Human Variation & Race

Mark Glen
Anthro 101
10/16/2012

Race Variation

     Humans ability to maintain homeostasis relative to environmental heat is a rather difficult task. Heat at temperatures too high affect us in that it not only damages our skin, it also causes internal damage as well. As a natural reaction to heat, we sweat. However, if the weather is hot and dry then humidity will be low, causing sweat to readily evaporate. Initially that sounds like a good thing, but when analysis extends a bit further we find that through this ready evaporation, we rapidly produce the loss of bodily water and salts just by sweating. If those minerals aren't sufficiently replenished, then the heat can potentially be fatal in less than a day. Now that's how it affects us internally, what it does externally is burn our skin.This mostly affects people with paler skin complexions and less melanin prepared to protect the skin. The burning will cause redness of the affected area, peeling of the skin that has been burned, and pain when the area is touched. 

•      Sweating, it's our bodies way of naturally cooling off when it is hot. If there is event he slightest breeze of wind, our skin will be cooled when it meets our sweat. Also, it soaks into our clothing, giving us and even further amount of cooling.

 

•      A facultative adaptation to heat would be the body's ability to tan when it's exposed for too long to the sun.

 

•      Melanin/darker skin and bipedalism are the two greatest developmental adaptations to heat. The darker skin complexions can withstand the heat more efficiently than people with pale skin. They can stand the heat longer and naturally it doesn't cause much or any harm to them. Bipedalism is everyone's adaptation to heat in that it brings us up from the ground where heat is immediately being extracted from and it allows us to expose a tremendously lower amount of our body to the sun. 

•      As for cultural adaptations, we have incorporated large bodies of water to get into like pools or oceans. We now even have swamp coolers that can do the job for us if we live in a modern, enclosed house.

     In benefit we learn how to cope with heat, how to avoid being damaged by it or possibly killed by it. Explorations like this are helpful in many ways. Example, studying our homeostasis relative to the haet conditions in the Sahara show us what we need to do to survive there. Or any other hot place on our planet, it give us the power to keep our race (human) alive when under these conditions.

     To help someone understand the variations of adaptations to heat based on race I would explain how black people have melanin in their skin that helps then withstand the heat and white people didn't develop the same way. However, they do tan during the summer time when it is most hot out in order to avoid damage by the sun. (no offense to anyone). Well, when you use race to explain adaptation variations you separate people the single "human race" that we are and put them into sub-categories, as if to be totally different species. To clarify and explain that the only reason we have different phenotypic adaptations is that every environment is different brings us back to unity. When it's explained this way, it makes the listener understand the relation we have to our environment and that its the stresses we undergo over long periods of time that shape our adaptations, not the race that we are born into.