Scars of Evolution

Comments

1. 

   April 14, 2005

   Jim

   My favorite unique feature that AAT explains is our diet. Compare what gorillas eat whit what seals eat – which would a you prefer?
   The larger point is the real cause for the dismissive attitude of the anthropologists. Pathetic and childish. There is a book waiting to be writen of all the theories that eventually turn out to be vakid but that various scientific mafias stonewall for decades.

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2. 

   April 14, 2005

   Dom

   Never trust a writer on evolution who writes things like: “they became two-legged so as to “run faster” and carry weapons”. The “so as” is about as undarwinian as anything can be.

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3. 

   April 18, 2005

   Paul Bradford

   I thought David Attenborough was too cruel on opponents of the the acquatic ape hypothesise. Right or wrong there are good reasons for questioning it, but David Attenborough seemed to libel the critics as closed minded sexists.
   For instance if human hairlessness is caused by an
   acquatic past how come many acquatic mammals like the otter, beaver and the fur seal covered in hair? In fact the only unhairy aquatic mammals seem to be just so aquatic they seem to be loosing or have lost there legs; like the Dolphin or the Whale, making the theory problematic for describing how our strong hind limbs developed.
   Also if we are so acquatic a mammal, how come we are such slow wimmers compared to other acquatic mammals? some otters can outspeed the fastest human swimmers despite their much inferior size?
   I am willing to hear answeres to this and other questions. Instead sceptics are insulted as close minded sexists for no good reason.
   Paul Bradford

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4. 

   April 18, 2005

   Jim

   Paul,
   I wonder in the question you raise about retaining fur if it mattered that otters and beavers started out with better down layers than we probably ever had, so that fur was never a real option for us in the water. Chimps and gorillas seem to have only guard hair and not much down hair, though maybe I am just not looking closely enough.
   Another question – otters and seals swim very fast because of the prey they hunt, but manatees are quite slow. As I understand the theory, we are supposed to have colected slow or immobile food such as molluscs, and so would not have needed to develop much speed. Also, but we may never have had the cahnce to develop a high degree of water speed if we still hasd some us efor land mobility, since increasing one capability would necessarily decrease the other.
   There is another unrelated theory to explain another problem. Polynesians are both much larger than other island populations and also can put on fat like nobody’s business, and the explanation proposed is that it had to do with natural selection in response to hypothermia on ocean voyages in outrigger ships. It may be that we tend to put on blubber rather than fur to deal with cold. We do tend to put on blubber even for no good reason at all, don’t we?
   The sexism accusation seems really stupid, unles the theory says that only one half the species swam or something.

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5. 

   April 19, 2005

   anthrosciguy

   Hi Mick, Jim Moore here
   The last time the AAT came up here I left a comment with my URL. For the benefit of those who don’t know about it, this is a site which looks at the evidence given for the AAT. It’s been used as source material for The Straight Dope and Fortean Times, as well as being linked to by several college course instructors. It has a lot of material on it (too much for some, I suppose :)).
   I’m doing a page on the BBC Radio 4 show, but it’ll probably be a few days at least before it’s up. I’m almost through the first half, and I’m having server probs with the BBC site today so I haven’t heard the second half yet. If the first half hour is any guide, I don’t expect anything really new to be brought forward in the second. The general gist of the first half was that Morgan and Hardy are victims of a close-minded, irrational establishment who reflexively and effectively bar outside thoughts from creeping in — a familiar story that Morgan has been peddling for 3 decades now.
   Let me just make a couple points here about things which came up in this entry.
   One is Elaine Morgan’s remarks about Lucy and the surrounding fossils. This illustrates something of Morgan’s style; she generally implies that the researchers there hid this info about eggs and crabs when the info was “hidden” in their official publication announcing the discovery. But Morgan herself is awfully (and suspiciously) selective about the fossils she mentions. Morgan repeatedly talks up the eggs and the crabs found at the site and neglecting to mention not only the giraffes and elephants, but the many bovids, horses, monkeys and baboons, hyenas, cats, rhinos, rodents, and pigs also found there. We know that shorelines are good places to get fossilized, and that those animals which frequent such places are fossilized more often than others. This is also evidence which is ignored by AATers, since, if our early ancestors were frequenting shorelines, we would expect to find far more than the relatively few we do find. Instead we find the sort of numbers we might reasonably expect from an animal which was spending most of its time elsewhere.
   The other point is that many of the features that Morgan and others use as evidence, including hair, are demonstrably due to sexual selection (there are others, for instance fat and sebaceous sweat glands). You can tell this is so because of the timing of changes in these features — right at puberty — and the differences between the sexes. In those (very few) aquatic mammals which the AAT says (misleadingly) has similar features, these features happen much earlier, generally in infanthood, and are similar in both sexes.
   As I said, much more on my site: http://www.aquaticape.org

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6. 

   April 26, 2005

   David Ewing

   Jim Moore wrote: ‘Never trust a writer on evolution who writes things like: “they became two-legged so as to “run faster” and carry weapons”. The “so as” is about as undarwinian as anything can be. ‘
   Jim, who said this and when? Was it a critic or a supporter of AAH? Source please…
   I thought it was a great programme, unfortunately not very audible. I have never understood the BBC’s refusal to post scripts of its interviews: as a licence payer I have already paid for them.
   David Ewing, haveagrandday@aol.com

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7. 

   April 28, 2005

   anthrosciguy

   David,
   That was “Jim”, not me. The sentiment in the statement is good though — saying things like that (which you find some people doing at times) is a warning sign.
   You all might be interested in my notes on the BBC 4 program, which I posted on my site a couple days ago.

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