eli5 How does such a small difference in human body temperature make such drastic differences? Ex:98° compared to 102°
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the biggest benefit from being warm-blooded is controlling your body temperature. A lizard might have its body temp go between 50⁰ and 100⁰ from day to night. Everything in every cell runs differently at different temperatures. Certain chemical reactions don’t happen if it’s too cold, or certain molecules that work well in the cold fall apart when they’re too hot. Bacteria in the gut need to be able to survive big swings in temperature, and can’t be specialized.
“Warm-blooded” animals aren’t so much about being warm as being the exact same temperature, all the time. This means everything is tuned to run really well, at the **exact** temperature it’s tuned for. The benefit is that everything in our bodies can work faster, more efficiently than a lizard’a, but the cost is that our bodies get thrown out of whack *fast* if that temperature changes even a relatively small amount.
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