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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?
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!
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?
> > 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