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Macaque Monkey Goes Totally Bipedal
Freshly Exhumed writes "Add another bonus point for the Darwinians/evolutionists. A macaque at the Safari Park Zoo in Ramat Gan, Israel has recovered from a near-fatal illness in an unusual way: she has switched exclusively to walking on her hind legs. Given theories of human history that stress the effect of disease on events and changes, as in William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, what if an illness was the cause of the shift to bipedal motion by our evolutionary ancestors, and rote imitation by offspring or another set of circumstances locked it in? No matter, this could be a fascinating study of the macaque's altered brain functions."
Another possible theory is that a weakened stomach system might depend more on gravity than before. The macque's possibly-weakend stomach system may now have more discomfort when walking on all fours, forcing the macque to walk upright to avoid discomfort.
This theory may not be valid, but this could be worth investigating?
walking upright is actually a defect in regards to survival, since she'd be easier to spot far away by more advanced predators...
Oh please. That is ridiculous, and you should be ashamed of your own brain for even posting that. You might note that the monkey is now taller, and can therefore spot more advanced predators when they are farther away, giving the monkey more time to escape.
I moderate "-1, Fool"
There is also the possibility that walking with the use of its arms causes discomfort. Pain and discomfort is a strong convincer of learned behaviour.
For example, if you are unfortunate enough to break a bone, how long after the cast comes off do you still tentatively utilise that body part? If your hip gets broken, a limp occurs and only through extensive retraining through physotherapy is the muscles and learned knee jerk reaction to avoid pain unlearned.
Having a physiotherapist in the immediate family and spending lots of time around recovering individuals, I have noted that people who refuse to perform their physio properly inevitably take longer to heal and revert back to normal physical movement.
The fact that this animal refuses to, can not, or will not revert back to normal movement may just be an indication of its non-complete healing. I believe time will tell on this one.
flinging poop since 1969
I will share from a painful experience common to many slashdotters and say that intelligence does not guarantee you will find a mate.
Seen from the perspective of one with postdoc level training in related matters, this is silly. It is wrong as support for natural selection in the origin of species among primates for two reasons:
;-)
1) In dogs, a broken leg makes them walk on three legs. This is compensation, not evolution toward bipedal posture. The broken-legged puppy is LESS likely to survive and reproduce (its weaker bones mayhap?).
In monkeys, a broken or weak arm (eg. from illness) makes them prefer to walk on two legs, but again the arm problem makes them LESS likely to survive. And monkeys in general already know how to walk on two legs OR on all fours--they do not need a group behavioral culture to teach them to do so. (Humans don't need to be taught to crawl by someone who cannot walk because of a weak leg, for example.)
2) More importantly, this smacks of Lamark. Arm weakness after enterovirus polimyelitis may cause a monkey that orginally could walk on EITHER all fours (preferred) OR bipedally to change to PREFER bipedal walking. Lamark said giraffes had long necks from straining their necks upward--this is the concept of learned or acquired characteristics passed to offspring. This is not a DNA based theory! And, it was not Dawin's theory!
Bad evolutionist--know thy Darwin!
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
grow up!
Grow up? What's so childish about observing how different animals adapt to their environment, and showing that walking upright wasn't such a big change from walking on all fours?
this sort of thing happens all the time without it leading to evolutionary leaps
The scientists aren't saying "look! a new species! evolution! hurray!" They're just saying that in the right circumstances this could lead to a pack/tribe/family/whatever of monkeys walking upright. The're also saying that macaques have the physical ability of walking upright, and do so if they really have to.
It so happens to be that always walking upright is one of the distinct qualities of being "human." It's refreshing to see our humble beginnings. Your dislike of science seems misplaced.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
the creation accounts, of which there are at least two accounts in the Hebrew Torah.
Much of what appears to conflict in English is an artifact of translation. Given this explanation of how the two accounts in the opening chapters of Genesis complement each other, with reference to the original Hebrew, what do you still find in conflict?
Christians and smokers prove there are lots of misguided people in the world.
what if an illness was the cause of the shift to bipedal motion by our evolutionary ancestors
That seems questionable -- sounds an awful lot like Lamarckism to me.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Yet they ignore Intelligent Design which seems far more rational than believing in the incredibly slim odds of evolution occuring as fast as (or at all) it is described.
Unfortunately, there is no theory of intelligent design. ID is little more than stealth creationism; instead of "god did it!", IDists claim that "something did something to something, for suitably broad definitions of 'something' and 'did.'" If you doubt this evaluation, one need only examine the writings of IDists like Phillip Johnson. How often does he support or even define ID? How often does he attempt to attack evolution or naturalism?
Geeze, did all the creationist trolls decide to wait until now to start posting?
Guess what, at least two of my close biological forefathers/mothers are not amongst my legal ones. The day that I was told about this did not change a single thing about my existance as a human being born out of a woman who was fathered by a man whose real father was not his legal one and whose mother was the product of no less than two "illegitimate parents" (sorry, I don't know a better way to describe what I mean).
You are confusing the concept of evolution with that of a detailed family tree of individuals.
You are right that theories can never be proven. This applies to all of them, including the existance of god and the fact that he created everything as is (especially if it must all have happened some 6000 years ago)
(Posting anonymously only to protect some of the innocent.)
1. Individuals that can walk upright when needed, will have increased chances for survival, thus concentrating genes that contribute to being able to walk upright.
2. Being able to learn a behavior is also a genetic trait. Apes not able to learn an upright walking posture when needed (either due to disease or injury) will have diminished survival chances, even if physically capable of it.
Thus disease may not only have selected for the ability to walk upright, but to being able to learn behaviors. Survival would have depended on both and most certainly would be evolution in action by weeding out inferior not-able-to-walk-upright and not-able-to-learn-new-behavior individuals.
In the case of our hypothetical ape acquiring a behavior, you argue this is not contributing to evolution because he would have had the same genome with no advantage with or without the disease. BUT, his cousin without the ability to walk upright may have similarly fell prey to a polio like disease and not lived to spread his genes because he could not or would not walk upright. Thus our first ape gets to distribute his better upright walking, better behavior learning genes with less competition.
You have 2 kidneys, when only one is needed. Why have 2 if redundancy doesn't contribute to survival or evolution? In this case upright walking is a redundancy for loosing an arm, and evolution could and probably did select for it.
Letter To Iran
I certainly could point out as many fallacies/issues with old earth studies and evolution as you could conceive of with creationism.
Care to give us some examples? Just curious.
> Evolution runs into trouble at the cellular level with the high level of complexity that has yet to be replicated from base chemicals by modern labs. If, with the input of directed effort by an intelligent person, we can't generate what the cells that all life is built from, then the house of cards falls down.
The funniest thing about the entire "Intelligent Design" movement (and that's a big pile of funny stuff) is the claim that the inability of intelligent people to do something is evidence that only an intelligent being could have done it.
(Now go back and read your argument as quoted above.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Given the intense level of debate, and the amount of heat as opposed to light from both sides of the evolution debate that ensued from the story, are we allowed to mod the whole article ;-)
-1 flamebait?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
it is this ability to lose the heat generated by running that enables hummans to run down pretty much any other mammal, as the animal will have to stop (or else die of heat stroke) long before the human.
While this is true, you also missed his point. If the human were to run full-out after the gazelle he'd quickly drop from both heat exhaustion AND energy expenditure. The human HAS to jog in order to balance energy expended with heat dissipated, otherwise the upright body position doesn't matter for shit.
However, with the balance in place a human being can outrun, over long distances, almost any animal on the face of the planet. Wolves are one of the very few exceptions - because wolves also have a quadripedal 'jogging' gait that allows them to cover long distances at a fairly rapid pace without overheating, despite the fact that they don't sweat and are covered in fur.
Being quadripedal is a decent advantage for long-distance travel. Being hairless works out pretty well too, except in colder climates. Having a gait inbetween 'walk' and 'run' that balances energy expenditure with heat dissipation and which doesn't deplete short-term reserves is absolutely essential if you want to outrace prey over the long haul. It is, however, a peculiar evolution, and most predators have no such gait, relying either on short-term speed, surprise, and/or teamwork to catch faster animals.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Without knowing too much about evolution theory, it would seem to me that intelligence would always be a selective factor in all species.
Actually, the evidence would point to the opposite. So far as we know, over the entire history of life on this planet only one species has achieved human-level intelligence - ours. The most successful species on the planets are nothing more than tiny biological machines - insects - and they show no indication whatsoever of developing bigger brains, nor have they over hundreds of millions of years.
Even for the 'brainy' animals like gorillas and chimpanzees brain growth stopped some time ago. They continued to evolve in other ways, but brain growth wasn't one of them. In fact, most of the variations of proto-humans that died out also didn't develop brains much beyond that of a chimpanzee, although they did continue to evolve in different areas, some of them rather specialized.
Some folks speculate that there's a limit to how useful a big brain is compared to how much energy it consumes (the human brain typically consumes about 40% of the body's total energy). Beyond this limit the increased survival advantage is relatively trivial in comparison to energy consumption, which means that the larger brain is actually a defect in terms of survival. The theory is that it takes some very specialized circumstances to promote brain growth beyond this point, until the 'plateau' is surpassed and the brain is once again large enough to confer a survival advantage that outweighs its energy requirements. It would explain why apes aren't developing larger brains, and why nearly all of our evolutionary relatives developed a larger brain to a point, then seemed to stop although they still evolved and adapted to their environment.
Human-level intelligence could very well be a combination of mild defects that occurred during a very forgiving period in Earth's ecological history, in a place where food was easy to come by and these defects didn't compromise survival. A certain selective set of very special cirumstances that lasted long enough to result in our big-brained ancestors (and our relatives, the Neanderthals), but in any other time or place would've killed those with the defects.
People also assume that human evolution will continue to result in bigger brains, although there's no evidence to support this. It might very well be that the next step in our evolution won't be larger brains but more social, community-oriented ones with a suppression of violent instincts. That certainly seems to be more advantageous, especially when you already have a brain large enough to make yourself the dominant species and what you really need is a method to avoid species self-destruction.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
hahahadslakjd
> > The curious thing is why (s)he made everything look like the whole shebang was 13,000,000,000 years old.
> I wonder about this myself. If the creationists are right that means the Creator is at least a malicious trickster, or something more evil. Why would he create the Universe as a charade? Does he/she/it want to puzzle us, to play tricks on us?
Yeah, it's funny (in a sad sort of way) to see creationists suggesting that God faked the universe to fool scientists, and never pausing to consider that such a God might also fake scripture to fool creationists.
If things aren't as they seem, scientists aren't the only ones who can't trust the ground they're standing on.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The problem is that creationism is pseudo-science
/. article this all stems from has proven that some evolutionists will grab at absolutely anything in order to say they have the slightest bit of proof.
The problem with this post is that it has no ground to stand on.
The sad truth is that you can take any nutcase concept, throw a thousand million years into it, and with no trouble at all, you've got the less competent side of the science community eating out of your hands. It's not very intelligent in the big scheme of things, but some people just want to believe whatever coincidence-theory spans the most years. If the logic common to these lower scientists held any ground, I could say that Manhattan evolved out of rocks and snails if I tossed a few hundred millenniums into the equation.
For one, one does not read a book intended for spiritual enlightenment as a history book
Now we're just shooting off in so many random directions that it's no wonder this post supports evolutionism. First: What book? Did this book create life? No? Then your argument and much of evolutionism is relying on something that has nothing to do with the subject. If you wanted to rant about some Jahovah's Witness that came to your door then there are other, more reasonable concepts to use.
Second, if the "History cannot be spiritual" logic follows through then I can declare George Washington's biography to be a book written for spiritual enlightenment, and that would turn it into a big conspiracy lie and whatnot.
Here we see evolutionism in a nutshell: Fragmented, inconsistent, unable to present an ounce of solid logic. All-in-all, nothing more than a misplaced rebellion against certain spiritual people and at most, a thoughtless piece of ammo to up the reputations of emerging pseudo-scientists. And if anything, the
Thank you and goodnight!
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
I think you're focusing purely on the former, and completely ignoring the latter.
But a broken-legged puppy that can still manage to walk (on three legs, or however) is MORE likely to survive than a broken-legged puppy that can't manage to walk at all. But a broken-arm monkey that can still manage to walk (on two legs, or however) is MORE likely to survive than a broken-arm monkey that can't manage to walk at all.Flame what you will, but this sounds like an isolated case of adaptation...whether due to weakened stomach or weakened arms, etc.
To rush off and cry "evolution" and "darwinism" etc. seems premature IMHO. Granted, you could say a genetic disposition existed that enabled the subject to adapt as such in the presence of adversity, but to prove that definitively as the cause (as opposed to raw adaptation) would take deep amounts of work, if that were even the case to begin with.
It's hard to tell the cool to chill, my favorite hotel room has a view to an ill.