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.