, and cultural responses.

A short term response that humans have used to adapt to the cold is shivering which can help generate body heat and muscle heat for a short amount of time.

A facultative response that humans have used to adapt to the cold is having involuntary changes in vasoconstriction which narrow blood vessels to reduce blood flow to the skin and then reduces their body’s heat loss.

A developmental response that humans have used to adapt to the cold is having large compact bodies that have more fat insulation around their vital organs.

A cultural response that humans have used to adapt to the cold is using insulating clothing such as heavy jackets and pants to combat the cold climate.

The benefits of studying human variation from this perspective across environmental clines is to see how humans vary in their ability to adapt to cold climates and find out why certain groups of people can adapt better to the cold climates while others cannot. For instance, we can find out why people like the Inuits were able to experience periodic warmth and avoid frostbite in below freezing temperatures, while someone like me would more likely experience frostbite in a short period of time.

Information from explorations like this can be useful to help us because it might give us a better idea of what we need to do if we would like to one day inhabit an area in which the climate is very cold. For instance, people are always looking for new envirnoments in which to build houses and attract new residents, so in being able to tell prospective residents that it's easy to live in cold climates if they just follow these simple steps will help them appeal to those people and maybe help them sell houses faster. One example of how this information can be used in a productive way is by studying vasoconstriction which is a short term response to the cold climate. In studying this, manufacturers that specialize in cold weather clothing can figure out more productive materials that will help reduce heat loss at the body surface like vasoconstriction does.

I would use race to understand the variation of the adaptations I listed in number two by saying that in regards to the cold climate, people that had a darker skin pigment were at a disadvantage for Vitamin D production which helps with bone growth and regulates neuromuscular functions. The study of environmental influences on adaptations is a better way to understand human variation than by the use of race because people of the same race can still vary in their ability to adapt. For instance, even though the Inuits had dark skin pigmentation, they made up for their vitamin D disadvantage by eating lots of fish and mammal blubber that contained vitamin D.  

Language Experiment

Part 1: No use of Symbolic Language

Although this was a difficult experiment, it wasn’t as hard as I thought that it would be. It was just like being involved in the game of Charades which I used to play as a child. I think the most difficult part of the experiment was my trying not to get frustrated or laugh when I heard what people thought I was trying to say. For instance, while I was trying to make the sign in charades for “sounds like” which involves grabbing an ear, people thought I was trying to make a monkey impression and wouldn’t get off of the idea that I wasn’t talking about a monkey. The impressions of my partners in the conversation (who were my thirtyish year old cousin and her children) were that I was acting really silly. They thought it was funny that I was trying to use certain gestures to mean certain words. (In fact, my older cousin told me to remind her to not let me be on her charades team if we ever play) Although at times I was getting frustrated because I couldn’t get through my message to them, the children were excited to alter their way of communicating with me because of my absence of symbolic language. The younger children tried to get me to tell them what it was I was trying to say so that they could see if they could relate it better to their mother and make it easier for her to guess. The older child was trying to mimic me to see if it would make more sense once he was going through the same motions I was. Their mother stayed with using her symbolic language and decided to videotape the whole thing because she thought it would be funny to watch later. If my cousins and I were to represent two different cultures meeting for the first time, I thin that I would have had an even harder time since gestures can mean different things in different cultures. (For instance, in America, a pat on the head by another person can be considered as a good sign where as in an area in Thailand, a pat on the head can symbolize a bad thing like that the person thinks that you are low class like a dog.) I think that if my cousins and I were to represent the two different cultures meeting for the first time, the culture that would have the advantage in communicating complex ideas is the one that is using non-symbolic language which has more gestures and meanings for certain words because it would allow them a much better chance of getting their meanings across.  For instance, I can keep trying different ways to get across the same idea until someone gets it where as someone using a spoken language has little chance of the other culture understanding their idea if they aren’t familiar with the language. The attitudes that the speaking culture might have toward the culture that does not use symbolic language is that they are not as developed as or as intelligent as they are. Individuals in our culture that have difficulty communicating with spoken language are small children, or those with autism. Children just may not be as developed yet to know how to speak yet, where as those that have autism may know how they are feeling but can’t find the right words to express themselves. This affects how people who do speak interact with these individuals because it requires them to take the time to try to read their use of non-symbolic language. They need to try to figure out the meanings of whatever variety of gestures that the person using non-symbolic language can make as it can vary from person to person.

Part 2: No use of Physical Embellishments

            Out of the two experiments, this was by far the most difficult. Using only speech for communicating, I was not able to last for the full fifteen minutes the first time I tried it. I had to restart about three times to finally make it all of the way through. This experiment was difficult for me for two reasons. The first reason it was difficult was because as someone who is Italian, I happen to use a lot of hand gestures when I speak. That made the experiment very hard and was the reason I ended up tying up my arms under I belt I put on during my third attempt at the experiment. The second and most important reason this experiment was difficult was because of the mere creepiness in it. A couple of my cousins though I resembled a “zombie” with no emotion and were the first ones to say I looked creepy when I was talking without any physical embellishments. My partners in this experiment were affected by my communication limitations because they couldn’t read my face which is normally how someone would see whether or not I was enjoying what I was talking about, or being sarcastic. They also did no like to look straight at my face since they said I looked like I was acting like I was an alien from a scary movie. J This experiment says that our use of “signs” in our language is very important in our ability to communicate effectively. Non-speech techniques definitely help us get our points across when talking to other people. Without the use of a symbolic smile and elbow from your best friend, how can you tell whether or not they are just joking around with you when they say “Happy Birthday Old Timer!”? Without their symbolic gestures, you may misunderstand them and instead think that they are being mean to you. Physical embellishments in our language help those we are speaking to have a better shot of not misunderstanding what we are trying to say. Some people that have problems reading body language include those that have severe vision problems and are blind. There are definitely adaptive benefits to possessing the ability to read body language. For instance, in the medical field, doctors and nurses can try to read a patient’s body language which will a lot of times give away small clues about their body (like a face gesture or their hand holding onto their stomach showing that they are in pain) and how they are really feeling inside. Environmental conditions where there might not be a benefit to reading a person’s body language is if you have a job like a court reporter which requires you to stay on task and only write down what the person is saying instead of what their body language or inflection in their voice is telling you they mean.

The Piltdown Hoax

The Piltdown hoax was basically a hoax that said that the remains of an unknown early human had been newly discovered. The remains included part of a fossilized “human” skull and jawbone which were found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England in 1912 by an amateur archeologist named Charles Dawson. These artifacts were presented to the scientific community as being authentic, which made people believe that England could have been the home of the original birthplace of mankind. As it turns out, the “human” remains were not human at all. They were not the artifacts that would prove to be the missing link between humans and apes, but actually the artifacts of a female orangutan which had been manipulated in order to look real. This caused some members of the scientific members to be stunned, not knowing why someone would do such a thing. The hoax was discovered through the use of new technologies such as measuring the fluorine content in fossils. This allowed the scientists to roughly estimate the date of the fossils. The varying responses it received from the scientists involved were that it was not only a scandalous forgery, but it was an embarrassing incident for the scientific community as well. It helped create an even bigger distrust of scientists in that of the public’s point of view. In the related fields of evolution, scientists were quick to try to distance themselves from the Piltdown hoax.

The human faults that came into play in the Piltdown scenario were greed, envy, and pride. Charles Dawson was a prideful man who wanted to make to make a name for himself, and wanted to do it quickly. He was envious of those that had already done so and had devised a plan that would allow him to become as famous as he thought he wanted to be. It was his greed that would prove to be the undoing of him. These faults negatively impacted the scientific process because it caused the public to doubt the scientific community. Instead of believing them when there was a new breakthrough or discovery, everything from then on would be meticulously observed and tested. And even then, the public wouldn’t be certain of the accuracy of the scientific processes used.

The positive aspects of the scientific process that were responsible for revealing the skull to be a fraud were the invention of a new technology after World War II that was able to measuring fluorine contents in fossils, and the first full scale data analysis with better dating methods in 1953. The initial fluorine testing that was used was able to date the skull and prove that it was much younger than what it should have been. The full scale data analysis discovered that the fossils had been stained, pieces of the jaw and skull had been cut in order to make it look more human, and that the teeth in the jaw had been filed down. These processes were able to prove that the Piltdown skull was not a human skull after all.

Although it would be nice to remove the “human” factor from science in order to reduce the chance of errors like this happening again, it is not possible. Even computers and other scientific instruments which some consider to be extremely useful in the scientific process are built by human hands and can have design flaws. Even though it’s not possible, it’s a nice idea to think of being able to remove the human factor in science. But one has to keep in mind that even when we figure out results using our computers and lab equipment, it is still necessary to make sure we double check our results by human hands to see if we made any mistakes in our work.

The lesson I can take from this historical event regarding taking information at face value from unverified sources is to not just believe something because someone says it to be true. Do research and try to prove it one way or the other. Remember, if people had chosen to not question what they were told and believed that the world was flat when they were told so, we would most likely still  believe that we would fall off of the edge of the world when we came to it.

Comparative Primates

Diet

1.      Lemurs (Prosimians/ Strepsirhini)

a) Lemurs can be found in Madagascar and the Comores Islands. They can be found living in a variety of environments including dry desert- like forests and moist tropical rainforests. Although ringtail lemurs that can be found living on the ground, the majority of lemurs can be found living in the top of the canopy of the rainforest within the trees.

b) Lemurs are basically herbivores (a.k.a. vegetarians) whose diet consists mainly in eating plants, tree bark, flowers, seeds, sap, leaves, and fruit. There are however certain types of lemurs that incorporate insects, larvae, and small animals such as frogs and lizards into their diet as well.

c) The lemur’s diet has been influenced by its environment because of deforestation. By cutting down the trees in which they live and find their food, it severely limits their diet and is making them have to search elsewhere for food and try to adapt by eating more insects and small animals (which is making them vulnerable to other animals).

d)

1.      Spider Monkey (New World Monkey/ Platyrrhini)

a) Spider monkeys can be found in the evergreen tropical rainforests in South America, Central America, and Mexico. They live in tropical climates and live in the upper canopy of mangrove and semi deciduous forests.

b) Spider monkeys have a diet that consists mainly of eating seeds and fruit (about 90%). They also eat leaves, bark, flowers, nuts, and pieces of wood. Less often, they will eat things such as small insects, spiders, insect larvae, and bird eggs,

c) The spider monkey’s diet has been influenced by its environment because logging and deforestation are greatly reducing the number of trees in which they live and find their food in. This has even caused them to go from being endangered to being critically endangered.

d)

Baboon (Old World Monkey/ Cercopithecidae)

a) Baboons can be found in either Arabia or Africa. They can be found living in a variety of environments which include tropical rainforests, and the savanna and other semi- arid habitats. Although they are adaptable, the few things they look for in a good habitat are a sleeping area near a cliff or in tall trees (for protection), and a water source.

b) Baboons have a diet that consists of grass, plants, leaves, bark, roots, seeds, berries, and fruit. They also eat insects, fish, birds, rodents, rabbits, and the babies of other animals.

c) The baboon’s diet has been influenced by its environment. In being able to live in a variety of environments, it has been able to adapt its diet to suit wherever it’s living. For instance, some baboons that live near farming villages have been found to eat the crops that are growing there instead of looking for food in the forests. This is why baboons have become known as opportunistic in regards to their diet.

            d)

4.      Gibbon (Lesser Ape/ Hylobatidae)

a) Gibbons can be found living in the tropical rainforests in southeast Asia. They live in the trees and rarely are found on the ground (they even sleep sitting up in the trees).    

b) Gibbons have a diet that consists of eating plants, fruit, flowers, leaves, seeds, and tree bark. They also eat bird eggs, insects, and small animals such as birds.

c) The gibbon’s diet has been influenced by its environment because with deforestation, their food supply is quickly disappearing. The plants and animals that they usually eat are either being cut down or are being run out of the forests. This has caused them to be put on the endangered species list and is threatening their existence.

d)

4.      Chimpanzee (Great Ape/ Hominidae)

a) Chimpanzees can be found living in a variety of habitats including the African woodlands, grasslands, swamp forests, and rainforests.

b) Chimpanzees have a diet that consists of hundreds of foods. Their diet includes fruit, flowers, seeds, plant shoots, insects, eggs, and different types of meat. They also eat small animals which sometimes includes small monkeys.

c) The chimpanzee’s diet has been influenced by its environment. Because of the chimpanzee’s wide variety in its diet, it’s able to adapt its diet to the seasonal availability of food found in its habitat/ environment in which it lives.

d)

My findings on the level of influence the environment has on the expression of physical and behavioral traits are that the environment has a lot of influence over a primate’s diet. When a primate lives and spends most of its time in trees, a change in its habitat caused by logging, deforestation, and humans moving in and living in what was once their territory can have a huge impact. Cutting down the trees in which the primates live and are for the most part protected in, leaves them not only vulnerable to predators since they now have to forage for food elsewhere, but it also threatens their very existence since the food in their diet is either being cut down or chased out of the forests. Because of this, the environment has a lot of influence over a primate’s diet and whether or not they will find food at all.