Adaptations to the cold

                The cold can have a profoundly negative impact on humans and disturb our homeostasis. Cold environments have the ability to drop our core body temperature down to fatal levels. This is called hypothermia and occurs when your core temperature reached 94 degrees Fahrenheit, or 34.4 degrees Celsius. These freezing conditions cause our bodies to try to adapt which in turn cause stress to our bodies. This disrupts our homeostasis because we are not relaxed and happy. Our bodies are not functioning properly; instead they are fighting for survival.   

               

               Humans have however found ways to adapt to the stress of the cold. A short term

adaptation that we use is shivering. When the body is cold the muscles start to convulse to continue the blood flow in those muscles. This helps us deal with the cold for a short amount of time and does not cause a change in our genes. An example of a facultative adaptation would be the narrowing of blood vessels near the skins surface. This is known as vasoconstriction and it helps to keep heat from leaving your body by reducing the peripheral
blood flow.
This can lead to frostbite if the body is left in the extreme conditions for too long however. Developmental adaptations could include an increased basal metabolic rate, higher levels of fat around vital organs, and the overall short and round shape of the body. Higher levels of fat and the body shape all help to retain heat in the body’s core. Cultural adaptations can be seen in many different ways. People who live in consistently cold weather use fire to keep warm. They also sleep in huddles with their bodies pushed up against each other to retain heat as

well. Their clothes are also designed to keep the cold out and the heat in. The picture to the right shows the style of clothes that keep the Inuit people warm. You can also see that their body type is shorter and rounder. All of these adaptations help the human body to survive in otherwise frightful conditions.

                The benefits of studying human variation is that we get to learn how our bodies work and change to better fit our environment. We are the only species that can survive in such varying conditions. That is something incredible and worth researching. Explorations like that help us to understand our body and its ability to adapt. From studying this we have been able to see the different adaptations form people living in subarctic regions to the deserts of Africa.

                You could use race to say that Inuit people are better adapted to the cold because of their race, but that is very limiting. You are taking away the importance of change over generations to adapt to that environment. They cannot survive the cold because they are Inuit. They can survive the cold because over generations their bodies have evolved and acclimated to the cold weather. The shorter and rounder shape took over in genes because they were better suited to the environmental stresses. To use race as a way to study human variation is a mistake. Race is a cultural and societal term. We are all more genetically similar than people tend to realize. Studying the environmental adaptations show you how and why a group of people changed.

                

Language Experiment

                In this language experiment we were told to speak with a partner using nothing but body language, hand movements, and facial expressions. Our partner could speak but we were not able to. In the second part of the experiment we were allowed to speak but not to use any facial expressions, fluctuation in our voice, or hand signals. The two parts of this experiment were extremely different from each other and the results were intriguing.

                Part 1 of this experiment was very difficult for me. It is tough to convey a thought to your partner without the use of words. It was like a game of charades at first. As it continued however my partner changed from asking complex questions to asking me yes or no questions. This was a lot easier for me to answer and for my partner to understand what I was trying to communicate. From a cultural standpoint when it comes down to describing complex ideas I believe the spoken language has a real advantage over the non-speaking form of communication. The speaker became a leader in our conversation. They would ask all the questions and I, the non-speaker, had to answer them. It was very difficult for me to ask my partner a question since most of the time they had to just guess what I was trying to say. For non-speakers there is too much guessing work involved, this makes it very difficult to convey a complex idea. From a speakers standpoint as well they might look down on the non-speakers as being dumber and less cultured. The speaker had to dumb everything down to a yes or no question for me to be able to answer. There are many people in our current culture that have difficulty speaking. Whether it is a young child just learning to talk, a foreign citizen who does not know the language, or a mutation in a person’s genes that make it difficult to speak, there is always a struggle. Unfortunately in our society there is not a very helpful reaction to this. People mostly just try to talk louder or slower to the other person. When talking to kids we dumb down what we say so we don’t confuse them. As a culture we tend to look down on those that don’t speak exactly like we do.

                Part 2 of this experiment was a little funnier to me. I could not last more than 1 minute without bursting out in laughter. I found my own monotone voice as funny and robotic. We rely so much on our emotions and express them in every aspect of our language. In taking that away from me, I tried to break it and ended up laughing so that I could show some type of emotion. My partner had much the same reaction as I did. We are not used to listening to someone talk with no emotion so we end up laughing at it. My partner also kept trying to make me break and laugh before the 15 minutes were up. We are able to judge a lot about a person and their personality through the way they talk and how they hold themselves. Body language is a huge insight into the person you are speaking to. You are able to tell if they are lying, or happy, or angry with you. Seeing the emotions of the person you are talking to enables you to change your own tone of voice as well. We are able to adapt and communicate better with whoever we are speaking to. However there are people who do have difficulty reading body language. Many people with mental disorders such as Asperger’s or autism have difficulty reading people’s body language. They can learn to imitate it in some situations but it may never come naturally to some. There are situations where it would be a benefit to not read into body language but it is very difficult for me to think of one. The only one I can really think of is from a law point of view. When listening to a testimony it may be more beneficial to not see the person talking. In this situation you may be able to hear the testimony better if you are not taken in by their bod language and how they are talking. If a woman is crying we are more likely to feel empathy for her but if you do not see her crying you may be able to make a better and less biased decision.