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Kong Mirrors Real Evolutionary Paths
CNN has an article pointing out that, though King Kong may be a little extreme, evolutionary gigantism is not out of the question on remote islands. From the article: "There are many examples of what biologists term 'gigantism' on islands. These include the Komodo dragons, the world's largest lizards which can be 10 feet long or more and weigh up to 500 pounds. Found on a few small Indonesian islands, the Komodo -- a recorded man-eater -- is in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson's fertile imagination."
"King Kong," which is reigning at the North American box office this holiday season...
CNN should label these articles as advertisements. There's little science in the story, and certainly nothing new.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Uhhh, I hate to nitpick, but which creatures did Jackson imagine in this remake?
Not to say that the man isn't creative or imaginative, but he certainly didn't invent King Kong...or the brachiosaurus or the T-Rex or the Velociraptor or or or....
HAH! Let's see now... The Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Yeah, real original.
While I loved LOTR (haven't seen Kong), let's call a spade a spade, shall we?
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
If anyone should get the credits for inventing King Kong, shouldn't it be Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace? Not to mention previous works by Jules Verne and others...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
One point in the article seems incorrect to me.
:) were every bit as big as fancy mice, four inches or more long from nose to tail base. Going by volume they were well over three times the size of their parents, probably closer to 5. All it took was a regular diet of pet mouse grains, crickets and burger mince.
The house mice -- believed to have made their way to Gough decades ago on sealing and whaling ships -- have evolved to about three times their normal size.
I have raised a couple of generations of house mice from a captured pair at my parent's place, and while that original pair were the same size as any other house mouse, about an inch and a half from nose to the base of their tail, their offspring raised in my tank and fed well (ok, overfed
They were certainly fatter, but also MUCH larger at a base level.
Hollywood is an island unto itself. Where the flops get bigger and bigger while quality entertainment gets smaller and smaller. This is why some of the better movies are coming from New Zealand. I guess there are no intelligent designers among the Hollywood beancounters to save the day.
http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/11/21/w
My choice quote - at the very end, and the only tenuous link to the present subject:
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Content free article (or has that already been proposed?)
Being the cool dudes we are, let's shorten that to CFA. There's nothing even mildly interesting in the linked article. It reads like an advertisement for King Kong.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
Over here (Australia) it seems very much to have flopped. I myself haven't even the slightest inclination of going to see it - did they stuff up the marketing here or is it just a dead movie?
This reads like a story invented in a Reuters reporter's head, with out-of-context quotes from scientists to support his clever idea. Anybody that followed the homo floresiensis story knows that large mammals tend to become dwarves on islands.
Agreed. Although, having said that, I was suprised by the new King Kong film. It really does try to do something new with an old film, rather than just watering it down and selling it as a basic adventure or feel-good movie.
King Kong isn't really about big creatures or evolution, though. It's about how humans are sacrificing nature on the altar of concrete monuments to our own "achievements".
Mammals shrink on islands and smaller ecosystems. See pygmy elephants in islands in India. It's reptiles that increase in size.
for websites like how slashdot used to be?? With actual tech stories. You know, news for nerds, stuff that matters. If I wanted watered down advertisements for hollywood I'd read Entertainment Tonight or whatever it is called. Anybody else notice that Zonk's stories don't seem to have any submitters? They just magically end up in the queue. I for one check /. now 2 or 3 times a day, where in the past it was almost a sickness with the refresh button. Anybody else feel slash has jumped the shark?? Any websites that are still GEEKY??
lameness filter not working?
Kong's a remake. The LOTR trilogy were books first. He may have a talent for visualizing but these are NOT his stories.
Stretch your mind back to childhood. What giants do you remember? Jack and the Beanstalk? Hercules? Paul Bunyan? Goliath? What were you told and what did you read? With the exception of Goliath and an occasional ornery cyclops, legends emphasized their innate goodness, eye-popping feats accomplished with unparalleled strength, victories over the bad guys and all performed by "gentle giants". What if it were all a lie? What if the truth were something much MUCH more sinister?
The hippopotamus is one of the most dangerous of wild animals...
Deleted
huh? did the author miss a little bit of history here? The original King Kong idea WAS based on the knowledge of isolationistic giant evolution. KK would not exist had it not been for a bit of science fiction with background knowledge. that the story has been rewritten slightly for modern tastes is not a point for discussion.
...the new human species, Homo floriensis, observes quite the opposite of the evolutionary path - standing at under 1meter tall
0 27_041027_homo_floresiensis.html
What's more, it is thought they spent most of their time in trees :
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3948165.stm
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Coconut crabs (Birgus Latro) are pretty huge. They co-exist only with birds that are non-threatening on small tropical islands. It is probably the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world. http://www.arkive.org/species/GES/invertebrates_te rrestrial_and_freshwater/Birgus_latro/
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's been a long time since I've seen it... but isn't that what the original movie was all about as well?
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
... I'm wondering when critics will finally realise that PJ's Kong is a really bad movie.
Yeah yeah, I get it, he was creating a modern action movie as a sort of homage to the old B movies he loved as a child. Someone should've told him that modern movie goers are a little more sceptical about "indestructible lead actors" than they were 50 years ago.
They also should've pointed out that end-to-end action is all great fun, unless it runs for 60 minutes more than most people can stomach, featuring gun FX circa 1950 and Brody having giant critters shot off his body with a 1930's machine gun, hardly designed for accuracy.
It was a rotten movie and about as good as this "it's a slow day" story...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
> the Komodo [...] is in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson's fertile imagination
Obviously the writer never saw Meet the Feebles
(Warning - post contains sarcasm)
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
I'm going to a remote island. Wanna come along and experience the gigantism? It's not out of the question, you know.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Hey now, let's leave Tito and his Neverland Ranch fantasties out of this.
Office Space trivia game - play it now douche hole.
+3 Interesting? I guess pseudoscience is always more interesting than science, isn't it.
you totally missed the point of king kong
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I remember seeing some scientist on TV explain why giant ants the size of buildings would never work because living things just do not scale like that. When it gets too large the structure would not support it. Would the same apply to an ape? Common sense makes me think as long as everything enlarges evenly a creature could become infinitely huge. Someone correct me on this because I've never understood the logic of it.
Enough of the Steve Ballmer impressions already!
If anyone's interested, the principal described in the article is a special case of something called Foster's rule -- which you can google if interested.
In my opinion, more interesting than the giant species are pgymy species also created by the same effect. Pygmy Mammoths likely survived far longer than their gigantic counterparts before going extinct, as there is evidence of them being alive as recently as 5000 years ago on a few select islands. In fact, if I recall correctly, there is an egyptian painting which many suggest appears to be the pharoah or some lesser ruler recieving one as a gift. My details on this are a bit sketchy, so those genuinely interested should take their queries to google . . .
Some of you may also remember the somewhat controversial discovery of a species of pygmy hominid described as "hobbit-like" that was discussed on Slashdot about a year back -- those fossils were also from a rather isolated island . . .
Awesome! Her first, um, "job":
Moby Dick (1998) (TV) (special effects assistant)
Of course, her big break was:
Sexy Beast (2000) (third assistant director: Spain)
Also of note:
Phoenix Blue (2001) (third assistant director)
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
It's not the class, it's the size. According to the "island rule", islands don't provide the territory or food to support a diversity of larger animal species, especially very large animals such as elephants, so for the species that aren't killed off entirely, runts are favored. With the size, number, and variety of upper-level predators greatly reduced, smaller animals can grow larger (which provides advantages such as better body temperature control, more food and water storage, and being a more difficult kill for larger small predators) without risking as much lethal attention from predators.
There are exceptions and there is debate about the details of the island rule mechanism or whether it's even a valid idea at all, but the rule does NOT support the idea that a gorilla-sized animal would get even larger on an island. The factors that keep a large, top-tier animal from getting bigger - finite food supply, body design and that pesky square-cubed law - aren't likely to stop being issues on an island.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/eden/giants.html
Komodo dragons appear to be close relatives, or an offshot of Megalania prisca, which was up to 23 feet long (and lived in the continent of Australia) - in other words Komodos would be an example of island **Dwarfism**
They only appear big, because their bigger continental cousins became extinct (BTW in relatively recent times - approx 19,000 years ago or less)
I love how nobody at Slashdot seems to understand sourcing an article.
CNN has an article ------------ No. Nope. Wrong.
CNN is running an article. ------------ YES!
CNN is running a Reuters article. Learn to understand the god damn difference. This article is running on dozens of other sites out there, yet you just gave CNN credit for it. If I were one of these AP, Reuters, AFP, UPI, or [insert wire service here] writers, I'd be annoyed when nobody could figure out how to properly attribute my work.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
Giant Gorilla Design, now in every Science Classrooms !
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
10 feet = 3 meters
_ Dragon
and
500 pounds = 226.796185 kilograms
http://en.wikipedia.org.nyud.net:8090/wiki/Komodo
about me A - B
I don't care, as long as it's not three bloody hours long.
... in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson's fertile imagination.
Okay, I have never seen the original King Kong. However, from what I understand, much of Jackson's Kong followed the original, so this wasn't so much a product of his "imagination" as his self-indulgence. Can we please stop fellating this guy now? If his films were half as long as they are they might be decent, but making them overly long with a bunch of FX doesn't automatically make them great and important.
The reasons that creatures become gigantic have to do with lack of competition and predation, neither of which is the case in the environment in which King Kong lives.
just as some islands have created giants, other islands have shown a trend to producing pygmies, particularly in the elephant family (mammoths found off the coast of north america) and in the hominids (modern pygmies and homo floresiensis).
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
You see this kind of thing happen all the time. For instance, since the Da Vinci Code came out, I have seen plenty of historic tv specials on channels like the History channel that allude to that book in order to gain popularity (think "Da Vinci and the Code He Lived By"). That doesn't change the fact that Dan Brown is an idiot who has no idea what he is talking about 99% of the time and whose books contain nothing factual at all, nor does it make those specials psuedoscience. These specials have nothing to do with the book, they are just feeding off its popularity.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
"Meet The Feebles" co-written and directed by Peter Jackson, now -that- is imaginative.... And there's only one way to describe it if you haven't seen it -- Muppets on crack.
:)
Meet the Feebles is also a commentary on evolution. Just as the Beetles evolved from bubble-gum music to psychadelic music, muppets evolved from polite entertainment for children into coke sniffing, prostitute banging adult entertainers
Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
Straight from IMDB.
King Kong (1933)
Writing credits: Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
Not Peter Jackson! Give credit where credit is due.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
A lot of you are getting annoyed about how Jackson is being praised for his originality and such. And then many of you point out LotR and Kong -- both were created by other guys. Understandable. But try thinking outside of the box. LotR is a trilogy of books written by Tolken. The only [decent] movie even remotely based on Tolken's work was The Hobbit, an animated feature. And if something was made on the triolgy, it certainly wasn't 9 hours long. But that's the beauty of Jackson's films. He interpretted the content in the three books and was able to show us a damn-close idea of what Tolken may have wanted. Likewise, there are people who never heard of Lord of the Ring prior to his movies; I'm sure they now know a good idea of the storyline. As for Kong, admittedly, I've never seen the older versions. But think of it in terms of "hey, it doesn't suck!" And that, my friends, is something special. =)
Speaking as the last living Flores Man, I can well see what isolation has done to you poor Sapiens. Indeed, being segregated away from our beautiful Flores land somehow made your bodies huge, probably to the detriment of your brains. I can't imagine what life conditions you must endure living cramped on that small rock you call "World", but overcrowding alone must make it terrible! At least, based on what I read daily here on Slashdot.
Best regards.
P.S.: Anybody here with a short sister?
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
*Evolution ... Evolution ... Evolution ... if I just repeat it enough times, maybe I could start believing it. Now repeat after me ... Evolution ... Evolution ... Evolution ...
* I mean macro evolution of course.
Seeing as macro evolution is nothing but 'micro evolution' repeated enough times, this might just work!
Isn't the crocodile the world's largest lizard?
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-38416
The crocodiles are the largest and the heaviest of present-day reptiles. In former times the Nile crocodile (Crocodilus niloticus) and the estuarine crocodile (Crocodilus porosus) attained a length of almost nine metres (about 30 feet), but today, specimens rarely exceed six metres (20 feet). Other species, for example, the smooth-fronted caiman (Paleosuchus) and the dwarf crocodile (Osteolaemus tetraspis) are about 1.7 metres (six feet) in length.
if I just repeat it enough times, maybe I could start believing it
If evidence won't convince you, but Jewish folk-tales will, then that really shouldn't be your biggest concern.
On a related note... when you saw mommy kissing Santa Claus... it's because she was cheating on daddy.
Why is it that, on this mysterious Skull Island, the only life forms that didn't evolve to gigantic proportions were the humans?
Maybe they just drank too much seawater out there on the perimeter, or something....
King didn't seem to hang so well in New York City, where was Donkey at duing all of this?
"is in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson's fertile imagination." "
WHAT fertile imagination? AFAIK he hasn't done anything original.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Blue whales are even bigger than crocodiles, but that doesn't make them the world's largest lizard either. This is because for most people an important requirement for being the world's largest lizard is being a lizard, and neither the blue whale nor the crocodile are lizards.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I was listening to CBC Radio One yesterday morning to a discussion of the original 1930's King Kong movie, and it was mentioned that an original inspiriation for the movie was when a giant Komodo Dragon was brought to New York and died soon thereafter.
Let's see if I can find a reference for this. Ah, here we go...
"Elements of the 1933 Kong movie are based on the 1926 real-life expedition of William Douglas Burden, a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History," says Mitman, an expert on how animals are portrayed in popular culture.
"Burden traveled to Indonesia to film and capture the Komodo dragon, which he thought was the closest living relative of dinosaurs," he says. "When Burden brought back two live Komodo specimens and housed them in captivity in the Bronx Zoo, they died. Meridan Cooper, producer of the 1933 film version of Kong, wrote at the time, 'I immediately thought of doing the same thing with a giant gorilla.'"
The same correspondence indicates that Burden attributed the Komodo dragon's death to civilization. "This is why Cooper chose the Empire State Building and modern airplanes to kill off Kong. They were fitting symbols of civilization and the machine age that many feared were destroying nature," Mitman says.
He adds that the film's enduring appeal (the current one adds to the 1976 version and the 1933 classic original) might be linked to the restorative properties of an unspoiled, natural landscape.
Hasn't King Kong been overhyped enough? Does Slashdot have to stoop so low that these viral marketing diseases have to infiltrate this site? Please, enough with the Kong references already. What's next? Kong condoms? Jack Black appearing on the Muscular Distrophy Telethon in an ape suit? Giant monkey week on the Discovery Channel? Is Orange County Choppers going to build a hairy ape-themed bike for POWs from Kong island? Please give us a fucking break with the Kong shit!
I don't care if Angelina Jolie tattoos the goddam movie poster on the inside of her thigh and gives every moviegoer a peek, I'm NOT going to see this stupid remake-of-a-remake-of-a-remake movie. So stop with the King Kong viral marketing!
Here's how the Kong movie hype gets exploited on the web:
Slashdot: "Kong Mirrors Real Evolutionary Paths"
Something Awful: "After watching King Kong, how many times did you cut yourself?"
Digg: "Kong-inspired PC Case Mod! OMFG!!"
Craigslist: "I will have sex with you for two tickets to King Kong premier."
eBay: "Folding table used by catering company on Kong movie set to be auctioned off starting at US$50,000"
Fark: "Man sues waffle house for refusing service to him while dressed as a giant ape. Your dog wants to see King Kong."
Oh come on give me a break. Basic physics in high school taught us that because of specific gravity and density, if King Kong really existed his weight would keep him flat on his back. It has to do with dynamic simularity and Bukingham's constants / theory. You cant just scale something up 10 dimensions bigger than it is. Even Leonardo di Vinci knew that. And they had several disasters in the 1800s because the designers of some ships and bridges were too stupid to take what should have been obvious into there plans. Sort of like the screw ups at NASA today, like inches in one calulation and centimeters in another equals 300 mil literally thrown away . To put it more simply about dynamic similarity, etc, just think of the area of something being squared, but its' volume being cubed.
though King Kong may be a little extreme...
You mean like the giant man eating penises with teeth? The endless cascade of falling brontosaurs I could handle. Jack Black's horrible acting I could handle. But Andy Serkis getting eaten by big dicks with teeth was too much.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
So crocodiles are not lizards? African (aka Nile Crocodiles) are friggen huge - up to 16 feet in length.
Oh well, what the hell...
The ecosystem is too small to support a band of such enormous mammals (a band assumed because of reproduction). Komodo dragons are reptiles and as such their metabolic requirements are about an order of magnitude less than a similar-sized mammal -- even so they are several hundred pounds max, not many, many tons like King Kong.
Even King Kong by himself on a tiny island would defoliate it pretty quick.
That was one of the problems with Jurassic Park: The Lost World. The island would be much too small to support than many gigantic animals.
As other posters have noted, when the animal size goes up 2X, volumes increase by 8X while areas only increase 4X. While this causes structural difficulties and joint problems, etc., the most fundamental problem is heat. If a warm-blooded animal gets too big, it will cook itself on the inside just by virtue of the fact that the surface area to volume ratio is insufficient to allow heat to escape. You'd have gorilla au jus.
Somebody took away my five mod points, probably because I uttered a spelling flame unrelated to this post, or I'd give this guy all 5 for sagacity. Hey! Stop That Thinking!
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I recently reread Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. In it, he describes the extinction of many large species that grew up on remote islands.
... in most cases, not even leaving a generation to try to adapt to our presence. For this reason, they were quickly killed without fearing us.
We're all familiar with the dodo bird which was a fairly large species but there were also appearant extinctions of other large animals in the Polynesian Islands.
The reason for their extinction is that they grew up without modern man on their islands. Now, animals that live in Africa like the giraffe, wildebeest, hippo, etc were exposed to the evolution of man. Our initial stone weapons didn't kill all the targets but gave them time to adjust genetically and grow wary and eventually instinctively fear humans.
Those that didn't were killed.
Once the remote island mega fauna became exposed to humans and their advanced iron or steel weapons, they did not have the time to adjust to fear us. And our weapons rarely didn't kill them
A supposed Kong would invariably never fear humans unless their were a race of Kongs and we adapted our 1920's technology to be able to kill them more efficiently.
If you haven't read that book, do so.
My work here is dung.
Kongdoms! I think you might be onto something there!
But it is evolutionary out of the question when such monstrosities would clearly violate the square-cube law.
Found on a few small Indonesian islands, the Komodo -- a recorded man-eater -- is in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson's fertile imagination.
Have you seen how ugly those orcs are in Lord of the Rings?
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
There are many examples of what biologists term 'gigantism' on islands.
There are even more examples of dwarfism on islands because of the low energy environment and relative lack of predators. Pygmy mammoths are one good example. The recently found hobbits are another.
an ill wind that blows no good
Not viral. If it was viral, you would have heard about it from a friend. If it was astroturfing, you'd have seen it spray painted on a building. But it's on fucking Reuters, for God's sake! It's just some lame infomercial-in-print. To be viral, it would have to be a whole lot better.
"When the movie (with spider sequence intact) was previewed in San Bernardino, California, in late January 1933, members of the audience screamed and either left the theatre or talked about the grisly sequence throughout the remainder of the film. Said the film's producer, Merian C. Cooper, 'It stopped the picture cold, so the next day back at the studio, I took it out myself.' " From imdb.com ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024216/trivia )