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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
Get this monkey a typewriter! I'm in the mood for some new Shakespeare.
The monkey to correctly enunciate a single English word, and in the company of fellow monkeys slips into fits of screaming:
We need to stop this race of super-human monkeys at the source!
The White House?
Oh wait, super-human monkeys... nevermind!
=Smidge=
Could be. Worth looking into.
But I'd put my money on weakening of the arms, whether through loss of control or coordination through nerve damage or some other flu side-effect, making quadrapedal motion difficult.
For a four-legger like a dog this would be crippling. (Dogs can't do two-legs for long due to blood pressure issues.) But for a monkey or ape with both four and two legged gaits, it's just an annoyance: Just drop the one that doesn't work so well any more and you're hardly bothered. (Like a kid with a knee injury no longer skipping.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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!
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.