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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."
Judging from some of the people I've met, bipedalism does not imply higher brain functions are present in the individual.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
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?
Get this monkey a typewriter! I'm in the mood for some new Shakespeare.
Where's Charlton Heston when you need him?
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
Has anyone done a study on whether human bipedalism is due to the behavior learned from surrounding people or if there are practical reasons for why we hardly ever walk on all fours? That is, do we just walk on two legs most of the time because everybody else does?
The monkey to correctly enunciate a single English word, and in the company of fellow monkeys slips into fits of screaming:
You only need to be smart enough to survive until you can breed. Look around among your fellow humans- it don't take much to reach that point.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
We need to stop this race of super-human monkeys at the source!
The White House?
Oh wait, super-human monkeys... nevermind!
=Smidge=
It depends on how well she develops the ability. Walking upright makes you easier to catch, running upright makes you much harder to.
For a monkey or ape, which doesn't have the adaptations for it, running up right is slower than on all fours. (That's why they switch back to all four when in a hurry.)
The advantage of the two-legged walk for people is that it is lower-energy, not that it's faster. This lets us jog for a long time, at speeds that quickly overheat and exhaust prey animals until they drop from heat prostration.
People can outrun some horses in a very short sprint (though I wouldn't bet on it for quarterhorses). And they can jog down darn near anything. But in the middle distances other animals do better.
It may have been a defect when the first human did it, but it survived and we ended up all the better for it.
In particular it gave us a new hunting mode (like wolf packs but better) that, in combination with freeing the hands for weapon use, put us on top of the food chain and gave us the safety and leisure to develop agriculture and technology.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I for one welcome our new simian overlords. (Score:1, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our new Monkey Overlords. (Score:0)
I for one welcome our new super-monkey overlords... (Score:-1)
Lesson? People like simians, don't like monkeys as much, really hate super-monkeys
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
I, for one, welcome our new Macaque overlords.
Sorry.....
Of blankness, I know nothing.
The problem is that creationism is pseudo-science, often by people trying to "prove" their religion, or trying to find a way to squeak in religion edgewise as a subject legitimately teachable in public schools.
For one, one does not read a book intended for spiritual enlightenment as a history book. That is the using-a-saw-as-a-hammer approach, such that its usefulness is somewhat limited because that is outside the scope of the texts. Have you ever tried to read about the complete history of Nevada in a book about the WW II nuclear programs? It majorly falls short.
Many of the same people read far too literally into such texts, particularly concerning the creation accounts, of which there are at least two accounts in the Hebrew Torah. Both are conflicting accounts, if you take them literally. If one says one is literal, the other non-literal, then you have an argument on which one is literal.
The people that try to claim that the earth is young and claim that is provable now, either are lying, are ignorant or couldn't pass a decent set of college science and math classes such as calculus, statistics, geology and second-year chemistry, because they pass off "facts" that seem to contradict some basic experiments I've done. Some try to make up some BS theories on radiation, but there are greater holes in those theories than they claim are in old-earth and evolution theories.
But this monkey likely tells us nothing about either theory.
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!
The part of the brain resposible for balance is the Cerebellum. It really hasn't changed much since we left the trees. Various structural changes in our skull allowed the cerebrum (frontal lobe) of the brain to grow larger.
Neanderthals and many species of proto-humans had flat foreheads, but walked upright.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
One of the things that bipedalism gave us was the ability to carry a larger brain. Rather than having to hold the head up, we just sortof balance it on the top of the spine.
Try crawling around for a while on all fours. Besides getting sore knees, you'll also get a sore neck from holding your head up. (Although the fact that our spine connects to the skull in a different place from that of quadrupeds may exacerbate the problem.)
But don't let this confuse you. Having a larger brain did not cause us to go bipedal just so we could hold our heads up. Evolution doesn't work that way (with quadrupeds, brains larger than what gives an immediate advantage are selected against). Instead, our ancestors developed bipedalism because it was a hunting advantage... you can see farther and not occupy your hands with the act of moving (as someone else in this forum already mentioned). But then that allowed us to develop larger brains (and thicker skulls *g*) which kinda got us cornered this way (that is, our larger brains are now a selection criterion against NOT being bipedal).
(BTW, the thicker skulls thing is serious, though, when you consider Neandertals.)
So, to answer your question, bipedalism is not a learned thing in modern humans. We evolved to be this way, we don't function well if we don't walk upright, and children pretty much figure it out on their own (although watching others may help a little).
Also, besides bipedalism, another way to be able to develop a larger brain is to be aquatic. (Floating is good.) Thus, we have dolphins.
True it makes you much slower, but it in terms of energy effeciency it's a no brainer. A famous anthropologist who's name escapes me once did a demonstration to make this point. He started chasing after a gazelle and of course was QUICKLY outpaced, but he continue to jog after it slow and steady. Everytime he'd close the gap, the gazelle woould bolt.
.
After a little while though, the gazelle was totally exhausted. On 4 legs it was much faster, but it was burning quite a bit more energy to escape. Eventaully he caught up to the gazalle and was able to basically do wahtever he wanted to it. The gazalle was simply too exhausted to keep running. .
Also keep in mind that amonst tall savanah grasses, walking upright lets you see over the grasses and see predators sooner.
In otherwords, upright locomotion certainly has a downside, but its also got alot of nicepoints. It really just depends on the niche you're trying to fill.
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