SkepticLance

To foodchain There are a couple of very likely remanants of grooming behaviour in human behaviour. Mothers fuss over their children, including such things as combing their hair. Women go to hairdressers for grooming. People go for a massage etc. However, the main replacement for grooming as a social glue is probably conversation. Where chimps get together for prolongued grooming sessions to build social bonds, humans get together for prolongued 'chin wag' sessions, which also build social bonds.

To lucaspa It appears probable that Homo erectus used fire. http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Galaxy/1508/H_erectus Quote : Homo erectus was the first to invent fire. This is supported by charred bones and stones found in the many H. erectus sites all over the world. Fire provided a great number of advantages, including warmth, light, safety from predators, cooked food (easier to digest) and many others. It was fire that allowed H. erectus to migrate north into Europe You made the following statement These more active early humans faced the problem of staying cool and protecting their brains from overheating. Peter Wheeler of Liverpool John Moores University has shown that this was accomplished through an increase in the number of sweat glands on the surface of the body and a reduction in the covering of body hair." This is exactly the kind of thing that sets my bullshit alarm ringing. Did Wheeler have actual empirical evidence, or is this a case of deduction? If the latter, then it is little better than speculation. Paleoanthropologists have an unenviable reputation for swallowing a grain of sand and regurgitating a mountain. That is : using minute bits of evidence to deduce conclusions that are not sufficiently supported by the data. You made the suggestion : . So our ancestors walked around in clothes that stank. Seriously unlikely, in my opinion. Homo sapiens came into existence as a species somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 years ago. Since they were our species, we can assume they were hairless. For most of this time, they lived in Africa. That is a warm part of the world. If an untanned skin was taken from an animal to use as clothing, in tropical heat it would rot and fall apart within a few days. I doubt that animal skins were that readily available that everyone could get a new one every few days. I have often wondered about the clothing used by the native polynesian people of my country - the Maori. In spite of having access to dead seals, they had no tanning technology and did not use leather. Even in the cold of New Zealand, skins rotted too fast. Instead, they used a fibre technology based on the native flax plant. They wove this into mats, and made cord and rope from twisting the fibres. The warmest garment they could access was the feather cloak. This was a flax mat, with thousands of down feathers tied into it. Thrown over shoulders, it made a very warm cover. However, feather cloaks were too expensive in raw materials and labour to be widely available. It appears that most Maori had to make do with clothes from flax fibres, and the warmth of the fire. How sophisticated is this? Could Homo erectus have made clothing in a similar way?

To lucaspa My original information came from a Scientific American article about 10 years old, which described Australopithecus as the first plains ape, hunting and gathering food on the plains. It also described them as small and vulnerable. If that is now obsolete, and they were forest edge dwellers, of course that changes matters. My conclusions were sound, based on the data. If the data has changed, the conclusions must also change. You said : Because modern chimps have had 3 million more years of evolution than Australopithecus. This demonstrates that lucaspa is quite capable of logical fallacies. Life has been evolving for 3 to 4 billion years. Mammals have been around for something like 200 million. A 3 million difference between two varieties of ape is not of great importance in degree of evolution.

To foodchain No one knows why Homo sapiens thrived while others, like the neanderthals died out. We can only guess. immortal said : how can co-operation and competition both exist? Do animals compete just to pass on successful genes and eliminate the unfit? If these two exists together then when do organisms co-operate and when do they compete? Actually competition is not there for any purpose at all. It is just a fact of life - an inevitable result of the way the world is. It generates certain results, and increased evolutionary change is one of those results. But it has no specific purpose. Cooperation is not an opposite to competition. Normally when groups of organisms cooperate, they are competing against other groups. Thus competition drives cooperation.

To pioneer First : migration As I said before, humans are not a particularly migratory species. However, every living thing has some means of dispersal. Some plants have seeds that are dispersed by explosive force, such as gorse - and some have seeds that are blown in the wind. Some are sticky and cling to animal fur etc. Animals are able to move, whether a dolphin swimming, a bird flying, or a monkey swinging through the trees. Against these examples, there is nothing special about human movements. Except for one very special thing. When a seed blows in the wind, and lands, it will most probably die, since the seed can only grow if conditions are right. If a human family walks 50 kms, and decides to settle there, they can thrive. Why? Not because they are adapted to the new environment. In fact, they are probably maladapted. They thrive because they use culture and technology in the first instance as their means of adaptation. It is technology and behavioural flexibility that enables humans to live in new environments. It took over 50,000 years for humans leaving Africa to colonise the whole world - a very slow rate of migration. However, people can adapt through technology to any environment. So we have the San in the Kalahari desert, and Inuit in Greenland. Plus others in every environment in between. I don't think there is any particular qualitative special feature in human language either. The African grey parrot has a rich and diverse vocal 'language' for communicating with its fellows in the wild, and can be taught to use English in a meaningful way in captivity. Apes have been taught to use sign language meaningfully, and cetaceans appear to have quite complex vocal languages. Sure, none are likely to have language as complex and flexible as human languages, but this is a quantitative difference - not qualitative.

To ecoli I think you missed the point I was alluding to earlier. There has been lots of research into chiropractic treatments. For a control, they normally use a massage or 'subluxation' that is not considered appropriate for the problem. So if they are testing the effect of chiropractic massage on neck pain, they put half the patients into the kind of chiropractic massage that is used for back pain. The end result, if the test is done correctly, is ALWAYS that any chiropractic massage will work as well as any other. In other words, chiropractic treatments are exactly as good as placebo. As revenged points out, chiropractic treatments are not free of risk. There are lots of cases where people suffer permanent and debilitating injury. My quackwatch reference even details a fatality. Do you really want to use a placebo treatment that can kill you?

To ecoli Plenty of research has already been done on the value of chiropractic treatments. The result = zero. I went to a lecture by a doctor who had practised chiropracty once. This guy was a fully qualified general practitioner, and decided to extend his field. he did the full training course to make him a qualified chiropractor, and began his chiropractic work. He started getting suspicious when he found that all his 'massages' worked equally well. When a patient with a shoulder or neck ache was given the treatment for lower back pain, it worked just as well as when he gave the proper treatment. He also discovered that the results appeared to correlate with noise. The louder the pop, the better the result. After all this, he concluded that the effect was pure placebo, and he gave it away. If you want further information, try http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/chiro.html

lucaspa said Losing hair predated learning to use fire. Apology in advance for quibbling. We don't know that losing hair predated fire. We do not know when that hair loss occurred since hair is not normally fossilised. We do know that Homo erectus used fire. Was that species hairless? We don't know. lucaspa also said the stone knives would have been sufficient to skin animals that died from other causes Not a quibble this time, but a question. The above phrase just tickled a question in my mind. There is a tendency to imagine pre-humans in 'clothes' of animal skin. However, I know a bit on that subject and it does not ring very true to me. Raw animal skins go rotten really quickly. And tanning skins, while it can be very simple, does not usually result in a product that is very useful as clothing. You can tan an animal skin by dropping it into a forest pool that is full of tree bark fragments, and leaving it for a few months. In fact, something like that is probably how the first tanned skins came into being. However, the product is like plywood. Hard and inflexible. In fact, this type of leather has been used throughout much of history as armour. To make leather flexible enough for clothing is much more difficult. It involves carefully scraping off flesh before tanning, making it thin enough to flex, and then much flexing of the hide during tanning, and rubbing in oils. With the skins of small animals sewn together, this can be done by primitive peoples, but it is not something a tribe with no experience with treating skins would quickly discover. I find it hard to imagine Homo erectus, for example, doing this. My question is to do with early clothing. How do people think the first clothing was actually made?

To lucaspa I am finding this thread a bit frustrating. I feel that you and I have a view of science that is pretty damn close, but we are just not communicating. Most of what you say, I agree with completely. However, I think you may be attacking my statements a bit harshly, in that you are dragging meaning out of them that I had not meant to put in there. I agree that we cannot come up with a simple definition of science or the scientific method. Anyone who tries has to over simplify. Such a definition can, of course, be shot full of holes. I have admitted my defintiions are over simplifications, and you, accordingly, shoot them full of holes. While it is not possible to come up with something that can be called THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD, there are commonalities that run through science. You have even agreed with me on some of them. I admit that it is not possible to make a single, simple statement that applies in all situations. However, perhaps you can be a bit more constructive, and try to think of a few points of agreement.

lucaspa said : Remember, there may be some weird set of circumstances that would result in your survival from such a fall. There was a guy in WWII whose bomber was shot down. He jumped out in flames, and his parachute caught fire when opened, and turned to ashes. He fell over Germany in winter at terminal velocity. He fell through forest, with the tree tops covered in snow which slowed him dramatically and landed in a deep snow drift which cushioned his final impact. He crawled out of the snow drift with a few bruises, and no broken bones. Definitely a million to one chance, but it can happen.

To foodchain One thing I recognise is that predicting the future is really, really difficult. At least if you do it accurately! One good guideline is that long term trends do not change abruptly. The reduction in fertility is a long term trend. It has been dropping for 50 years. The reason for this is known. It is the development and dissemination of effective contraception. We can make good predictions based on this long term trend. We will continue to develop and distribute good contraception, to more and more parts of the world. Fertility will continue to drop as a result, and we will see population level off and begin to decrease. We can argue about the exact details, but the pattern is not likely to be terribly much different from that predicted.

Foodchain said : In 500 years the amount of people alone on this planet is going to be staggering. I suggest you do a bit more research on human population growth. A good start is the United Nations site (http://www.un.org/popin), where its expert demographers show what is really happening. Human fertility is dropping at a rapid rate, to the point some nations are getting really upset about their falling population. Many western nations have a fertility figure of as low as 1.1 children per couple, on average. In the developing world, the figure was 5.5 at a time 50 years ago, and is now less than 2.5, and dropping. The United Nations predicts that the human race will probably rise from its current level of 6.5 billion to a figure close to 9 billion, and then the total population will start to drop. By 2060, the world will have a falling population. Minor correction to web site address http://www.un.org/popin/data.html

Foodchain said : personally despise what humanity is doing to life in general all over the planet. I think our ignorance is not going to pay off in the future, and I think its going to take life being brought to the brink of extinction in time to point this out. That is a terribly negative and pessimistic view of reality. Life is more resiliant than you think, and human kind is not as stupid. Life has been through six major extinction events, with some (like the Permian event) much worse than anything we are doing. Each time, life rebounded with increased diversity and vigour. In the mean time, humans are learning, and slowly turning to more environmentally responsible methods. In the western world, things were much worse in the past, with no consideration whatever of the impact of introducing new species into new environments, and with pollution rampant. The western world today has biosecurity offices to stop introduction of alien species, and both air and water pollution are way lower than 100 years ago. Sure, we have a way to go, but the point is that we are moving towards more environmentally friendly ways to do things. Non western countries are trainling behind, with massive pollution in China and in Eastern Europe. However, they are starting to tidy up their acts, and it is predictable that they will clean up their environments as we in the west did.

To Pioneer I am getting the impression that you do not understand what correlation is. It is NOT subject to political spin, any more than the answer to 1 + 1 = is subject to political spin. A correlation is the answer to a statistical calculation. Two sets of numbers are related to each other by means of the calculation, and the result is a correlation coefficient. A number between 1 and minus 1. Political influence cannot affect this in any way. Of course, the way the correlation is used, interpreted, and applied is political. But not the correlation itself.

foodchain said : Its the same thing with humans and placing everything on the crutch of technology. Humans were around for hundreds of thousands of years with little to no technology past very primitive versions compared to today’s standards, that’s not covering ancestors of course. To say that human evolution was solely surrounded by fire, spears, and say cutting rock with rock for instance, well, I don’t think that quite covers the whole issue. I have often thought that our ancestors were smarter than we normally give them credit for. Even chimpanzees use crude tools. Homo habilis which lived nearly 2 million years ago, has fossils that are found associated with chipped stone, which makes it pretty much certain that they actually made stone tools. I suspect that tool use, though not fabricated stone tools, preceded Homo habilis by quite a long time. The problem is that most tools are not fossilised. Thus, if our early ancestors made use of wooden clubs or spears, or formed some kind of string or weaving, we would not have any way of proving it, since those items are not preserved as fossils. However, if chimps can use tools, it is very likely that our ancestors well before Homo habilis also did. It seems to me quite obvious that human evolution must have been strongly influenced by the use of technology.

To foodchain As lucaspa pointed out, very correctly, to you, the reason humans are such successful generalists is technology. If you wish to understand human evolutionary success, you need to focus on that aspect on human evolution and way of life. Humans are masters of technology. The question is how we evolved that characteristic. I believe that technology and evolved human characteristics are intertwined. Our pre-human ancestors learned to use basic technology a long, long time ago. Once it became a big part of human life, our ancestors began a process of evolution to make them better at using technology, since the best tool makers and users were the ones most likely to survive. At the same time, technology freed our ancestors from certain needs, and our bodies evolved in response. For example : Why are we functionally hairless? That is a unique quality. There is not even one other mammalian species, living on land, in our size range that is hairless. I have heard theories about hairlessness meaning better cooling during exercise, and hairlessness permitting better ectoparasite control. If these are true (and they probably are) then why have other species not lost hair to obtain these advantages? The simple answer is that the disadvantages of functional hairlessness prevented that evolutionary trend in other species. The big one is loss of thermal insulation. Even on the equator, there are mornings when it gets damn cold. Without hair, mammals either die of hypothermia, or become vulnerable to hairier predators. Humans could lose hair, though, without facing this disadvantage, because technology can provide an alternative means of thermal insulation. Sitting round a fire, or some kind of primitive clothing. This principle applies to a number of other unique human characteristics also.

To foodchain. Diet and evolution. It may interest you to know that humans have the smallest gut as a percentage of their total body weight, of any primate. And this difference is quite massive. Humans cannot quite be called gutless, but we are well on the way. If you do not believe me, take a photo of a bikini clad teenage model (because they have the least body fat to distort the picture) and compare it to a photo of a chimp. Where the young lass goes in, the chimp goes out. The reason is that, in the absense of lots of fat, the alimentary canal occupies most of the abdomen, and the human has not got a lot of it, while the chimp has lots of gut. Why have humans evolved such a minimal gut? Answer : cooking. There is evidence that Homo erectus had and used fire. This means cooking. Cooked food is much easier to digest. Being able to dispense with gut means the body has less mass to carry, and less tissue to feed. Hence, if cooking is part of everyday life, the gut can be reduced through evolution, leaving a lighter weight, more energy efficient individual who can hunt better.

Actually ftw The Japanese people are no different to people anywhere else in relation to this. Japanese coming to Kaikoura to watch the sperm whales are just as taken with their majesty as anyone else. They are prime candidates for opposing the whaling. The problem is that most of the Japanese poeple simply have no idea about the wonder of whales or about the damage their government is doing. We need to publicise both.

Paralith said : I also think it's a little unfair that you assign all the greediness in the world to Westerners. I totally agree. You don't even have to look at history. Think of today's leaders. Robert Mugabe has to be one of the most evil individuals on the planet. Mao Zhe Dong lived in luxury while his subjects died of starvation. Ditto for Kim "the dear leader" in North Korea. Idi Amin in Uganda. The military junta in Myanmar, and lots more cases.

To Pioneer I am not quite sure what you mean by empiricism. The correct definition says something like : "The philosophy that the mind has no internal knowledge and all must be collected by experience, experiment and observation." The word 'empirical' refers to data collected by experiment and observation, rather than that internally generated by the mind, or by an equivalent, such as a computer. Empiricism, and the need for empirical as opposed to internally generated data, is utterly basic to science. Data collected by non empirical methods must be treated as highly suspect. In fact, the establishment of modern science began with Francis Bacon, whose great contribution was to require that data be empirical. Before that time, the great hindrance to advancement of knowledge was the principle established by Aristotle 2000 years earlier that logic could be used to deduce all knowledge. Until this was overturned, and people totally focused on empirical data, science could not advance. Of course, any knowledge can be abused by the political process. This is not a fault with science, but one coming from pure human weakness.

CDarwin said : Its the extraordinary measures that I've taken issue with, as well as the notion that the earliest tools must have been weapons. I just don't see any support for that, especially since the earliest stone tools weren't weapons at all, but butchering implements. Looks like you are 'guilty' of the nefarious crime of being human. Like most of us, you read into my statements a bit more than I said. I did not say that the earliest tools were weapons, or suggest any extraordinary measures. Merely that Australopithecus could not have survived a plains existence without some kind of weapon. I don't think we have any clear data on what the earliest tools were. If you are correct that Australopithecus did not live on or hunt food on the plains, then my information is out of date. Both the 'Walking with Cavemen' TV series, and at least one Scientific American article stated that they did, but new information may have rendered that obsolete.

To CDarwin Here is my original posting on this subject. I don't think I have softened my view. Do you remember the 'Walking with Cavemen' television series? They had this ridiculous bit about Australopithecus afarensis. The one metre high upright ape apparently lived in the African plains. As such, it would be prone to predation by big cats. The TV series said that it resisted this predation through social grouping. Togetherness to drive off the sabre tooth giant cats. Yeah right! I immediately visualised a bunch of, say 100 Australopithecus being stalked by a Smilodon. The big cat would simply walk up to the bunch - grab an individual - and return again every time it was hungry. Within a few months the apes would be gone. However, if we alter the picture a wee bit, everything changes. Imagine that our ancestors instead are carrying long wooden branches, with points on the end. Smilodon walks up and is confronted by a porcupine of sharp spears. The Australopithecus wielding these spears stab viciously at the cat, and drive it off. Survival through the use of tools and weapons. Admitting I was mistaken about Smilodon, I do not think my view has changed. I still cannot see how a relatively vulnerable species could survive on the African plains without weapons. I appreciate that you claim that Australopithecus was a dweller of the forest edge rather than the open plains. However, they are still supposed to have hunted food on the plains, which would render them vulnerable. I picked the idea of wooden spears rather than clubs simply because they seem more formidable weapons to me.

What is science? Science is a process. By analogy : Compare science to building. Joe is a builder. A builder is a person who builds. Building is a process. The result of the building process is houses. Jack is a scientist. A scientist is a person who practices science. Science is a process. The result of this process is theories, models and what some people call scientific 'facts'.

Just an interesting observation on race. We are all supposed to be descendents from Africans. About 55,000 years ago, all our ancestors diverged from the one home base. An interesting genetic observation is that people today of recent African descent have more diverse genomes than those of other 'races' such as white European or Chinese Asian. This is supposed to be the reason why people of recent African origin are disproportionately represented in top class sportspeople, such as olympic runners. Since the genetic normal distribution curve is wider in those of recent African descent, there will be more at the top end of exceptional sportspeople. Of course, if this is true, there will also be more at the other end of the curve. I cannot comment on whether this is true of intelligence. If so, we will discover over time that Africans have a disproportionate number of geniuses, plus a disproportionate number of those of very low intelligence.

It strikes me that Pioneer's comments were actually about the quality of data in science. Studies result in data that can be excellent, or very poor. Good science requires that we identify how good or how bad that data is. A major problem comes from the fact that the media often takes study results that are, in fact, very poor data, and splashes the possibly erroneous conclusions across headlines. This is a big problem in epidemiology, which is the science that Pioneer's tobacco example comes from. It is quite common for studies in epidemiology to result in data that can be challenged. It is also very common for the results to be reported in magazines/TV etc in ways that are ridiculous.