Skin: A Natural History | 
 enlarge | Author: Nina G. Jablonski
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 44903
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 0520256247
Dewey Decimal Number: 301
EAN: 9780520256248
ASIN: 0520256247
Publication Date: May 21, 2008
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Product Description
We expose it, cover it, paint it, tattoo it, scar it, and pierce it. Our intimate connection with the world, skin protects us while advertising our health, our identity, and our individuality. This dazzling synthetic overview, written with a poetic touch and taking many intriguing side excursions, is a complete guidebook to the pliable covering that makes us who we are. Skin: A Natural History celebrates the evolution of three unique attributes of human skin: its naked sweatiness, its distinctive sepia rainbow of colors, and its remarkable range of decorations. Jablonski begins with a look at skin's structure and functions and then tours its three-hundred-million-year evolution, delving into such topics as the importance of touch and how the skin reflects and affects emotions. She examines the modern human obsession with age-related changes in skin, especially wrinkles. She then turns to skin as a canvas for self-expression, exploring our use of cosmetics, body paint, tattooing, and scarification. Skin: A Natural History places the rich cultural canvas of skin within its broader biological context for the first time, and the result is a tremendously engaging look at ourselves.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Why we need to hug and sweat, how silly to think skin color matters. March 10, 2008
This review just touches the surface, to flesh this book out, read it.
Skin is amazing - it's strong, resilient, sensitive. Skin protects us from microbes and chemicals, shields us from heat, water, abrasion, and punctures. As Jablonski puts it "this is a list of qualities that make the epidermis sound more like a revolutionary new type of carpeting than a natural material".
We have as many hairs on our bodies as apes, but ours are much thinner, practically invisible in most places. We can't communicate emotion by standing our hair on end like angry chimps or cats (piloerection), so we've evolved other ways to show anger, such as pursed lips.
I've always liked Morgan's aquatic ape theory, but I've had to give it up after reading so much criticism. Jablonski points out that we couldn't have lived on the water's edge in our ancestral environment because we'd have been killed by crocodiles and other predators lurking at waters edge. Since we're quite vulnerable to water parasites and show no sign of an evolved immune system to fight them, it isn't likely we spent much time in the water. Nor is skin is an advantage, due to thermoregulation issues. Walrus and hippo's are so huge that heat loss is not a problem. Otters and other water mammals have thick fur they don't get cold in the water or back on land.
Sweat
Everyone zeros in our big brains to define humanity, but what about our sweat? Sweat has played a huge role in how we evolved.
Our nakedness is a great advantage in hot weather. If we had fur, we could only produce 10 to 20% of the sweat we're capable of to cool us down. Fur is great in the heat until it gets wet, and then it's hard to dissipate and animals can die if they stay out in the sun then. Though of course, only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun". Furry creatures are safely in their dens or in the shade during the worst heat of the day. Which leaves a niche open for us to be out and about, hunting.
We're so good at sweating to cool down, we can sweat 12 quarts of water a day, or even up to 3.5 quarts in an hour.
Sweat keeps our enormous brains cool. If you get a temperature of 103 F, you enter delirium territory, where your thinking, reasoning, and communication skills start to go haywire. At 106 F you die.
We also keep our brain cool by walking, less surface area is exposed to the sun, and our head hair protects us from UV radiation, especially frizzy hair, where the surface can be quite hot, but lower down, the air is cooler.
Once the outdoor temperature goes over 98 F and the humidity is higher than 90%, sweat is 90% of our ability to cool down. You must keep drinking water at this point to stay alive. If you exercise, your sweat glands better be in top form. It's good to be tall and lean with thick limbs to provide more surface area for sweating.
Skin color
Sunburn interferes with sweat, so that's a good reason to have dark skin if you live where there's a lot of sun. In fact, we have a wider range of skin colors than any other species, and you can predict roughly what skin color a native population will have by how far they are from the equator. What seems to determine the optimum skin tone is vitamin D - a greater selective force than skin cancer, because women need to produce twice as much calcium when they're pregnant, which you need vitamin D to pull off.
Although dark skin gives you an SPF of 10-15 (not as much as I'd expected), dark skinned people need to spend about 5 times more than a light-skinned person to get enough vitamin D (which is why lighter skin evolved). The Innuit are not as light-skinned as you'd expect, because they get a lot of vitamin D from their diet, and their darker skin protects against UVA.
People who live in 23-40 degrees of latitude have excellent tanning ability to cope with the wide UV fluctuations. These tans offer a protective level of SPF 2.5 (very little). Tanning does not protect against UV damage and leads to premature aging of skin, visible wrinkles, and uneven pigmentation.
People with freckles are at much greater risk of developing skin cancer and need to use sunscreen or cover up outside.
Touch
Being touched is incredibly important. The young grow better if touched. Touch leads to friendship and ultimately, perhaps, sex. In orphanages where infants weren't touched, they often died, or suffered chronic disability from the stress caused by a lack of caresses.
In cultures all over the world, babies are massaged in oil, vigorously stroked, then swaddled. Mothers swear babies are calmer, sleep and grow better, and this seems born out by premature infants who do better if cuddled and held. Mothers with postpartum depression are less depressed if they massage their babies. A few hospitals are experimenting with massage in normal infants. Children with autism given deep pressure massage seem to be calmer and have better relationships.
Grooming is the social glue that holds primates together - it resolves conflicts, helps maintain alliances, and reduces stress. High ranking common baboon infants get more grooming and mature faster than lower-ranking babies.
Touch deprivation harms immune systems as was shown in macaque experiments.
We humans groom too with reassuring touches and hugs, but it's not nearly enough, and so we go off to get massages and spa treatments.
How much people touch each other varies considerably from culture to culture. High touch cultures hold and massage infants and shun any kind of device that isolates babies from people, like cradles and strollers. Non-touching cultures only hug and touch babies a small part of the day, which only grows worse as children get older.
Maybe we could get people off andi-depressants and other drugs if we hugged each other more. Jablonski points out that in non-touch cultures, like America, institutions and workplaces often have strict rules against touching. She concludes that no wonder there's so much depression, anxiety and other social pathologies.
Children who are routinely punished physically rather than nurtured, are likely to be especially disturbed, addicted to drugs, and commit physical violence themselves.
Nursing home elderly who were massaged and hugged "acted younger" and seemed more alert than those who didn't receive this contact.
Some final random facts:
Fingerprints aid in gripping.
Body lice descended from head lice about 40,000 years ago. They're more deadly since they can carry typhus.
Melanoma: detect by one or more of these qualities: non-symmetric, irregular border, mixture of colors, larger than a pencil eraser.
Tattoos aren't as visible on dark skin, so in these cultures, branding and scars are more common.
Botox: over time, this will leave your face deadpan. Great for poker, but you won't be having animated conversations, you've lost your power to "emote".
I wish Jablonski had spent more time on how how much skin protects you from chemicals. Although she mentions lead is bad, there are thousands of other chemicals found in many products we all buy. If you google "cosmetic safety database", you'll see that some hair color, skin cleansers, skin lotions, lipstick, etc., products are highly hazardous.
 stimulating, insightful book December 4, 2007
Jablonski's book is well written, well informed, and a deeply insightful discussion of one of our least appreciated, but most important organs. She deftly, gently guides the reader through some basic scientific principles governing the functioning of the skin, and provides compelling explanations of such topics as the role of pigmentation in evolution. She also highlights the role of skin in human culture through such practices as tattooing and scarification. I have some research interests in the topic of the book, and it repays careful study. At the same time, though, Jablonski is such a fine writer, and her explanations are so clear, that I'd have no worries about giving the book as a gift to non-academic friends who are just curious about this amazing organ. (Warning: After reading this book, you'll probably never again want to sit out in the sun tanning yourself, at least without slathering on the sunscreen first!)
Excellent (though subjective) review of the subject November 20, 2007
I work a lot with skin and though this book might be a good review of the subject without too much "crazy biology".
This book does exactly that. The author gives a good review while concentrating on her personal experiences and interests.
This was a quick and easy read and left me a little more educated on the subject than I was before this book (although I've studies human physiology in detail before).
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject, no matter their technical skill level.
Worthwhile read November 17, 2007
This book has the rare combination of two positive traits: being genuinely scholarly and being easily approachable. We read this book for my Anthropology 101 class for these reasons (and also because it was written by a BMC alum). Jablonski's research is sound and her credentials are superb; however, the book is never above its reader's head. While topics such as the function of melanocytes and the effects of UV radiation on folates and calcium absorption may sound impossibly abstract, they are explained expertly and easily in this work. In addition to the biology of skin, this "natural history" also examines skin's function, skin diseases, decorations of the skin, and the future of medicine for skin. Throughout, the book is fascinating and well-written. It was one assigned reading that I couldn't put down!
An excellent overview May 12, 2007
Drawing from many fields, this work is an excellent overview of its subject. I would recommend it both for the casual reader and as a good supplemental text for an upper division class in anthropology or biology.
Nina Jablonski does a great job of presenting complex material in a very readable format.
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