CDarwin

Ok, I freely admit that I am but the layest of amateurs at these things, but I have a problem. Sure, but doesn't AA also require: Now where is the evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, to support that? Plenty of apes live along streams and lakes today, and during that massive Miocene hominoid radiation I'm sure some lived beside the ocean too. Does evidence to support half a hypothesis count as supporting all of it? The question is honestly not just rhetorical.

Thank you, very informative.

That's just what happened with recapitulation, as Gould relates. It started with whole organisms being recapitulated and ended with only one organ or another being recapitulated before the idea was "rejected." I really like Gould's "classification by process." That impressed me a lot in the book, and you can spot fallacies that result from classification by result in other places.

Well if you want to get nitpicky, I don't think its right to say humans were partially adapted to water; we would be fully adapted to a life partially in water. An omnivore isn't an imperfect carnivore, and an edge species isn't an imperfect forest species. They have specific adaptations to a specific mode of life. There's more than just a lack of fossil evidence, though. There are also no modern aquatic primates that can be looked to. Bonobos wade when crossing streams but they don't live like that and they're not obligate bipeds because of it. The most aquatic species are swimming monkeys like talapoins that have few similarities to humans. I take your second point, though. There are three questions I have concerning Aquatic Ape (I'm not saying these haven't been answered, I'm just curious): What did human ancestors eat as aquatic mammals? I don't see Homo erectus swimming down a salmon. Shellfish? Algae? Why did our ancestors leave the water and when?

One of my favorite race quotes, from Evolutionary Anthropology, my pen died before I could get the author: "Race is a cultural construct with historical, biological, and anthropological elements: Its mix difffers for each person, probably in ways he or she is not even aware of." Humans vary gradually across the planet, any attempt to split them up biologically into "races" or even "ethnicities" or any other euphemism is inherently arbitrary.

Stephen Jay Gould uses "Darwinism" quite a bit. It's a kind of evolution: evolution driven purely by selection, as opposed to deterministic evolution or random things like genetic drift and mutation (which natural selection can then act upon, but their effect on the gene pool is evolution in itself). The term is used a lot outside of biology too, but that's not very important.

One of my biggest problems with Aquatic Ape (other than the whole no evidence thing): Human breathing. We breath down the same tube we drink, it's a necessary result of the arrangement of the throat for speech. That has an unfortunate effect of leaving us vulnerable to choking; not very adaptive for aquatic life. Not that aquadic ape is at all a refutation of Darwinism anyway. It's still adaptation and natural selection. If you want to go into "non-Darwinian" mechanisms of human evolution you'd be looking at Haekel's Biogenic Law or Bolk's Fetalization Theory, both of those concern deterministic changes in development that yield "progressive evolution" independent of selection. I'm not a big fan of savannah theory, either. I kind of like "big forest brachiator." What happens if a gibbon gains 30kg? He startes walking on the ground more. Brachiators live vertically already and walk bipedally. I'm about to get into Stanford's Upright so I'll probably be able to speak a bit more intelligently on the subject soon...

Does anyone have any particular thoughts on its possible importance or frequency in evolution? I just finished Ontogeny and Phylogeny (old but amazing), and its provoked something of a facsination with the subject. I must say I'm a bit skeptical of his neotenic explanation for human evolution, though.