environmental stresses

1)   The environmental stress I chose was heat.  Humans have adapted to almost every climate in the world. However, high temperatures (113F) causes the metabolism and human homeostasis to stop and will ultimately cause death. 

2)   When faced with heat stress an organism will reduce its metabolic activity so the heat in its body isn’t as high,  they decrease their energy levels,  humans in regions with higher temperatures usually have longer limbs because it allows more surface area on the body and the greater the surface area, the faster the body heat will dissipate into the environment and off our bodies, sweat also helps to cool our bodies.

3)   The benefits of studying human variation across different environmental regions would be useful to us because we could see the differences in peoples reactions in different climates. Do people in hotter climates sweat differently than people in cooler ones? What is the average limb length in a higher temperature climate verse a cooler climate? 

This would be beneficial to science so we could have a better understanding when we find fossils. We would be able to see if the limbs on those correspond with the current day adaptations and see when this started.

4)   Race could be used as a more in-depth way to categorize humans and these adaptations. I think that it wouldn’t really be super important to the whole thing. Region the person is from would be the most important thing.  If this was in the terms of fossils we do not know that race as a defined as it seems today. 

Body language

Part 1:

I found this part of the experiment to be fairly easy. I was engaging in conversation with my step sister. She is a big talker so it was easy to carry on a conversation without actually saying anything just nodding in agreement or shaking my head to disagree. At about the 12 minute mark she noticed I hadn’t said anything and started getting mad at me thinking I was making a joke about what she was saying, but before that – she didn’t notice that I was not verbally responding to what she was saying.  It would be hard to say who would have the advantage in communicating complex ideas. I would assume it would be the person who cannot communicate with spoken language because you could kind of act things out which even the person who spoke with language could figure out.  I used to work at the Apple Store and I once assisted someone who was deaf at first he was kind of acting things out. It took a few minutes to get on the same “page” but eventually things were okay and i got him what he was looking for.  I think that if we were making up 2 fake cultures with the same specifications of the assignment the culture that had the vocal speech would think they were superior to the culture that did not use vocal speech. They would think they were uneducated or not as advanced . My answers were kind of backwards for this section.

Part 2:

I was able to last the whole 15 minutes with only vocally communicating.  My partner wasn’t effected by it at all. I did this portion with my mom. I noticed that she uses her hands a lot to speak. I think that I noticed this a lot because I was actually paying attention to it.  I come from a really Italian family. My Italian family is always waving their hands around when they speak. I think they would go nuts if you tied their hands down while they were speaking. My mom doesn’t come from an Italian background but I think that she picked something up from my dads family because she is insane with the hand movements when talking. I am currently watching my step-dad and my mom have a conversation and he is using his hands quite a bit – not as much as my mom is. I think that in our society it’s used to express feeling and seriousness. It definitely brings something to the conversation.  If I was deaf and watching their conversation, I think I’d be able to tell the “tone” of the conversation just by watching their body language and hand movements. A lot of people have difficulty reading body language. The benefit to being able to read it would be if you were in the situation where someone was saying something to you that was “serious” but their body language showed they were joking. You would then know it was a joke and not take their statement as serious.  The environmental condition where there might be  a benefit in not reading body language would be if you were really cold and shivering.  That would probably hinder the expression of any emotion because you’d probably bundled up and shivering.