Environmental Stress

I picked the environmental stress of heat because it is so often talked about, not so much with humans, but the earth itself. Heat negatively effects human homeostasis by Hyperthermia, which is an overheating of the body that eventually causes the deterioration of all internal organs, if it remains untreated. Heat can also cause cramps, heat stroke, and heat exhaustion. Heat from the sun specifically can also cause certain forms of skin cancer as well as sun burn.

One example of short-term adaption to this specific stress would be sweating, which cools down the body somewhat, when it becomes too hot.

An example of a facultative adaption is the reddening of the skin when exposed to heat for a long period of time. The reddening of the skin is all the blood coming to the surface to help cool the person’s internal organs.

An example of Developmental adaption in humans is the limb length, the height of the person, and their weight. People adapted to a hot climate are usually tall and lanky, with long limps to help disperse heat from their bodies.

Two examples of cultural adaption to heat are diet and clothing style. Humans generally choose to indulge in colder foods such as ice cream and popsicles around this time of year. Most humans also began wearing shorter and thinner clothing to help with their body’s cooling process. 

The benefits of studying human variation across environmental clines from this perspective is learning how things happen to our bodies and why. We also learn just how much our environment affects us and how we have evolved and adapted to it through natural selection. Information from these explorations is helpful to us in an educational way as well as a way to better survive. Examples of how this information helps us is knowing how to protect yourself in certain climates such as extremely hot or extremely cold.

I would use race to understand this adaption because people in hotter environments are normally have a very dark or black skin color, because it better helps defend against the damage the sun can cause as well as helping cool the person down. I believe that this variation helps explain why depending on our different environments, why we are different colors and that inside we are all the same. This study offers undeniable proof that just because we have different skin colors and such does not mean we are too different to be equal.

Piltdown Man Hoax

The Piltdown Hoax began in 1912 near the southern English town of Louis, in the tiny village of Piltdown. These supposedly ancient bones were found by amateur Archaeologist Charles Dawson. This hoax had scientists fooled for over forty years, because they were not allowed to perform tests on the fossil's which would have proven, they were fake. This hoax caused a rather large set back in the scientific community, because now people wondered how we could be sure of age, if it was so easy to fool a scientist by staining bones. Some citizens most likely wondered if scientists themselves foraged evidence of evolution to further their own careers.

The hoax itself was discovered after World War Two, when a new technology was created which allowed the use of fluorine measuring to date fossils. It was soon after they discovered not only were the bones not very old, they were also stained, and not human. The fluorine test was conducted in 1949 to test the age of the bones. The test revealed the bones to be rather young, maybe only about a hundred thousand years old, but they were not finished testing them yet. Finally in 1953 Scientists were able to conduct a full scale analysis on the Piltdown man bones.  This is when they discovered that the staining on the bones was fake.

They also discovered that the jaw bone was not human, but instead a female orangutan, who's teeth had been sanded down prior to being found, so it would seem human. This jawbone was also less than one hundred years old.  Pieces of the jawbone that would have shown it did not fit with the skull had been purposely broken off. The skull itself was human, but not the jaw. Scientists were stunned by the realization that they had been tricked.

Being human we do all have faults, the faults seen here are greed and selfishness. These faults caused someone to forge information that set scientists back quite a bit. Someone wanted money or wanted their theory to be recognized, so they set up a scenario that would make it so. These faults caused people to be less eager to accept scientific advances as they could not be sure that scientists were trustworthy anymore. Some also questioned what all a scientist could possibly know, if they were fooled so easily. There is also the fault of an eagerness to learn that for some scientists over ran their feelings of distrust and the need for absolute proof.

The positive human faults were that because scientists were curious, when things began to become confusing, they dug deeper. As technology grew and allowed them to be more thorough, they discovered more and more that did not add up in this hoax. Through the use of fluoride testing, microscopes, and full scale analysis. All three put together they found the actual date of the bones, how they had been fooled, and the actual origin of the jaw bone, which was not human at all, even though the skull was human.

You cannot remove the "human" aspect from science, because all scientists are human. Perhaps in the future we might theoretically create robots who can conduct science, but even then they were created by humans and are essentially ran by humans as well. I personally do not believe we could ever or should ever remove the human aspect from science. Humans may have faults, but these faults do not always run who we are and what we are capable of. This hoax was a major set back scientifically, but it also led to knowledge on how to prevent future hoaxes like this one from happening.

The life lesson I would take from this is to never let your eagerness for learning get in the way of making sure the facts add up like they should. Never be in such a hurry to accept something that you forget to thoroughly check out all the details first. While I believe even if the scientists had been more careful, currently they did not have the technology which would have fully proven the fossils to be fake, not to mention how the fossils were kept tightly locked up to prevent what little testing was possible at that time.

Analogous and Homologous

1. I picked Humans and Household Cats for the Homologous part of this project.
The trait which they both share is the tail bone or Coccyx, while in humans it ends and does not stem out, in cats it forms an entire tail, but the bone shaping is almost identical in both species. Their common ancestor had a well developed tail bone and passed it on to them.
The first image is a cats tailbone and the second is a humans.

While our spines work very differently as humans use Bipedal-ism and cats use Quadrupedal-ism. These words just mean that while humans walk on two legs; Cats usually walk on four. "While our coccyx or tailbone has become a vestigial structure, cats and dogs still have their tails intact."(Analogy V.S. Homology)  The similarities in both cases come from a shared ancestor, which caused this trait to appear in both species.  As this was very early in evolution this ancestor does not have a name, but is the common ancestor of not only primates(humans) and Carnivora (cats), but also many more, which I thought would be interesting to share considering the common trait came from the ancestor. 

Human

House Cat

2. For the Analogous part of this project I will compare Whales and Fish. The analogous trait they share is Fins. Even though one is a mammal and one is a fish because of their common ancestor who also had this trait, it was passed on to one of them (fish). Then through many generations of evolution the whale also developed fins do to evolutionary stress.

First picture is a Killer Whale or Orca (Cetecea) and the second picture is a Crappie (Actinopterygii)

The common ancestor (Osteichthyes) that these two shared  did have fins and lived underwater. I can say this because the family tree displays it. Their common ancestor would  have had fins, the fins would have been later changed by these two species in order to survive evolution or natural selection. However because of all the evolving that happened before Whales came to exist, the fins are an analogous trait. The whales received the trait through evolution instead of through the ancestor that the two share.

Sources: http://evolution.about.com/od/evidence/a/Analogy-Vs-Homology.htm

http://tolweb.org/Eutheria/15997 Tree containing the ancestor of cats and humans.

http://tolweb.org/Gnathostomata/14843 Tree containing Fish and Whale ancestors. 

DNA Strand for translation: TACUUGGAAAGCCGAAGTGCTAACGCCACCCCCATC

1. Out of the listed scientists I chose Thomas Malthus. When researching him I found a piece of Charles Darwin's autobiography, in which Darwin stated that his idea of natural selection came into being from his readings of Malthus's "Essay's on the Principles of Population." Considering that reaing Malthus's work lead to the creation of his theory, I would venture to say it was a positive influence.
Link: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/malthus.html Title: Thomas Malthus Author: Unknown
References used for site (provided for legitimacy): Milner, Richard 1990. The Encyclopedia of Evolution, an Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company. New York
Futuyma, Douglas J. 1986. Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates, inc. Sunderland, Mass. Glass,B., O. Temkin, and W.L. Strauss (eds.). 1959. Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore. Bowler, Peter J. 1989. Evolution: The History of an Idea. University of Califonia Press, Berkeley. Wood, John C. (ed) 1986. Thomas Robert Malthus: Critical Assesments. Vol II. Croom Helm, London.
2. Thomas Malthus, believed that struggles for life ended and began with over population. He began his research around a time where his country, England, was in poverty and many lower class produced more bodies than they could properly take care of. He believed this was the reason for God and that God would prevent man from being lazy. Darwin did not agree as to the reason and also later introduced more reasons to what is now called natural selection. In rough terms Malthus opened the door for new discoveries made by Darwin and Wallace.
3. The point Malthus touched on most was "Who gets better access to limited resources," although he focused only on humans, this was his point it seems in my opinion. He believed the rich had more resources, but the poor were reproducing more than they could deal with and this threw the whole country into poverty, he believed this to be god's work. He agreed that these led to some sort of selection, but he believed it to be spiritually based. As for what Darwin took from this and if it was positive or negative that is a matter of opinion, I can see how it might go both ways, but I think it was far more positive than negative. Yes, Malthus was incorrect in who he believed was the cause, we have grown scientifically and now know the cause as not a who, but a what. Darwin did build from what he read of Malthus's work and that I believe over runs the disagreement as to cause, because if we truly wanted to argue it, it is a matter of opinion. Some refuse to believe that it could be anything but god and some see it for what it truly is.
4. I believe that perhaps eventually Darwin could have come to the same theory without reading Malthus's work, but it would have been rather delayed. Especially considering how nervous he was to fight against all his country had known and followed until the moment he shared his discoveries. Seeing someone else starting to make similar conclusions to his own helped push him to say what he thought and knew. Perhaps if not for Malthus, Darwin may not have published his theory, but he most certainly would have still come to that conclusion eventually.
5. The Church made Darwin very nervous to publish his book, he feared what damage he might cause by publishing his theory, which went against all that was believed at that time. He was very brace to publish his theory and I believe he felt relieved when he finally did. In the end his fears were for nothing because they let his final resting place be in a church. I don't imagine if they had been angry with him for his beliefs, that this would have been allowed.

If I were stranded on an island the two items I would take would be a survival pack which usually contains emergency supplies such as water, flares, food packages, etc. Then the second item would be A satellite radio similar to what truckers and pilots use, so that I could contact help and possibly listen in to figure out where I was and how to escape.