[quote]Grimnuruk wrote:
jjoseph_x wrote:
Tithonus81 wrote:
Why did we evolve weaker muscles and mutant MYH16 genes? I think you have no further to look than the what’s sitting between your two ears: the human brain.
[Begin Rant]
That’s not how evolution works. There’s no evolutionary reason why we aren’t as strong as chimps (like “well they’re smarter so we won’t make them any stronger”).
Genetically it just-so-happens that we aren’t. If any human was as strong as a chimp (and as smart as we are, for thousands of years might made right in human society), that person’s genes would be naturally selected (i.e. assume that they’re male, they beat the tar out of the rival males and shag all of the women rotten).
The thing that annoys the heck out of me when people talk about evolutions is that they act as though it’s an active process to advance a species; it isn’t. It’s a random mutation that’s naturally selected (i.e. it helps you to survive so that you can pass it on to your offspring)… it’s all about luck.
Saying that “species X evolved a feature so that they could…” is like saying “Jimmy grew another foot so that he could play basketball his senior year”… nothing Jimmy did caused him to grow, he lucked-out.
[/End Rant]
The second half of your rant is basically correct but the first half is incorrect. (As a student of anthropology, I lived and breathed this stuff for several years before health problems forced me to stop my doctoral work, so I am rather well equipped to make these statements and offer corrections, I did it for a living and I was good at it.)
Do strong men always win out over weaker men in competing for women’s attention today? No. Does the strongest male chimp always win out over the weaker to become Alpha Male and mate with more females? No. (read Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal). Not in even less culturally complex primates such as baboons does the simply strongest male father more offspring. Intelligence,particularly political or interindividual manipulative intelligence is very often the primary deciding factor. After humans evolved (through random mutation(s)) modern characteristics: intelligence and culture, greater strength alone was not as needed therefore it was very possible for it to be selected out like any other trait that is not constantly called for by the environment.
Hominins didn’t require great strength to throw the javelin into massive animals because spear thrower technology(a cultural invention)allows greater force to be generated by a much weaker human. A guy that could weave nets to catch game and fish could support more kids than the guys running down and killing large dangerous animals at close range, partially because the risk/benefit ratio was much better.
Eventually people who cultivated the naturally occurring plants in the environment had an even better risk/benefit ratio and overran the last of the complex hunter/gatherers.
Evolution is directionless in that it is only a response of selection of naturally occurring variation in response to environmental stressors.
[/quote]
But if there were a race of early humans who were 4-8 times stronger than other humans, yet just as smart, wouldn’t they have a much better chance of survival and wouldn’t they eventually… umm… for lack of a better expression “prevail” genetically?
Even if it started with one human, his/her offspring would all have a great advantage (again intelligence and everything else being equal), and eventually, I’d image that they would become the dominant sub-specices of homo sapiens.