Cold climate can negatively impact humans because people that live in freezing climates it is harder to collect food (if they are farmers or not). People limit their outdoor activities to warmer [parts of the day so it isn’t as cold as it would be. Sin some societies they sleep in family group in order to share body warmth at night due to the low temperatures that occur. Also many people that live in freezing climates drink alcohol in order to warm themselves. The alcohol increases blood flow to the body and provides the feeling of being warm. The results are only temporary and can actually speed up the heat loss from vital organs which can lead to as faster death from hypothermia.
4 ways in which humans have adapted to this stress is consuming large amounts of high calorie fatty foods which significantly increases the basal metabolic rate which results I the production of extra body heat. A cultural adaption would be how some society sleep in family group in order to keep warm. A short –term adaptation would be drinking alcohol to keep the warm feeling but that would only last as long as you drink and can actually cause more heat to dissipate from your body.
The benefits from studying this would know how to deal with extremely cold climates and what to do is someone develops hypothermia from the freezing temperatures. Also by knowing that in cold temperatures a group can sleep together to keep warm it lowers that chances that a group in low temperature could survive.
I don’t think using race could be used to understand the adaptations. To understand that adaptations you have to live in these areas and learn to survive and deal with these stresses. It is better to understand human variation by environmental influences because this is what these people deal with on a day to day basic where as if someone is a part of that ethnic background they wouldn’t have the necessary skills to adapt and survive as the indigenous person would.
Manuel Solis
ReplyDeleteHey Justine, good job. I find it interesting that humans living in cooler climates drink alcohol and fatty foods to keep warm. It sounds like a good time to me. In all seriousness, it's amazing what is available to us as humans to alter our physical state, in this case being cold. The fact that alcohol could be used to warm up in cooler climate and can also influence and speed up death from hypothermia is scary.
I also did cold weather so I found it interesting and informative to read your blog post! I never thought about how cold weather can affect the growth and supply of food or that some families even have to sleep in big groups of people to keep warm. Your post informed me of even more ways the cold can be harmful to humans and the way our bodies work. You talked about people drinking alcohol to stay warm, how would this help children to stay warm? I do not know if I agree with alcohol being a suitable way for people to bear with the cold temperatures. However when you clarify it as a short-term adaption I do see where you are coming from. Good Job!
ReplyDeleteEating fatty foods and drinking alcohol while also by not becoming overweight sounds like paradise for most people but this diet is used to survive not just binge on unnecessary food. I never knew that alcohol actually made heat escape faster as well it’s pretty scary luckily we don’t have to worry about subzero temperatures in Southern California.
ReplyDeleteRemember that since we are talking about homeostasis, we are talking about how the physiology of our body is impacted by a particular stress. Yes, access to food affects this indirectly, but we are talking about how the direct impact of a stress, in this case cold stress, affects homeostasis. You touch on this very briefly when discuss the affects of heat loss and hypothermia.
ReplyDeleteGood catch on the myth of alcohol, but then you list that as a short term adaptation. An adaptation actually has to help maintain homeostasis. If drinking alcohol only gives the illusion of warmth, and in fact can be detrimental to survival, this wouldn't qualify as an adaptation. Also, this would likely be classified as a cultural response, not short term, which would need to be physiological. An example of a short term adaptation is shivering.
Yes, group sleeping is a cultural adaptation. How would you classify diet changes? What type of adaptation would this be? You list only three possible adaptations. Missing facultative and developmental. Make sure you review this material in Blackboard and your textbook.
Good discussion on the benefit of the adaptive approach.
While I agree with your conclusions on the use of race, citing the value of the adaptive approach doesn't explain why using race doesn't work. Make sure you don't confuse "race" with "ethnic group". Race is based solely upon external features and ethnicity is both biologically and culturally based.
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