Human Variation & Race

1) The environmental stress I have chosen is heat. 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. 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. 

2) Human have adapted heat stress is sweating, which is a short-term adaptation. Sweating is the release of a salty liquid from the body’s sweat glands and it helps keep their body cool. This process is also called perspiration. Sweating is an essential function that helps your body stay cool. Sweat is commonly found under the arms, on the feet, and on the palms of the hands. The slightest breeze of wind, will cool our skin when it meets our sweat. Also, it soaks into our clothing, giving us and even further amount of cooling.



The second way humans have adapted to heat is air conditioning. As far as behavioral adaptations

go, humans are smart enough to invent creative means of avoiding the heat. We seek out shade and cooler environments such as caves, tree cover, water, etc. When we feel ourselves becoming too hot. We drink more water. We limit our physical exertion to reduce water loss. You could even call air conditioning a highly advanced behavioral adaptation for avoiding the heat. Human beings are able to live in more varied climates and environments than any other animal because of our ingenuity and behavioral adaptations.

Darker skin and bipedalism are the two greatest developmental adaptations to heat which is development adaption. 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. 

The fourth way humans have adapted to heat is by using swimming 

pool or oceans. 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.

3) The benefits of studying human variation 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. Any other hot place on our planet, it give us the power to keep our race (human) alive when under these conditions.

One example of how this information can be used in a productive way is to explain race in a environmental adaption. We have to accept that human adapted environment differently then the animals and we can cope with different environments in different ways. 

4) To help someone understand the variations of adaptations to heat based on race I would explain how black people have darkness 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.