I don't know the average lifespan, but what I have heard how highly variable life spans of populations are in rainforest locations ranging from well below that of here in north america to even higher than here for some. diet and lifestyle habits locally are responsible for variations of this in rainforests. Whole villages have the same lifespan because all residents share the same common habits, so when they are bad such as only eating starchy roots, drinking or something else, it reflects in the whole population there. I won't adopt any othat stuff. I know the key to a long healthy life is things like green vegetables, activity ect and it may be hard to convince them of that. avoidance is the most important preventitive measure I plan to use against health problems in the Amazon. Also the plants such as antifungal, bacterial, viral ect. can also be used to further strenthen prevention on any suspected exposure to health threats like applying them to disinfect after photographing animals in a wetland. I have bought an infatable boat which makes it easy to stay seperate from threats in wetlands and still take photos. lets hope a piranha or spiny animal does not pop it!
I am actually impressed that an inflatable boat from walmart for less than 70 dollars and small as a pillow when uninflated can take me and 5 amerindians onto the river to go fishing and go on excursions into the rainforest.
about the part where you said "they might not be that great at curing all their infectious problems as you believe", while that is true, the interesting thing is that many of the plants I have been researching are likely plants they don't even know about in that village. while known by many herbal healers in other parts deep in the Amazon and modern proffesionals from elsewhere they grow in Rio Napo but many may not be utilised.
I'm not the one who said there were. You asked which species he was talking about and I thought it was obviously H. sapiens. It's not clear that there were ever subspecies of our species. We all lived on one continent until sixty thousand years ago. But in any case, by the time people in the Iron Age (1000BCE until the Industrial Revolution) began talking about different "races" of humans, we already had such efficient transportation technology (wheels, draft and riding animals, large sailing ships) that substantial interbreeding had already taken place among the various human population groups. By the Industrial Era, when the term began to have negative and insulting connotations, none of the "races" were even close to pure enough to quality as subspecies--if they ever were. It's in the dictionary as applicable to non-human animals, but it's down around definition number 17C. In some languages they have one word to use with both humans and non-humans. Since the dog already is a subspecies of wolf, any further distinction would have to be at an even lower level, such as "population," which is about all "race" means in humans. But we use "breed" specifically to mean a gene pool that we created by selective breeding. If there are two populations of an animal species in natural environments with distinctly different DNA, we do not call them "breeds." If they're not different enough to qualify as subspecies, we just call them populations. AFAIK the only time "breed" has been used for humans was in the Wild West slang word "half-breed," meaning a person who had one parent of European ancestry and the other Native American--the equivalent of Spanish mestizo. I wonder if they had a similar term in Australia? "Variety" is usually used for plants and "breed" for animals. But "variety" can also mean a naturally occurring population. A cultivated variety of plant is referred to by the portmanteau "cultivar." The term has really fallen out of favor lately. I notice that all of your examples are from before the 1960s, when the "race" of humans became a hot issue. Not for the last couple of generations. "Science and Society" is a pretty broad category. This isn't the Physics subforum. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Dispénsame, que yo no lo había visto. Pero es muy difícil escribir en español, por los diacríticos! General members only have fifteen minutes to edit or delete a post. Contact the Moderator of this subforum (that would be Tiassa) if you need help with it. We have to do this or else some of the less mature members will go back and change a post after somebody criticizes it and then say, "Huh? I never said that." Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I was kind of joking about pirahna. They are no threat to a human let alone a plastic boat with air in it! they are overexagerated by all people I know. given that the rivers are sand, mud with no rocks/stones, the only threat to the boat are branches and roots, but I won't move fast so there is little problem there. I just picked up my peruvian soles curency today so i know what money is like from there. I will pay 25 dollars worth for a daily fastboat service available taking me 100 miles to the village far in the jungle as soon as I get off the flight. public transport especially by waterway is cheaper there than most other places on earth. I don't think any 100 mile boat trip will be 25 dollars one way in the US.
That is interesting. I was amazed when I found out how few generations it took for man to change from black to white in the migration north. The change seemed fast in terms of evolution.
The extremely light-skinned Latvians and the extremely dark-skinned southern Indic people both started out in the Indo-European homeland, the Pontic Steppe. They are only separated by two or three thousand years of migration in opposite directions--less than 200 generations. Melanin is a survival advantage close to the equator because it blocks a large percentage of solar radiation, preventing sunburn and reducing the chance of skin cancer. But it is a disadvantage farther from the equator because by blocking the scarce sunlight (a lower solar angle plus they wear more sun-blocking clothes up there) it reduces the body's ability to synthesize Vitamin A, which is essential to health. Survival of the fittest works rather efficiently with a trait that can actually cause people to die before they reach puberty so they never reproduce. Of course we've succeeded in developing remarkably different-looking breeds of dogs in fewer than 200 generations (which for them is only about 200 years), but that's because we don't wait for nature to make the decisions about who gets to be in the gene pool.
(it is vitamin D by the way. vitamin A is the one in carrots like beta corotene) I think if it were not for the issue of vitamin D humans would all still be black. I found that out when researching about inuits that had a diet of seafood rich in vitamin d and therefore never changed lighter. same thing would have happened with the blacks moving from africa to everywhere else if they had eaten food rich in vitamin d.
*sigh* No, it isn’t. Try reading some of the many review articles on this issue. Try this one for a start. Genetic variation, classification and 'race' Lynn B Jorde & Stephen P Wooding Nature Genetics 36, S28 - S33 (2004) Nope. From the review above: Analysis of many loci now yields reasonably accurate estimates of genetic similarity among individuals, rather than populations. Clustering of individuals is correlated with geographic origin or ancestry. These clusters are also correlated with some traditional concepts of race, but the correlations are imperfect because genetic variation tends to be distributed in a continuous, overlapping fashion among populations. As it happens, I am also a biologist. And, germane to this conversation, I have a genetics background. And I would be careful about speaking on behalf of all biologists, if I were you. In a number of years of developmental biology research involving flies (D.melanogaster), worms (C.elegans) and zebrafish (D.rerio) I have rarely if ever heard scientists in the field use the term ‘race’. I made no value judgements whatsoever. I never said that I didn’t “like” the concept of race. Hmmm, are you embarrassed by your misplaced arrogance yet? You will be at some point.
Assuming that your own ignorance of a useful term in biology is a standard held by all practioners is the ultimate in arrogance, HR. You are simply wrong in much of what you say, and you attempt to impress the people in a public forum with your completely unsupported assertions. Morphological differences between populations have a genetic basis. That has nothing to do with whether genetic differences have a continuous or discrete distribution. You've confused the mechanism with the effect - and that is one of the propblems that those biologists who thing everything can be explained by genetics make. It is a reductionist argument that sucks most of what is really interesting about organisms right out of biology. The move over the last 30 years or so towards molecular biology at the expense of organismal biology is an unfortunate trend. In addition, you try to slide in quotations about the distribution of clusters of genetic diferences as though there was just one "scale" of differences between the human races - something that no competent biologist has ever claimed. Nice attempt at a strawman argument, but it fails on the merits. You may not have heard the concept "race" used by biologists, but that reflects your own limited exposure to the breadth of the field. And it is apparent that you are far too arrogant to ever be embarassed by your own ignorance. Another self-appointed science King of a middling internet science forum. Sad, that. Rich
