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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.
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".
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 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/
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+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
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 . . .
Not necessarily. If you think about it in terms of architecture, it may be easier to understand. Look at your living room or bedroom. The ceiling is probably being supported by the four walls on each side. The room is small enough that the ceiling doesn't require support in the middle. If you scale the room a 100 times, the distance between the main supports (the side walls) would be too large to support the ceiling without additional support, either via poles or other means. I'd guess the same thing would apply to creatures. If you look at Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest man, he had trouble walking due to his size.
The problem is the square/cube ratio. Double all linear dimensions, and volumes / weights go up by a factor of eight; areas only go up by a factor of four. So exactly doubling a creature would double the amount of weight per unit area, and the joints wouldn't be strong enough.
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100% pure freak
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!
I remember from my university biology classes why giant insects are impossible. Insects breathe through breathing pores, the air enters their body through the entire surface of their carapace. Apparently if they get over a certain size the core of their bodies would die of oxygen starvation in the time It takes the air to get into their sustem.
Now think about big mammals. Imagine the size of the heart that would be needed to pump blood against gravity into King Kong's brain. Imagine the muscles that would be needed to force enough air into the lungs. Gravity would collapse lungs over a certain size.
Now, I imagine giant reptiles would find it easier than giant mammals. Their metabolism requires less oxygen and thus the requirement to breate might be tolerable. Though I would hazard that the size of the biggest dinosaurs that did exist was probably the size of the biggest that could exist.
Additionally, it makes sense to me that of all animals an ape would be least likely to survive at that kind of size. Apes have the largest brains in land mammals (besides ours) and the glucose requirements for a brain like that would be phenomenal. So, King Kong could never actually exist.
But I will ignore that and go watch the movie anyway. After all Go-Jira is one of my favorite movies of all time.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
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.
Isn't the crocodile the world's largest lizard?
No, crocodile != lizard. Comparing crocodiles and lizards would be something like comparing dogs and monkeys. They belong to an entirely different order.
Crocodiles are from the order Crocodilia, lizards are from the order Squamata (which includes snakes).
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.
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."
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!
Peter Jackson was famous in NZ long before he made LOTR, he made a lot of original stuff first.