There’s a part of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves where “five thousand years later” we learn that there’s a separate group of sea-dwelling “rootstock” human survivors who are really good at holding their breath because they’d been hanging out in… I dunno, maybe the Marianas Trench or something while the earth was ceaselessly bombarded by meteorites for a millennium or so. Sonar Taxlaw comments that it only took so many generations to get hyperspecialized subspecies: “If we could create Chihuahuas from wolfhounds in 2000 years, think what could be done with humans in 5000!”
So yeah, evolution, I thought. Real life and selective pressures and all that. A fascinating story of the Bajau, and I wondered if Mr. Stephenson had perhaps heard of them.
This reminds me of colostomy or ileostomy procedures wherein the surgeon can place a pouch made of the patient’s own tissue into the body’s cavity and, for lack of a better term, just put a check-valve outside the skin to empty the pouch contents.
Still, anything external comes at a cost. Low- to no-tech is still ideal if you can afford to wait a coupla zillion generations to get Nature to sort it out elegantly.
The coupling for that external bio-compatible tank would be… an interesting piece of engineering, for sure.
ETA: pushed the button thingy too soon, with a stray click
Since diving is the main occupation for the Bajau people, they
deliberately rupture their eardrums at an early age. Unsurprisingly,
most older Bajau are hard of hearing.
I disagree with the headline of this article. I can stay submerged under water as long as anyone, just weigh me down with concrete blocks and toss me in. I will be dead, but continue to be submerged, as long as the rope holds, or until the fish get through my ankle.
Doesn’t being a race imply not being able to interbreed with others? Also doesn’t it usually come with a different number of chromosomes? Is anybody saying these guys meet those criteria? I don’t think the definition of race is asclean as you are suggesting.
No thats a species. Australian Aborigines are a race. They also have genetic adaptations which help them live in their native environment. Black skin would be an example. Helps cope with strong sunlight.
I’d love to see a scientific citation for that, because i have always thought that “race” was a bullshit victorian construct. If you can point to something from the biological literature that uses the term, I’d love to learn more.
“Race” and “subspecies” can be used interchangeably in biology, we just don’t use them as such in sociology because it sounds much more divisive. Both refer to genetically distinct populations that are capable of interbreeding, in which case the offspring retains fertility and phenotypic characters of both parent populations.
OK - thanks for that - I have learned something new today.
Would you agree, though, that I’m justified in answering “human” on any form where I am asked for my race - because of the absurd BS that goes along with it?
It’s astonishing to me that I am asked for this information at least weekly in the US, while in years of living in the UK, Italy, New Zealand, Canada and Australia I don’t believe I was ever asked this question.
If you prefer not to be associated with the concept, I have no objection to that. I just try to imagine it as an alien biologist perspective, if they came to earth and observed humans as a naturalist.
Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, that is, a symbolic identity created to establish some cultural meaning. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is not an inherent physical or biological quality.
With regard to “subspecies,” the only biologically-accepted living human subspecies, when it’s accepted at all, is Homo sapiens sapiens, which we are all members of.
In terms of whether “isolated” groups of humans with genetic differences are considered biological “races” or “subspecies”, like they can be for subspecies of other animals,
Studies of human genetic variation show that human populations are not geographically isolated, and their genetic differences are far smaller than those among comparable subspecies. […] “Human populations do not exhibit the levels of geographic isolation or genetic divergence to fit the subspecies model of race.”
(from first link, and quote from Biological Anthropology, Population Genetics, and Race)
The article you linked to, links to another article that has some very nice tips on how not to die in a very specific manner:
So I learned the breathing-reflex is more about the amount of co2 in your blood, then it is about the oxygen.
Which leads me to my question: how does the Bajau’s enlarged spleen help them cope with the higher amounts of co2 in their blood? Surely that will still be a issue for them? Any experts here want to weigh in on that?
