Week 5 Human Variation

1. Heat is not always a terrible thing, but when the temperature gets a little too high we can start to experience a handful of negatives. Extreme heat can cause the human body to experience Heat Exhaustion or Heat Stress. What happens is when the temperature gets too high, your body needs more water to maintain its normal bodily functions. So what the body does is begin to tap into different water reserves in order to keep itself running. Eventually it begins to take too much water from from your body and you begin to enter early stages of Heat Exhaustion or Heat Stress. The further you let it develop, the higher chance of enduring a heat stroke which can cause permanent brain damage or even death.

2. Short Term - Sweating is a short term adaptation that occurs shortly after exposure to high levels of heat. Heat is released from the body as sweat rises from the skin and evaporates. As heat leaves the body, body temperatures cool down to maintain a lower body temperature.

Facultative - Vasodilation is when blood flow increases toward the skins surface. This is tied to how people turn red in the sun. Your body is bringing its blood flow closer to the surface in order for heat to exit the body easier from the blood.

Developmental - Bipedalism was one way humans adapted to heat. By walking upright you are exposing less of your body to sunlight. That is a possible reason that the human body chose to keep hair on the top of our heads and on the top/front side of our arms, legs, and hands/feet even after the human body lost majority of its hair through evolution. Hair helps protect the skin from the harmful UV rays.

Cultural - Wearing clothes was a cultural decision humans made that helps regulate body temperature. Less clothing keeps you cooler and more clothing keeps you warmer.

3. Understanding why the body functions the way it does in certain scenarios like how it has adapted to heat can be very useful to human survival. For example, by understanding how sweating cools the body maybe we can develop some sort of drug to help catalyst the process and help the body function more effectively at a higher temperature for a longer time.We can use this drug with people working in high temperatures or as an emergency type drug that hikers can carry or soldiers etc.

4. You can not use race to study the variation of adaptations I have listed above. All races sweat, all races are bipedal, all races can endure vasodilation, and any person of any race can put on any piece of clothing and experience the same effects. Therefore it is better to study the human body as a whole to better understand how we have developed these adaptions to increase our chances of survival. You can maybe look at the type of clothing some cultures wear such the long robe and head pieces that are worn in the middle east to help block sun rays, but what i am trying to say is that any person of any race can wear that piece of clothing and experience the same effects.

Piltdown Hoax

1. The Piltdown Hoax began in 1912 when a man named Charles Dawson was believed to have discovered an ancestor of humans in Piltdown village near Sussex, England. The significance of the find is that the discovery would suggest is that humans had evolved directly from apes which we know now to be untrue. Humans and apes share a common ancestor but each underwent their own evolutionary processes. The big idea here is that the fossils proved were those of an apelike hominid yet showed proof of a larger brain similar to a humans. Therefore the findings were evidence that the human brain evolved long before previously thought. What eventually happened to Dawson's find was that it was proven a hoax in the 1950s. The remains that Dawson found were forged to be something they were not and he managed to fool some of the top minds in their respective fields that they were real (Smith Woodward and Author Keith). This caused a whole line of scientific work to be done based on the fact that the discovery was true when in the end it was not and the work done in that span of ten years was set back to the start. To this day we are not sure if Dawson knew the truth about the fossils or if he too was fooled but the effects of the false discovery remain the same. (Fossils originally found at the site included a jaw bone, skull fragments, teeth, and tools. The jaw bone and teeth came from an orangutan and the cranium came from a small brained human modern human.)

2. I think the humane traits at fault here were that too many people wanted the evidence to be true therefore did not question the findings to the extent they should have been questioned. At the time the technology we had obviously was not as good as the technology used to ultimately disprove the findings, but there should have been more testing done nonetheless before declaring the discovery true. It can be argued that a big reason for immediate acceptance is that the discoveries were accepted quickly by top names in Woodward and Klein and if those two men accepted it then they must be true in the eyes of many other scientific figures at the time. The fact that this discovery fulfilled the "missing link" in its theory that had already been predetermined allowed the perfect opportunity for quick acceptance on a discovery that should have been more closely looked at.

3. The Piltdown man was concluded a fraud thanks to a new dating method discovered after World War I called the Fluorine Absorption Dating Method. What this method did was measure the amount of fluorine the bones had absorbed while in the ground. After the testing it was determined that the bones were less than 100,000 years old. Along with this evidence, the teeth that were originally found had shown scratches and marks of reshaping. This was all the evidence needed to debunk and disprove the Piltdown Hoax and all the scientific work done based on it after its discovery.

4. The human factor of science is what drives our advancement. No I would not want it to be removed and I do not think it is possible to even if we tried. It still takes a human to decide where to dig, it still takes a human to decide what gets tested, it still takes a human to analyze evidence and determine what that evidence means to mankind. I do agree that everything found should undergo tests and these tests should be done through the most advanced technology available to confirm our findings, but if science had an instruction manual like these machines that test our discoveries then there would never be any advancement. It would just be a bunch of artifacts and fossils confirmed to be real and no further investigation as to what they mean and could entail about our past and future. We need the human brain to keep advancing further and further.

5. What you can take away from this scenario is that one should never believe things like this without valid proof from a reliable source. Its just like writing an essay and using facts from a reliable source. I could argue that aliens are real and there would be plenty of evidence I can pull from theory websites and blogs that everyday theorists post online, but none of it would be as valid as something directly from our government saying that no evidence has been found of outside life. What Dawson's discovery did was begin a chain of new scientific discoveries in theory of human evolution. With Dawson's discovery to be true, it opened the door to a whole new area of study that scientists immediately began working on. However when the Piltdown man was proved a fraud, it set back all those years of new scientific study that was started by Dawson. So the lesson here is always confirm before you accept.

Blog Post (Week 3 6/18)

Homologous:
a. A human's tailbone and a monkey's tail are examples of homologous traits. A human's tailbone is a small bone located in the rear end of the pelvis area within a human's bone structure. A monkey's tail hangs at the rear end of the monkey and can be controlled as if it were an extra limb.

b. A monkey's tail is a collection of small bones that extend out in a structure similar to the human spine from the backside of the monkey. This tail serves as an extra limb to monkeys and is used to help swing for tree to tree and keep balance. A human's tailbone serves no real purpose. It is similar to the tail in a sense that it exhibits the same bone structure that the start of a tail has. The difference is that in a human's tailbone, the rest of the tail is not there. It is just the single bone. These homologous traits exhibit differences although they are closely related because of the lives that each species has accustomed to living. Monkeys live in trees and a tail provides much needed support to thrive in that environment. Humans do not live in trees nor do they swing for place to place. The idea is that humans once had tails as well and the need for them faded away over time so eventually the tails themselves faded away.

c. Evidence does point to a common ancestor between monkeys and humans. To be more exact, there is a common ancestor between apes and monkeys, and there is a common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees that classify humans as apes to begin with. The ancestor is not exactly named but is said to have lived roughly 25 million years ago, but there has been no fossil evidence to prove that it had a tail. We know it had a tail because of the evolutionary timeline of each species. If you trace back far enough one can predict that the ancestor of each species had a tail at roughly the same time period.

d.  


Analogous
a. A penguin's wing and a dolphin's flipper are analogous traits. A penguin's wing is smooth and sleek and cuts through water very well. A dolphin's flipper is also smooth and sleek very similar in texture and structure to a penguins wing. It also helps the dolphin easily cut through water.

b.The penguin's wing sits at the side of the body. It's structure resembles that of a wing except in most birds the wing enables them to fly. A penguin's wing does not. The reason for this is that in Antarctica a penguin does not need to fly as much as it needs to swim. The main source of food in the environment is fish, so penguins needed to adapt and become great swimmers rather than flyers and a sleek wing enables them to do that. Although the penguin is a species of bird, it acquired a trait similar to a dolphin due to the fact that it needed to perform similar functions in order to catch its food. In dolphins the flipper helps cut through water and enables the dolphin to swim at high speeds to catch its prey. This is the same function the wing on a penguin serves. There it is determined that the trait is not a from a common ancestor between the two, but was developed over time as an example of evolution within two different species to adapt to their environment.

c.The common ancestor between the two species was some type of reptile that lived about 360 million years ago. It was the same common ancestor between birds and mammals. The reptile was said to have been some type of four footed fish that had lungs but primarily relied on under water breathing. We do not know specifically if it possessed the trait because there is no fossil evidence yet however it was assumed to live primarily underwater therefore we can assume it did have some type of sleek fin to help maneuver effectively underwater.

d.  

Scientific Method
1. (I'm assuming the class is a morning class since the prompt did not specify.) The student is not getting enough sleep every night and that is why he is falling asleep in class.
2 Test:

• A. I would test this hypothesis by first learning how much sleep the student gets on average per night. Once you know the average, I would as them to just add an hour or two for a few nights and see if their sleeping in class trend continues.
• B. If the student is able to stay awake through the whole class after adding an hour or two of sleep per night, then it is safe to say that my hypothesis is true and all he needed was a little bit more sleep.
• C. If the student is still falling asleep in class, I would consider my hypothesis falsified. He is falling asleep for another reason besides lack of sleep.

3. An untestable hypothesis to this scenario would be that the student is falling asleep on purpose because he is from the future and is on a mission to go back in time and disrupt the class to prevent a specific student from passing.