And not 98.5 or 99.2?
Yes I know there is individual and and situational variation.
98.6 F is 37 C.
Actually, we aren’t any more, according to this:
Fevers and Normal Body Temperature: 98.6°F Is No Longer The Rule (webmd.com)
"The 98.6 F standard dates to the mid-1800s. German doctor Carl Wunderlich measured the armpit temperatures of about 25,000 people and came up with an average of 98.6 F.
Newer research suggests that the number has since gone down. In a recent review, scientists looked at temperature records from three periods between 1860 and 2017. The average oral temperature slowly fell by about 1 degree to 97.5 F. A person’s age, gender, or weight didn’t make a difference, nor did the time of day."
Are you asking how it was figured out, or what advantage there is to that particular temperature?
Interesting. Call it “N°” then. My question still stands.
How did it come to be; not how did it come to be measured
ISTM that the temperature measurement devices and scales came first. Then it was used by Dr. Wunderlich, as described above, to determine an average body temperature for humans. Just like one might measure the temperature of a sofa, or pair of boots, using the existing devices and scales.
No, the people with actual temperatures came first, long before anyone measured it. I think the OP is asking about the body’s thermal regulation systems.
Sorry I’m not talking about how it’s measured. I’m asking why it’s a universal biological constant. (Acknowledging again that there are exceptions and variations. I mean as a general rule it baseline.)
My question is about adaptation, not quantification.
Homeostasis
From Wikipedia:
In biology, homeostasis is the state of steady internal, physical, and chemical conditions maintained by living systems. This is the condition of optimal functioning for the organism and includes many variables, such as body temperature and fluid balance, being kept within certain pre-set limits.
It’s not. Other animals have other temperatures, and there’s lots of variation among humans as well, with some people mostly below the average and some mostly above. Are you asking why humans are warm-blooded?
What he came up with was 37 C, rounded to the nearest whole number. As kenobi_65 pointed out, 37 C is equivalent to 98.6 F, but that extra decimal place makes the measurement look more precise than it actually is.
It’s 98.6 because her lovin’ is the medicine that saved me.
I mentioned those exact exceptions and variations in the post you pulled that quote from.
And clearly I mean among humans, not other animals.
And no it’s not just about why we are warm-blooded, full stop.
To the extent that 98.6° is recognized as the average human temperature, taking as read all the exceptions and variations, why did we evolve that temperature range let’s call it, and not 30° cooler or warmer. Was that the approximate temperature of the primordial sea when we left it? Or the general weather conditions when mammals appeared on earth? Or since other mammals have different average temperatures, the air temp when Homo sapiens first appeared?
This is not a question about measuring techniques, or general warmbloodedness, but about how our own temp settled to within that range and is not wildly variable outside of that.
Thanks!
Well, other mammals really don’t have very different average temperatures, since the range is generally given as 97 - 103 F. That’s an extremely narrow band given the range of sizes, weights, and habitats that mammals exhibit.
The likely conclusion therefore is that mammals got that temperature because it worked and later species, including humans, kept the same model.
That puts the question back 200 million years but the answer is going to be the same. There is a good balance point between energy intake and output function at around 100F.
Basically body temperature is an equilibrium between energy required to maintain common frames/organs, environmental temperature profiles the organism evolves to inhabit and the relative surface area available to shed internal heat.
There’s rarely an opportunity for a Keith reference, much less the reference itself.
If for no other reason than that … a hat tip to you, Sir.
For any who were out of the loop … I take this digression a single (albeit valuable) step further afield:
Ah. That’s well outside of my limited biological expertise, so I’ll step out. For what it’s worth, even birds are within a few degrees of mammals (depending on what they’re doing at the time) according to this, so maybe it has to do with the efficiency that Exapno_Mapcase mentions.
Ah of course: with external variables such as ambient temperature and humidity and pressure etc., balanced with the heat created by our metabolism, and the limits of our native temperature regulators. Thanks everyone
Another possible reason for “why that range of temperatures for humans (and other mammals)” is at the end of the Wikipedia entry on “warm-blooded,” with several cites: