What's Up With Chimps?

Off Topic
61

[quote]wufwugy wrote:
another point others have made is that genetic alterations are the same as natural selection. this is wrong. if this were the case then organisms would have reached a point and plateaued.[/quote]

That wasn’t the point I was trying to make. Indeed, my point (1) that there is genetic variation in all species is probably accounted for by the aforementioned genetic alterations or mutations.

Natural selection ia the process that allows those favorable mutations to be passed on to subsequent generations.

62

[quote]Panther1015 wrote:
I take it our integumentary system is what allowed humans to travel large distances so well? We regulate body temperature better than any other land mammals (or animals for that matter) I know of.[/quote]

I think their argument is that traits previously attributed to selection for “walking upright” may be due more to selection for distance running, so the emphasis was on long legs, big glutes, etc, but they did mention skull structure and heat dissipation. I wonder if selection for heat regulation while running could be one reason that we are not covered in hair/fur.

63

Is it selection for distance running or distance walking? I say walking since long distanc running doesn’t seem to be so good for us.

[quote]larryb wrote:
Panther1015 wrote:
I take it our integumentary system is what allowed humans to travel large distances so well? We regulate body temperature better than any other land mammals (or animals for that matter) I know of.

I think their argument is that traits previously attributed to selection for “walking upright” may be due more to selection for distance running, so the emphasis was on long legs, big glutes, etc, but they did mention skull structure and heat dissipation. I wonder if selection for heat regulation while running could be one reason that we are not covered in hair/fur.[/quote]

64

[quote]NateN wrote:
Is it selection for distance running or distance walking? I say walking since long distanc running doesn’t seem to be so good for us.[/quote]

So they mean, for some features of the human form, running may have had more influence than walking.

65

[quote]yustas wrote:
wufwugy wrote:
uh what? what, then, is responsible for evolution?

I don’t think it is known for a fact. There’re a number of different theories.
I think the guy who got a Nobel Prize for DNA discovery wrote a book about Perspermia. So, that is one take on it.
There are other people that argue abut irreversible complexity and implications of intelligent design.

-Yustas

[/quote]

Yes, but their theories belong in threads about religion, not science.

66

[quote]yustas wrote:
Kablooey wrote:

It’s just one of those things where “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

And, sometimes it works only for a while, though that while may be millions or even hundreds of millions of years. That species die out at all helps show how limited nature’s potential is to have a goal-oriented evolution.

But for species to even exist too many things had to come together just about perfectly. Things that seem to be outside of evolution, like the distance from our planet to the Sun, the air, temperature, atmosphere, gravity, radiation, etc too many to name here.
Did the law of gravity also followed evolution?

-Yustas
[/quote]

Evolution takes place within the parameters it takes place. There’s nothing complicated about that.

But I see you are into intelligent design, which is religion disguised as science, and of little interest in a discussion about science – except to people who would prefer not to talk about science in the first place.

No offense, but this can only lead nowhere, which is right where trying to address religion as if it were science started. It’s a closed system, and the opposite of science, which is empirical and tries to work toward finding things out, without knowing where it is going. The opposite of religious theories of science, which have a goal to get to and do everything possible to exclude science when necessary to arrive at a preconceived goal which cannot ever be deviated from or reexamined in any way.

67

[quote]jsbrook wrote:
yustas wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
They just needed to eat too many calories to maintain basic functioning for the circumstances they would face.

Interesting. How does it compare with elephants for example or gorillas? They are much larger in size yet they seem to be doing fine on their diet. Not to mention that they are vegetarians. It seems they would need huge amount of calories to maintain their body weight.
I guess their DNA is different in that respect, but it would be very interesting to know how are they maintaining their size on low calorie vegetarian diet.

-Yustas

Not sure why other species and genuses have been able to grow to large sizes. That’s not something I learned. But I suspect the very fact that they thrive as vegetarians has a lot to do with it. Don’t elephants eat a ton of grass? I’m not even sure how low-calorie such a diet is. Cows seem to do well on it. But human beings cannot live on a diet of grass. Even if living on minimal animal product, we needed fruits and veggies to the best of my knowledge. Things much more scarce than grass which required more energy to find.

Also, I suspect that our brains have a lot to do with it. It takes a lot of energy to keep our brains going. Animals with less developed brains don’t have this. I also learned that eating meat released a constraint on brain development. It allowed less energy to be devoted to the gut than when we were eating a more vegetarian-based diet and this allowed greater brain development. Most anthropologists don’t believe it was one of the DRIVERS of brain development, but it did serve to release a constraint.

[/quote]

I think cow stomachs have a lot to do with how they can survive on food like grass. They actually spend almost their entire waking time eating and barfing into their mouths the same stuff to be eaten yet again. They don’t need particularly rich food sources, but do need to spend a lot of time eating and re-eating to make up for it. That four-stomach business is time and labor intensive. Humans don’t need to spend much time eating their food at all, and certainly don’t need to eat it twice, but we need much richer food in consequence.

Kind of like sloths and koalas. They live on extremely low nutrition leaves, so they spend their time either barely moving and seemingly half-asleep on the one hand and stoned out of their minds on the other. If they tried to live a life in a higher gear, it would devastate them; their foods can’t support even what we’d consider a somewhat normal expenditure of energy by animals.

68

[quote]jsbrook wrote:
yustas wrote:
Kablooey wrote:

It’s just one of those things where “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

And, sometimes it works only for a while, though that while may be millions or even hundreds of millions of years. That species die out at all helps show how limited nature’s potential is to have a goal-oriented evolution.

But for species to even exist too many things had to come together just about perfectly. Things that seem to be outside of evolution, like the distance from our planet to the Sun, the air, temperature, atmosphere, gravity, radiation, etc too many to name here.
Did the law of gravity also followed evolution?

-Yustas

Sure, there are lots of things that came together long before life as we know it existed on this planet. There are some arguments for intelligent design with a lot of these things. But the evolution of species itself occurs because of random mutations as far as we can tell. But even here, it’s not totally clear-cut. Because random mutations lead to changes, and if those changes are adaptive and result in greater reproductive success they’ll be passed on causing a larger evolution over time. Species rise up and die out seemingly at random when they are no longer suitably adapted to the environment. BUT, over the eons the trend does seem to be towards greater complexity.

So, I personally don’t think it’s cut and dry whether we’re ultimately evolving towards something. Not we as in humans. Life itself. Maybe our speciies is just an intermediate stage.[/quote]

Hard to say whether anything is in any particular stage. That seems to be a matter of perspective coming from being locked in time. Precursors of horses did very well for millions of years, and were then a seeming successful endpoint in evolution. Later, they died out and became seen as a merely an ancestor and in a way a kind of dead end.

Everything that doesn’t die out is in an intermediate stage, because we don’t know the end of the story yet. That doesn’t necessarily mean any sort of goal or progress is going on that we’re in any particular stage of, though. Two types of parrots may come from a common ancestor, and both develop into equally viable species. Or die out at varied times. Their genetic ancestor may be alive at the same time they are, die off, or outlive them.

It gets confusing when we try to turn nature into a storyline, with a beginning, middle, and end, and maybe a moral or theme. It seems to take a more satisfying shape and coherence when we do so, but, like the scale of the cosmos, nature works in a vastly greater scale than we’re used to thinking of and in ways that seem, and are, inhuman. Randomness seem to have a certain, and to some intolerable, indifference to the point of cruelty to it. Most of us find it hard to deal with the world without trying to putting a human face to its every facet, no matter how inappropriate.

69

[quote]Kablooey wrote:
Evolution takes place within the parameters it takes place. There’s nothing complicated about that.

But I see you are into intelligent design, which is religion disguised as science, and of little interest in a discussion about science – except to people who would prefer not to talk about science in the first place.

No offense, but this can only lead nowhere, which is right where trying to address religion as if it were science started. It’s a closed system, and the opposite of science, which is empirical and tries to work toward finding things out, without knowing where it is going. The opposite of religious theories of science, which have a goal to get to and do everything possible to exclude science when necessary to arrive at a preconceived goal which cannot ever be deviated from or reexamined in any way.[/quote]

Yustas, I have to agree with Kablooey.

The probelm with intelligent design (just a fancy brand name for Creationism) is that it confuses cause and effect. Some people look around at the World and think “isn’t it great that we’re exactly at this distance from the Sun, that we have nights so we can sleep, that we have all these animals and plants around us to feed us? All this must have been put here especially for us!” No, no no! It’s completely the opposite! The reason we are thriving in this environment is because, through natural selection, we evolved into a species that is better adapted to it.

Take the human eye, for example. It is most sensitive in the yellow wavelengths of light. Isn’t this handy, considering the light from our Sun is predominantly yellow? No, it’s not handy, it’s efficient, and it’s evolved. Ancestors (and I’m talking about amphibians and small mammals here) that had eyes that were more sensitive to the prevailing light shining down would be able to see better, and would be more efficient at getting food and staying out of the way of predators. They would live longer, healthier lives that those with less efficient eyes, and would have more offspring. Eventually, after many generations, all members of the species would have the same type of eyes.

Please, don’t confuse cause and effect.

70

The T-Rex was among the last of the dinosaurs. It had much shorter front arms and a much bigger head the its predecessors.

The head and jaw grew larger and larger, and the arms became less important and actually a hinderence probably for reasons of balance.

Similarly, the cave guys with the big brains tricked all of the women into sleeping with them? :slight_smile:

[quote]sharetrader wrote:
Two points: one, our brains use up about 20% of our energy needs. Two, when we came down from the trees and starting walking about on the plains, energy efficiency in getting from A to B became important. Upper body strength, in particular, became unimportant.[/quote]

71

[quote]John K wrote:
The T-Rex was among the last of the dinosaurs. It had much shorter front arms and a much bigger head the its predecessors.

Similarly, the cave guys with the big brains tricked all of the women into sleeping with them? :slight_smile:
[/quote]

Said Archie Bunker talking to meathead…

(Pretty funny though)

72

I saw this link and thought of this thread. Sorry to the Bush supporters.

73

[quote]yustas wrote:
Miserere wrote:
[i]A gene mutation is a permanent change in the DNA sequence that makes up a gene.

DNA has a Double-helix structure. The second helix is used for a back-up specifically in case of DNA damage (or mutation) DNA in most cases can repair itself by using this second copy. How does DNA “know” to use that second copy and why it is there in the first place is not fully understood. So called “junk” genes and their function is not understood either.

-Yustas[/quote]

This is completely not true. When DNA splits, it is to form a new cell, one half of the DNA stays in the origional cell, the other half takes half of the cell structure and makes a new cell, both cells then grow back to their predetermined size.

where mutation can occur is when unzipping, one side of the dna strand might get a whole “rung” instead oif the half it’s supposed to get, thats ok for the one that gets the whole rung, but the other one now has an empty space to fill, and being that there are only 2 choices on what goes there, you have a 50% chance of mutation.

V

74

[quote]Panther1015 wrote:
…

Another note on the brilliant adaptability of the human body. I remember watching a special on the Discovery channel (ok, you can stop laughing now) about the daughter of missionaries that grew up playing with monkeys in her backyard. As a result of climbing trees most of her life and adapting to the movements of her tree-climbing monkey friends, she possesses world class coordination, agility and joint strength - particularly in her fingers (she can do strict pullups for reps with just her middle fingers). I think she’s only 16 or 17 now and is considered one of the best rock climbers in the world. I was blown away by her athleticism and strength. Lb. for lb, It was far beyond many of the most elite athletes out there.

[/quote]

I saw that too. She blew everyone away during the rock climbing contest. It wasn’t close. It was very cool.

75

I’m happy to hear stuff like this. It shows that the strength gap is at least SOMEWHAT due to potential not being realized.

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Panther1015 wrote:
…

Another note on the brilliant adaptability of the human body. I remember watching a special on the Discovery channel (ok, you can stop laughing now) about the daughter of missionaries that grew up playing with monkeys in her backyard. As a result of climbing trees most of her life and adapting to the movements of her tree-climbing monkey friends, she possesses world class coordination, agility and joint strength - particularly in her fingers (she can do strict pullups for reps with just her middle fingers). I think she’s only 16 or 17 now and is considered one of the best rock climbers in the world. I was blown away by her athleticism and strength. Lb. for lb, It was far beyond many of the most elite athletes out there.

I saw that too. She blew everyone away during the rock climbing contest. It wasn’t close. It was very cool.[/quote]

76

[quote]Kablooey wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
yustas wrote:
Kablooey wrote:

It’s just one of those things where “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

And, sometimes it works only for a while, though that while may be millions or even hundreds of millions of years. That species die out at all helps show how limited nature’s potential is to have a goal-oriented evolution.

But for species to even exist too many things had to come together just about perfectly. Things that seem to be outside of evolution, like the distance from our planet to the Sun, the air, temperature, atmosphere, gravity, radiation, etc too many to name here.
Did the law of gravity also followed evolution?

-Yustas

Sure, there are lots of things that came together long before life as we know it existed on this planet. There are some arguments for intelligent design with a lot of these things. But the evolution of species itself occurs because of random mutations as far as we can tell. But even here, it’s not totally clear-cut. Because random mutations lead to changes, and if those changes are adaptive and result in greater reproductive success they’ll be passed on causing a larger evolution over time. Species rise up and die out seemingly at random when they are no longer suitably adapted to the environment. BUT, over the eons the trend does seem to be towards greater complexity.

So, I personally don’t think it’s cut and dry whether we’re ultimately evolving towards something. Not we as in humans. Life itself. Maybe our speciies is just an intermediate stage.

Hard to say whether anything is in any particular stage. That seems to be a matter of perspective coming from being locked in time. Precursors of horses did very well for millions of years, and were then a seeming successful endpoint in evolution. Later, they died out and became seen as a merely an ancestor and in a way a kind of dead end.

Everything that doesn’t die out is in an intermediate stage, because we don’t know the end of the story yet. That doesn’t necessarily mean any sort of goal or progress is going on that we’re in any particular stage of, though. Two types of parrots may come from a common ancestor, and both develop into equally viable species. Or die out at varied times. Their genetic ancestor may be alive at the same time they are, die off, or outlive them.

It gets confusing when we try to turn nature into a storyline, with a beginning, middle, and end, and maybe a moral or theme. It seems to take a more satisfying shape and coherence when we do so, but, like the scale of the cosmos, nature works in a vastly greater scale than we’re used to thinking of and in ways that seem, and are, inhuman. Randomness seem to have a certain, and to some intolerable, indifference to the point of cruelty to it. Most of us find it hard to deal with the world without trying to putting a human face to its every facet, no matter how inappropriate.[/quote]

I’m not saying there definitely is some end goal out there. I was just tossing some thoughts out. What is fairly clear is that over time the trend has been toward greater complexity. That may or may not mean anything. In any case, I don’t think it’s anything we’ll ever be able to know for sure. At least not while we’re on this earth living life as we know it.

77

Very cool!

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Panther1015 wrote:
…

Another note on the brilliant adaptability of the human body. I remember watching a special on the Discovery channel (ok, you can stop laughing now) about the daughter of missionaries that grew up playing with monkeys in her backyard. As a result of climbing trees most of her life and adapting to the movements of her tree-climbing monkey friends, she possesses world class coordination, agility and joint strength - particularly in her fingers (she can do strict pullups for reps with just her middle fingers). I think she’s only 16 or 17 now and is considered one of the best rock climbers in the world. I was blown away by her athleticism and strength. Lb. for lb, It was far beyond many of the most elite athletes out there.

I saw that too. She blew everyone away during the rock climbing contest. It wasn’t close. It was very cool.[/quote]

78

It certainly puts the importance of phenotype/nuture into perspective.

[quote]NateN wrote:
I’m happy to hear stuff like this. It shows that the strength gap is at least SOMEWHAT due to potential not being realized.

Zap Branigan wrote:
Panther1015 wrote:
…

Another note on the brilliant adaptability of the human body. I remember watching a special on the Discovery channel (ok, you can stop laughing now) about the daughter of missionaries that grew up playing with monkeys in her backyard. As a result of climbing trees most of her life and adapting to the movements of her tree-climbing monkey friends, she possesses world class coordination, agility and joint strength - particularly in her fingers (she can do strict pullups for reps with just her middle fingers). I think she’s only 16 or 17 now and is considered one of the best rock climbers in the world. I was blown away by her athleticism and strength. Lb. for lb, It was far beyond many of the most elite athletes out there.

I saw that too. She blew everyone away during the rock climbing contest. It wasn’t close. It was very cool.
[/quote]