Upon successful completion of this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Contrast the diet and health of Depression-era Newfoundlanders with that of twenty-first-century Newfoundlanders to show how culture shaped biology and vice versa.
2. Distinguish biological from cultural adaptation and describe how the two interacted to produce our species’ distinctive strategy of adaptation.
3. Suggest why, even after many years of adjustment, cultures rarely arrive at ideal adaptations, using the Newfoundland diet as an example.
4. Explain how the interactions of biology, culture, and environment are but a specific case of the generalized model for cultural change introduced in Chapter 5.
5. Apply the biology-culture-environment system to an event or situation in your own life.
6. Use the concept of a socio-natural system to describe your own environment or that of an ethnography you are reading.
7. Distinguish the three processes of biological change: evolution, developmental adaptation, and acclimatization.