Body Heat by Mark Blumberg, Harvard University Press, 拢14.95/$22, ISBN 067400762X
FUNERAL directors could be the unexpected beneficiaries of global warming. If average temperatures increase by just 1 掳C, there will be an estimated 24,000 more murders each year in the US as Americans become hotter under the collar.
But temperature change is a life-and-death issue for every inhabitant of a small planet teetering on a knife edge between the scorching heat of the inner Solar System and the frigid depths of space. The need to maintain body temperature within a narrow range is the biggest single influence on physiology and behaviour, as Mark Blumberg explains in this little gem of a book, Body Heat.
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A professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, Blumberg describes the exquisite mechanisms developed by different species to generate, conserve or lose body heat. And this book is not just about organisms that live in extreme climates. Many temperate species also face the challenge of keeping specific organs at a different temperature from the rest of the body. Not surprisingly, the most intriguing insights come when the machinery breaks down. Failures in thermoregulation underlie a startling range of conditions: sudden infant death syndrome, the toxic effects of ecstasy abuse and even anorexia nervosa.
No organism is ever safe from the effects of temperature swings, even in the most protected environment. Witness the devastating developmental abnormalities that occur when mammalian embryos are briefly exposed to raised temperature in the uterus. It鈥檚 a stark reminder that genes alone do not determine our destiny.