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In Body Heat : Temperature And Life On Earth, biophysicist Mark Blumberg's exploration of temperature in the world considers the many ways temperature rules the lives of animals, from how penguins survive Antarctic winters to why people survive drowning accidents in winter, but not in summer. Packed with important scientific insights and a lively style which lends to leisure browsing, Body Heat is a remarkable survey and a highly recommended selection for Environmental Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.
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BODY HEAT
BODY HEAT TEMPERATURE AND LIFE ON EARTH
Mark S. Blumberg
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Mark S. Blumberg All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA
Blumberg, Mark Samuel, 1961– Body heat : temperature and life on earth / Mark S. Blumberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–674–00762–X (alk. paper) 1. Body temperature–Regulation. 2. Animal heat. I. Title. QP135 .B584 2002 571.7'6—dc21 2001051648 Excerpt from Light My Fire, words and music by The Doors, copyright © 1967 Doors Music Co. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission. BOOK DESIGN BY JILL BREITBARTH
To Goldene and Herschel, for making it possible To Jo, for making it worth it And to Joseph K., Aja, and Millie, for just being you
CONTENTS
Introduction 1 1
Temperature: A User’s Guide 13 2
3
Behave Yourself 49
Then Bake at 98.6°F for 400,000 Minutes 71 4
Everything in Its Place 87 Cold New World 109
5 6
Fever All through the Night 133 7
The Heat of Passion 151 8
9
Livin’ off the Fat 171
The Light Goes Out 197 Epilogue 213
Bibliography 219
Credits 231
Acknowledgments 233
Index 235
The cold has the philosophical value of reminding men that the universe does not love us. Cold as absolute as the black tomb rules space; sunshine is a local condition, and the moon hangs in the sky to illustrate that matter is usually inanimate. —JOHN
UPDIKE
Come on baby, light my fire. —THE
DOORS
INTRODUCTION
part of our daily lives, our rituals, and our language. Sitting at our kitchen counter on a winter morning, preparing to leave our warm house for the bitter cold and freezing rain outside, we rarely stop to consider how critically our evolution depended, and how critically our existence still depends, on the availability of a planet that is just the right distance from the Sun to support life. Instead, we gripe and grumble, refusing to acknowledge the obvious: Pluto is cold; Chicago in January is merely inconvenient. Like a campfire on a winter night, the Sun is the primary source of warmth in our isolated region of the universe. As with a campfire, the heat emanating from the Sun decreases E M P E R AT U R E I S A N I N T E G R A L
T
1
with distance, resulting in a continuous gradient of temperatures, moving outward like diminishing ripples on a pond, washing over the planets of our solar system. Thus Mercury, with an average distance from the Sun of 36 million miles, has a maximum surface temperature of approximately 400°C (752°F); while Pluto, with an average distance from the Sun of 3.7 billion miles, has a maximum surface temperature of approximately –225°C (–373°F). If planets were porridge, Goldilocks would have eaten neither. Earth, however, is just right. Nestled between Venus and Mars some 90 million miles from the Sun, Earth presents a narrow thermal window of organic opportunity, a small opening between deep freeze and spontaneous combustion