1. One of the environmental stresses that negatively impacts the survival of humans by disturbing homeostasis would be high altitude. High Altitude has been seen differently in several cases. Unlike most people they are unable to live in certain places or adjust to a specific weather altitude because they are just not use to it which could harm their health.
2. Short-term adaptation can become very difficult depending on whether or not they are in hot or cold weathers. For example if someone were to live in cold conditions it can be very hard to get use to the adaptations out there and they will struggle to even breathe normally which can be very harmful.
Developmental adaptation be seen as humans who are used to such high altitude areas and are able to live there without having a problem maybe because they were born there or family has lived there for generations.
3. Some of the benefits of studying human variation from this perspective across environmental clines could be the types of help it can provide us just incase we need any type of information about the different types of conditions of these places which allows us to be well informed. This can be used in a productive way to help those people who might be interested in a change of scenery or are interested in maybe moving out there one day and would like to know if such a thing can be done.
4. Personally i dont believe race has anything to do with these adaptations maybe cultures could be depending on whether or not they lived in high altitudes that they might be a lot more used to the conditions.
Can you be more specific on the impact of high altitude stress on the human body? What are the implications of moving into a high altitude environment? What difficulties would the body have and why? The key is the issue of how lower air pressures found in high altitude would impact the body.
ReplyDeleteLooking through your adaptations, you don't actually identify the adaptations themselves. For example, in short term, how does the body change and adjust to deal with lower air pressure? The initial response is usually an increase in respiration and heart rate to deliver that limited oxygen to the body at the necessary rate.
For facultative, what processes does your body turn on or off to address the oxygen levels? The body increases production of red blood cells in the circulatory system to help increase the delivery rate of oxygen to the body.
For developmental, yes, these populations will develop traits over time to deal with low oxygen access, but what are these traits? How about increased lung capacity and heart muscle size?
For cultural, what tools can be used to increase access to oxygen? Mountain climbers deal with this by using oxygen tanks.
Make sure you review this information so you understand what was being asked of you. The assignment folder contains many resources to guide you in this and reading other student posts will help as well.
More information and knowledge is always a good thing, but can you think of a more concrete way this information can be used? Can understanding the way high altitude impact the absorption of oxygen into the body have any medical implications? Can learning about new genes that address high altitude stress have genetic research implications?
You are correct that race has nothing to do with adaptations, but let's explore this with greater depth to understand the problem here. In order to use one factor (i.e., the environment) to explain another (adaptations) you need to have a causal relationship between the two. We see that with the environment, which causes our adaptations to appear. Does race have that causal relationship as well? No, it doesn't. Race doesn't cause adaptations. In a sense, adaptations "cause" race, since they are used as the basis to define race which is just a social construct, subject to bias and interpretation, based upon external phenotypes. Without that causal relationship, race is useless in explaining human variation.