Human Variation

The environmental stress I decided to choose was cold. I chose this because when I am cold is when my body usually hurts the most. By disturbing homeostasis this affects the survival of humans. When humans are cold they get really sick, and depending how cold it is this environmental stress can cause hypothermia. Hypothermia is when your body temperature is below what it is supposed to be., The cold can cause freezing and non freezing injuries. Vasoconstriction, the narrowing of blood vessels, also occurs which is your body’s natural response to keeping your body warm, but can also cause harm if permanent.
Short term adaptations
A short term adaptation to the cold is shivering. When humans get really cold they start to shiver so that their body can warm up. I experience this all the time, specially with this weather consistently dropping. Shivering occurs as the muscles have spasms, which help generate heat for a short period of time.


Facultative adaptations
A facultative adaptation is the narrowing of blood vessels near skin surface (vasoconstriction). This preserves core body heat by reducing peripheral blood flow. As a consequence, the skin cools and less heat is lost from the body by radiation. However, if the environmental temperature is below the freezing point, prolonged vasoconstriction can result in dangerous frostbite. As a consequence, the body's internal temperature regulating mechanism responds by dilating the peripheral blood vessels (vasodilation), thereby increasing the flow of warm blood near the skin surface.
Developmental adaptation
A developmental adaptation that humans use is the body fat.  People who have thicker layers of fat insulation under their skin still usually survive better in cold climates, while people who are slender do better in hot ones. People who usually live in cold climate have more fat so that their body can circulate and have insulation.
Cultural adaptation
A cultural adaptation to the cold are heaters. We use heaters to help keep our homes warm. They are found in vehicles and some you can carry with you wherever you go. For example they have portable heaters that you can buy and take with you to the park, beach, and camping. We use these heaters as a way to keep our bodies at a warm temperature so that we do not freeze. As a culture we have adapted to using these a source of warmth.

There are many benefits in studying human variation from this perspective.  Learning how and how long it take s people to adapt to cold weather is going to help us. Some people can survive in cold weather while others no matter how much clothing, and heaters they put in their house they are not able to survive. Information on what kind of people can survive is very helpful to us as well as knowing how frost bite and other types of cold related injuries work. This way doctors and scientist are ready and prepared when someone comes in with this injury.


Race is defined as "each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics." Race is used to describe a group of people that live in a specific place like cold weather for example. This means that we would study these people or race to see how they adapt to the cold weather. Environmental influences on adaptations is a better way to understand human variation because we see how humans adapt to all sorts of environmental stress. This is more of a broader way to see how other people not just the ones living in the cold adapt.

silence

PART 1)
    I found that this experiment was not as difficult as I though it was going to be. It was hard to get started but once my sister started talking, all I did was nod and agree by shaking my head back and forth. Then I would smile, forwn or make some sort of face expression that went along with what she was talking about.At first my sister thought it was better that I did not talking at all. She kept talking and I kept agreeing and shaking my head but towards the end of the conversation it looked like she wa beginning to get annoyed. She began to say shorter statements and eventually she just started asking questions where it was easier for me to just nod my head. Her behavior did alter and it was pretty ineteresting to watch her go from enjoying the conversation to just waiting for it to be over. If we were two different cultures trying to communicate my sister the speaking one would have the advantage over the non speaking and symbolic one. People who are deaf have a hard time communiacting with our culture because we as a whole do not understand sign language. People who do speak try to imitate what the hearing impared are trying to say or they try to act out or point at the object that they are trying to get across. I know that I have experienced this when I worked at a retail store I had an impaired woman come in and she immediately let me know that she was deaf by pointing at her ear. Then she took out a notepad and began writting to me what she wanted to buy.

PART 2)
  I was actually only able to last about eight minutes. Although I was able to freely talk I wasn't allowed to put any emotion behind it or use any hand movements. This was harder than I thought it was going to be because as much as I wanted to keep the conversation going not being able to put any emotion or facial expressions in my conversation made it a lot more difficult. My sister first laughed at me and said I sounded like a robot, but then she said it was harder for her to communicate with me than the first time. I actually found that it was harder as well.  I never noticed how important our signs and face expressions were to our culture and language. I believe that this says that we as humans have to have some type of emotion when we speak in order to communicate properly. Autistic people cannot read body language or facial expressions. The advantage of being able to read someones body language is that you are able to tell what kind of mood theyre in if theyre crossing their hands they might me mad. Things like this help us read each other without actually speaking to one another. An environment where it might not be beneficial to read body language might be in a court house. If the jury cannot read your body language , and if you are nervous they will not be able to tell. I don't know it was a little more difficult thinking of one so that's my best. Over all I really enjoyed this experiment and actually learned a lot from it.

Piltdown Hoax

  In 1912 Charles Dawson found a piece of an ancient human skull. He then invited Arthur Smith Woodward, and a French paleontologist to continue the search for earlier human life. Until this date no fossil had been found in England. Then Dawson found a jawbone that had the shape of the ape. Dawson made the announcement that England had discovered what could have possibly have been the oldest fossil and called it Piltdown man. England rejoiced and he became one of the most respected men in science until it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax. Dawson dies in 1916 and in 1920 Asia and Africa found more human fossils that dated back to earlier times.  Suspicions started arising because Africa and Asia's fossils were supposed to younger than the Piltdown man but for some reason their fossils were less human than the Piltdown man, not more which did not make any sense. In 1949 Fluorine test showed that the fossil was stained which meant the Piltdown man was tampered with. This outraged the scientific community as this made them look bad in the way that they were not able to detect that it was a fraudulent fossil for forty years.
   Human do have faults which we clearly saw in this video. Dawson was a very ambitious man who wanted to fit in and stand out in the scientific community. He wanted it so badly that he forged the Piltdown man. After his death it was discovered that Dawson had tampered with half a dozen more artifacts. This impacted the scientific process because instead of taking the evidence and making sure that the jaw bone was human Dawson made it look like it was by breaking off the end of the jawbone. Dawson violated the scientific process by making his own conclusion and striving for fame in his scientific community. He needed to be patient and keep looking for evidence and testing out more fossils instead of just forging them . Instead of taking all the steps he jumped to the last step in the scientific process and reported his findings.
   The whole scientific process was responsible for the finding of the fraudulent Piltdown man. Asking a question led the scientific community to wonder and form a hypothesis as to  why the fossils in Africa were younger than the Piltdown man, yet they were less human. Then testing the hypothesis by doing an experiment led scientist to try the fluorine test. This advent came after WWII with the technology that helped measure the fluorine content and scientist could roughly date them. After the scientist analyzed their data they came up with their conclusion and in 1949 the fluorine test revealed that the fossil was about 100,000 years old. This could only mean that the fossil was a fake.  They then communicated their findings with the rest of the world.
    I do not believe we can remove the human factor from science. As much as humans want to be professional and not let their ambitions get in the way , they always will. I just believe that there are good ambitions and greedy ones. If we did not have the human factor in the scientific world, I believe nothing would get done. Ambition is what drives scientist to great discoveries. I just think you have to learn to control your ambitions, and how you perceive things. Getting rid of the human factor, would turn us into robot like people. We would just go through the motions without really caring.  So no I do not think that we can remove the human factor from science and I don't think that if we could, we should. Being human even in science is what helps get things done. Good science depends on objectivity and when national pride or self interest overcome objectivity, then that's when mistakes happen.
  What I took from this lesson is that scientist make mistakes just like the rest of us. They can also be very vulnerable. Up to this point in history nothing this drastic had ever occurred. Which shows that everyone trusted each other's work. After the news broke out, doubt was on every ones mind on how far one can go to just gain the five minutes of fame. I ultimately learned that ambition and self greed can drive even the most respected people out there to do the most outrageous things.
   

comparative primate blog post

Lemurs are the lesser known primates. Most Lemurs live in Madagascar which is home to about 60 different species of Lemurs  ranging from the world’s largest lemur to the smallest primate. The forests have provided shelter and food for lemurs since they have lived there which may have been more than 60 million years ago. Many scientist assume that the ancestor's of todays lemurs hopped on a log and traveled from Africa to Madagascar. Scientist do not know exactly how many different types of lemur species there are.  The lemurs’ strong hands and fingers help them to climb trees easily. Their muscular legs are adapted for jumping. When they need a change of scenery, they hop to another branch. The Ring-tailed lemurs live in multi male and female groups of about 11 to 17 animals.Ring-tailed lemur social groups are centered around a group of related adult females and their offspring. There is often a single female that is the head of the group and determines which direction the group will go. Daughters of these lemurs do not inherit their rank but must fight for their class rank. In male lemurs there is usually one to three high ranked lemurs at this is determined byn their age. One of the benefits to being a high-ranking male is increased social interaction with the high-ranking females which may confer benefits such as decreased risk of predation, increased access to food resources, and increased access to reproductively receptive females.Females are sexually receptive for one to two days each year, and estrus may be as short as six to 24 hours. In the wild, the breeding season lasts between seven and 21 days in May and both males and females have multiple mates. During this time the males come to the females and try to mate. If the female lemur doesn;t want to accept she becomes very aggresive. What I found very interesting was The order of mating reflects the male dominance hierarchy , the highest-ranking, central male is the first male to successfully approach and mate when a female becomes receptive. He is followed by the second-ranking male and then by transfer males or non-troop males.The reproductive success of lemurs is highly dependent on environmental conditions. In exceptionally good years in the wild, age of maturation is earlier and birthrate and infant survival are much higher compared to years with severe environmental conditions such as drought. Because of harsh conditions it is a good thing that lemurs have a high reproduction rate. Even if the harshest conditions kill some, many are born after.






Spider monkeys live in the tropical rainforests of central and south America. They have long arms and gripping tails that allow them to move from tree to tree. They have great grip on trees even though they have no thumbs!The new world monkeys are social and gather in groups of two to three dozen animals. At night they split up into smaller groups and sleep together.Foraging also occurs in smaller groups and mostly during the day.The spider monkey knows when to reproduce by watching at the female monkey getting her cycle to start to reproduce. The female monkey has a monthly cycle from 24 to 27 days long. Mating occurs from 2 to 3 days. If they don't stay together for the length of 3 days then no baby can be conceived. Spider monkeys find food in the treetops and feast on nuts, fruits, leaves, bird eggs, and spiders. Typically females give birth to one spider monkey once every two to five years. These spider monkeys depend on their environment to help them hide from predators such as humans that hunt them .

There are different types of baboons and most of them live in Africa or Arabia. Baboons generally prefer savanna and other semi-arid habitats, though a few live in tropical forests Baboons do not have gripping tails but they can still climb tress to sleep , eat , or look out for trouble. Baboons are sociable and they groom each other eating off dead skin. This piece of article that I found on the Discovery website I found was very interesting. "With the male grunting and the female emitting loud and long operatic calls, mating chacma baboons produce an incredible amount of noise. And a new study has found that other males take advantage of the din by eavesdropping on mating couples to determine the status of relationships.

If the couple quarrels or parts, for even just a brief moment, the snooping male then takes advantage of the situation by mating with the female, himself." This trait has been adapted since there are more female baboons than males so they need to fight to find a mate. The head baboon picks out a female baboon and then he protects her for about a week from other males who want to mate with her. Kinda human like behavior which i thought was interesting.

The Gibbon is a small sized ape that is found in the dense jungles and tropical rainforests across the South East Asia. Gibbons spedn most of their time in trees which helps them hide from predators and also has food up in the safe distance. Gibbons are social and live in groups known as troops which consists of the alpha male and female and their offspring. I found it super cute that Gibbons stay together for life. A gibbon family is terrotorial and defends their property through morning songs performed by the breeding male and female. This song lasts ten to thirteen minutes sometimes longer if its raining or shorter if its reallt dry. This trait was adapted because of the limited number of Gibbon being able to stay up in atree. They must sing songs to mate and to wanr off other gibbons.

Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing more than 98 percent of our genetic blueprint.Chimpanzees live in central and west central Africa in the tropical rainforests.
Chimpanzees live in social communities of several dozen animals, and can habituate themselves to African rain forests, woodlands, and grasslands.There are no actual seasons of chimpanzee reproduction. They mate throughout the year when the females are receptive. However, there are cycles where the females are infertile.There is hardly any independence between chimpanzees. They are very social. Chimps that are just born can survive without their mothers and orphan chimps would be adopted by relative chimps that would take care of them like a mother. These chimps learned to adapt to their environment by mating as much as they could whether the female is fertile or not.

Through my research of all of these primates I found out that the environment does have a huge influence on their physical and behavioral traits. These primates have leanred to adapt to their environments based on their needs. for example the lemurs are good at jumping from tree to tree to receive food. The Gibbons used their environment to help stay away from predators and sleep at night. These are important traits of these primates. So in conclusion the environment does have a huge influence on these primates behavior.

homologous

Homologous


The beaver and the elephant are two different species that possess the homologous trait. Did you know that the beaver is actually one of the largest rodents in America. The beaver uses its flat hairless tail for balancing which I thought was pretty interesting. The beavers main habitat is the water and they can actually grow to be four feet long. Some can way anywhere from 40 to 60 lbs!

Now the elephant is one of the largest mammals on earth. The elephant's shoulder  can actually weigh over 16,000lbs. They can also grow to be 5 foot thirteen inches, which I know doesn't seem very tall but with that kind of weight, it can kill you. They have thick skin almost a coarse like feel, which helps them keep cool during the summer. They have long tusks and hair very think covering their bodies. A common ancestory for both is Mammalia because they both have teeth structures .






Analogous

The snail and the turtle are two species that possess the analogous trait. Both of these species  have an outer shell which they use as protection from their predators. If you have every picked up a snail or approached it, when you get to close they hide back in their shell. Same thing with a turtle, when they are scared they hide in their shell and this is for protection. Turtles and snails have no common ancestor and so they evolved independently of one another from different methods/structures.

Guess my DNA :)

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Thomas Malthus

      Thomas Malthus was an English parson who published a book in 1797 titled "Essay on the Principle of Population" The central theme of Malthus teachings were that population growth would always overpower food and supply growth. This would create hunger, diseases, and infinite struggle. Malthus warned his fellow Englishmen that no matter how many policies were created to help the poor they would never work because of population growth. A nation could easily double it's population in a few decades leading to famine and misery for everyone. Malthus made his economic arguments by rather than looking at human beings as individuals, he looked at them as groups of individuals, all who were subject to the same laws of behavior. In this study Malthus proved that the same forces of fertility and starvation that humans used, animals and plants used them as well. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/history_07
     
        The points that Malthus had the biggest impact were :

• All organisms have the potential of reproducing exponentially- Malther knew that we as humans could reproduce to the point that we would over run the earth and we would run out of supplies such as food and land to survive.
• Whats preventing organisms from reproducing at their potential- Malther stated that the only reason that humanity was not in famine was because it's growth was affected by plagues, infanticide, people putting off marriage until middle age, and natural deaths occurring.
• Resources are limited- Malther's whole argument was that the earth has a limited amount of resources and once they are used up humanity would starve.
• Who gets better to these limited resources- Malther argued that who was better equipped would be the ones to survive if there was a famine and only the strongest would stay and the weaker ones would eventually be gone.

    Darwin could not have developed his theory of natural selection without the influence of Malther. Before Malther, Darwin believed that the population grew until they were aligned with existing resources, and the stabilized. Darwin considered some of the competitors in Malthus theory about having the less prepared would die in struggle leaving only those with stronger traits alive. Through this Darwin developed evolution through natural selection. Malthus work helped inspire Darwin to refine natural selection by stating a reason for competition.  The book Malthus wrote inspired Darwin to begin his whole process on evolution, so without Malthus Darwin would have not gotten where he did.
     The scientific community was reluctant to pursue evolution due to the social repercussions of the time, with the church frowning on any ideas that seemed out of line with the religious and biblical doctrine. The church would scorn Darwin and that motivated him to do better and establish his name along with his theory.