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Example research essay topic: Adipose Tissue Body Temperature - 1,704 words

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... y requirements of its growing brain continues to devote roughly 70 % of its growth potential to increasing this fat deposit, reaching peak adiposity of around 25 % of its body mass by the age of nine months. These facts would not be predicted. either as part of the inheritance from early arboreal ancestors nor as adaptations to a life on the plains of Africa. One suggested explanation stressed the need of storing energy against possible food shortages, as in hibernating mammals. But the fat in humans is not seasonal, and it is hard to see why natural selection in the hominids would have given priority to food storage in a savanna habitat where speed seems to have been the prime requirement of most other animals whether predators or prey.

The other favourite hypothesis is thermo regulation, stressing the cold of the African nights as other thermo regulatory theories stress the heat of the African days. But in cross-species comparisons, measurements of the arrangements of white adipose tissue, as pointed out by Caroline Pond, "are not consistent with the long established theory that fat is adapted to thermal insulation or mechanical protection in terrestrial mammals. " The kind of fat specifically adapted for rapidly raising body temperature is brown fat, and human babies are quite exceptional in having massive deposits of white adipose tissue which is not readily mobilised for heat production. The attribute of fat to which least attention has been paid is that it provides buoyancy. The amount of fat in diving mammals is liable to vary according to whether they are surface feeders, or deep divers for whom too much buoyancy would be an embarrassment. It is worth noting that a human baby apart from adapting happily to the water if introduced to it early enough will float, whereas a chimpanzee or Nearly forty years after Hardy published his idea, , though Professor Tobias has called for a new paradigm to replace the savanna one and Professor Dennett has publicly queried why the aquatic hypothesis continues to be rejected out of hand, no professional journal has published an objective appraisal of its claims or invited a debate on the subject.

The arguments against it have tended to be in general terms, representing it as vague and un parsimonious, and a typical example of the kind of pseudo-scientific fringe theory which is often dreamed up by laymen, tailored to appeal to disaffected minorities. and / or claiming to solve an unrealistically wide swathe of the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything. In fact it was conceived twice, independently, both times by professional scientists (Professor Max Westenhofer of the University of Berlin and Professor Sir Alister Hardy, D. Sc. , F. R. S.

of Oxford). It is as void of political implications as the Third Law of Thermodynamics; and it seeks to explain a cluster of anomalous species-specific human physical anomalies hitherto not satisfactorily accounted for. It is not wildly unrealistic to explore the possibility that some common factor may have been involved in all of them. As the first person after Hardy to publish anything in support of his idea, I hasten to admit that my first contribution was not of a kind likely to inspire confidence. But that was in 1972; the data and the arguments as now presented are of professional standard. The ad hominem strictures and the UFO comparisons based on The Descent of Woman are quite inappropriate and twenty-seven years out of date.

As for vagueness, the theory makes no claim to be specific about times and places. The onset of an aquatic phase, if it contributed to the separation between ape and human lineages, could not have been later than 5 - 6 mya There is nothing in the fossil record either to confirm or to disprove the possibility of an aquatic or semi-aquatic or flooded-forest habitat for the earliest hominids. Taphonomic bias may or may not be the only reason why hominid fossils are usually found in conjunction with remains of aquatic species, and their skeletal anatomy is no more capable of unambiguously determining how much time they spent in the water than how much time they still spent in the trees. It is frequently pointed out that the different features cited above naked skin, bipedalism, the fat layer, the respiratory changes may not all have evolved at the same time. That is quite true.

In the case of speech, it seems likely that millions of years may have elapsed between the acquiring of conscious breath control and the use of that asset for purposes of communication. The other features too may have emerged serially the bipedalism before the nakedness, and so on. But. significantly, it has not proved any easier to produce convincing explanations of any of them merely by postulating that they may have arisen at long intervals and for different reasons. The charge of lack of parsimony is based on the null hypothesis: that since we know the common ancestors lived in the trees and their human descendants today live on the land, it is obligatory to conclude that they moved from trees to land with no intervening stage. Such rules of thumb can be useful aids to clear thinking, other things being equal.

But if too slavishly adhered to they can hamper the imagination and cause speculation to get permanently bogged down in dead-end lines of enquiry. The savanna scenario is defunct; the mosaic scenario has produced no new insights; the aquatic theory is to many unacceptable. This position has led to the tentative suggestion that the human anomalies may not be niche-related at all, but merely the result of genetic drift, like the slightly varying pattern of stripes on different species of zebra. This is not comparing like with like. Apes and humans are genetically no further apart than horses and zebras, or populations of the same species of gopher found on opposite sides of the Colorado canyon and indistinguishable to the naked eye. But in humans that slight difference is accompanied by a series of phonetic modifications of a degree and diversity unknown in any other instance of comparable genetic relatedness.

That seems to indicate that human ancestors at one time occupied a niche which was not only different from that of the apes, but strikingly different. Hardy's aquatic hypothesis, although highly speculative, is based on Darwinian assumptions... It outlines a scenario which could conceivably account for a number of hitherto unexplained human characteristics. Attempts to depict it as on a par with pseudo-scientific Bibliography: References Aiello, L. and Dean, C. (1990). An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy.

London: Academic Press. Bauer, H. R. (1977). Chimpanzee bipedal locomotion in the Game National Park, East Africa. Primates, 18, (4), pages? ? Carrier, D.

R. (1984). The energetic paradox of human running and hominid evolution. Current Anthropology, 25, (4), 483 - 489. Crawford, M. and Marsh, D. (1989). The Driving Force.

London, Heinemann. Credit, E. S. (1987). The Human Vocal Tract: Anatomy, Function, Development, and Evolution. New York: Vantage Press. Dennett, D.

C. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea: evolution and the meanings of life. New York: Simon and Schuster. de Waal, F. (1989). Peacemaking Among Primates. , Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Foley, R. (1987).

Another Unique Species: Patterns in human evolutionary biology. Harlow: Longman. Hardy, A. (1960) Was man more aquatic in the past? New Scientist, 7, 642 - 645. Hunt, K.

D. (1994). The evolution of human bipedalism, ecology, and functional morphology, J Hum. Evol. , 26 Johanson, D. C. , Take, M.

and Copies, Y. (1982). Pliocene hominids from the Hadar formation, Ethiopia. (1973 - 1977) Am. J. Phys. Anthrop, 57, 373 - 402. Judges, W.

L. (1988). Relative joint size and hominid locomotor adaptations with implications for the evolution of hominid bipedalism, J. Hum. Evol, 17, 247 - 265. Kingston, J. D. , Marino, B.

D. and Hill, A. (1994). Isotopic evidence for neogene hominid paleo environments, Science, 264. Klein, R. G. (1989) The Human Career: Human biological and Cultural Origins: University of Chicago Press. Kuzawa, C. (1998).

Adipose Tissue in Human Infancy and Childhood: an Evolutionary Perspective. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 41. Langdon, J. H. (1993). Umbrella hypotheses and parsimony in human evolution: a critique of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, J. Hum.

Evol. , 33 (4), 479 - 494. Laitman, J. T. and Reidenberg, J.

S. (1993). Comparative and developmental Anatomy of laryngeal Position. , Vol 1, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. Lovejoy, C. O. (1988).

The evolution of human walking, Scientific American, November, 82 - 89. Mohr, P. (1978). Afar. Ann. Rev. Earth.

Planet. Sci. , 6, 145 - 172. Montagna, W. (1972). The skin of nonhuman primates, Am. Zoologist, 12, 109 - 124. Morgan, E. (1990).

The Scars of Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press. Morgan, E. (1997). The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. London: Souvenir Press. Napier, J. (1992).

Hands. Princeton University Press. Negus, V. E. (l 929). The Mechanism of the Larynx, London: Wm. Heinernann (Medical Books).

Newman, R. W. (1970). Why man is such a thirsty and sweaty naked animal. Human Biology, 42, 12 - 27.

Pawlowski, B. (1998). Why are human newborns so big and fat? Human Evolution. Vol 13, N 1. Pond, C. (1998). The Fats of Life.

Cambridge University Press. Rodman, P. S. and McHenry, H. M. (1980).

Bioenergetics and the origin of hominid bipedalism, Am. J. Phys. Anthrop. 52, 103 - 106.

Schagatay, E. (1996). The Human Diving Response: effects of temperature and training. Lund: University of Lund Press. Scholander, P. F. , Walters, V. , Hock, R.

and Irving, L. (1950). Body insulation of some Arctic and tropical mammals and birds. Biol. Bull. , 99. Sokolov, W. (1982). Mammal Skin.

University of California Press. Taylor, C. R. and Rowntree, V. J. (1973). Running on two or four legs: Which consumes more energy?

Science, 179, 186 - 187. Wheeler, P. (1984). The evolution of bipedalism and loss of functional body hair in hominids, J. Hum. Evol. , 13, (1), 91 - 98. Verhaegen, M. (1991) Human regulation of body temperature and water balance.

Pp. 182 - 192, In Red M. , Wind J. , Patrick J. and Reynolds V. (Eds). The Aquatic Ape: Fact or Fiction? London, Souvenir Press.


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Research essay sample on Adipose Tissue Body Temperature

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