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Genes and the environment influence human biological variation in visible characteristics, physiology, disease susceptibility, mental abilities, body size, and life span. Though humans vary in many traits (such as genetic predispositions and physical features), humans are among the least genetically diverse primates.
Human biology is an interdisciplinary area of academic study that examines humans through the influences and interplay of many diverse fields such as genetics, evolution, physiology, anatomy, epidemiology, anthropology, ecology, nutrition, population genetics, and sociocultural influences.
Growth and development occur after birth, and include both physical and psychological development, influenced by genetic, hormonal, environmental and other factors. Development and growth continue throughout life, through childhood , adolescence , and through adulthood to old age , and are referred to as the process of aging .
Human physical appearance is the outward phenotype or look of human beings. Image of a European female (left) and an East Asian male (right) human body seen from front (upper) and back (lower). Adult human bodies photographed whose naturally-occurring pubic, body, facial, but not head hair have been deliberately removed to show anatomy.
Examples of human phenotypic variability: people with different levels of skin colors, a normal distribution of IQ scores, the tallest recorded man in history - Robert Wadlow - with his father. Human variability , or human variation , is the range of possible values for any characteristic, physical or mental , of human beings .
Thus, different cells can have very different physical characteristics despite having the same genome. Morphogenesis, or the development of body form, is the result of spatial differences in gene expression. [82] A small fraction of the genes in an organism's genome called the developmental-genetic toolkit control the development of that organism.
Physical growth—height and weight—accelerates in the first half of puberty and is completed when an adult body has been developed. Until the maturation of their reproductive capabilities, the pre-pubertal physical differences between boys and girls are the external sex organs.
Human body shape is a complex phenomenon with sophisticated detail and function. The general shape or figure of a person is defined mainly by the molding of skeletal structures, as well as the distribution of muscles and fat. [1]