CDarwin

Well, I'd say anyone who wasn't a fan of massive wastes of public funds would be a bit perturbed by that. Especially since 'abstinence education' more-often-than-not (and I've been through it) involves at least 50% of the time devoted to telling kids that contraceptives don't work and are useless. Oh, well, Phi for All pointed that out.

There's a psychology to it, though. All of those things are much more deliberate and seemingly unpleasant than just putting a bullet in your head. I could certainly see why people would be more likely to actually commit suicide if they had a firearm handy, though whether that justifies general restrictions is another matter.

I don't know, maybe it's just how I think. I wouldn't say that there was any reason for the quadrupedal locomotion of the early tetrapods. You just had animals that happened to be pretty well preadapted for it, crossyptergian fish, in a particular ecological environment, pools on the shores of shallow oceans. Quadrupedalism happens.

Quite a substantial difference. Putting weight on the front limbs predisposes an entirely different posture than putting weight on the hind limbs. You can think of it two ways, in terms of balance and in terms of a gradation between a hand-stand and walking upright. In a hand-stand all the weight is on the front limbs, in a baboon the majority of it is, in an ape a minority of it is, and in an upright human none of it is. Also think about trying to balance yourself standing upright if most of you weight bearing muscles were in your upper body. It would be impossible. In apes the weight-bearing muscles are already in the lower body, as they are in humans. It works both ways, too. Just as a quadrupedal monkey would be poorly prepared to evolve the bipedal posture of Australopithecus, an ape would be poorly equipped to adopt the efficient quadrupedal striding of a baboon. The ape would have to shift its body's primary support from its rear to its front, all along the way while experiencing positive selective pressure for these changes. This is quite an evolutionary gauntlet, and seems accordingly unlikely. They have noses of similar length to other colobine monkeys. Female proboscis. Langur of some kind, I believe a Douc langur. Not much difference between the two. The female proboscis nose isn't any more significant that male nipples. It's not that important what the proboscis nose is used for though, since the human nose projects as it does as a simple consequence of the foreshortening of the face. When you bring an ape's jaw in, there's nowhere for the nose to go but to jut out. Holding your neck up doesn't count as bipedality, nor does the standing upright for short periods that otters might do when many other terrestrial weasels (think meercats) do it much better. Our feet aren't flipper shaped in any meaningful way. What they are is perfectly designed (down to the position of the toes) to give a surface to launch the body forward with each stride. The only thing our feet show any especial adaptation to is good, bipedal locomotion. On land. And the early australopithecine feet that have been found don't look like flippers either. They look like ape feet that have been jerry-rigged for efficient, bipedal locomotion. Any encounters with water during this evolution was by all appearances irrelevant to this trasformation. We never needed a stage where our bodies were preadapted by an aquatic lifestyle, the ape foot itself had enough plasticity to serve as the beginnings of a fine biped extremity. Promising to explain lots and lots of things and then offering piteous support is no virtue of a scientific theory. It may sell books, but that's about all. All of those (or most, at least) are perfectly theoretically valid, but I think it would be safer to say they were possible selective pressures reinforcing bipedalism, rather than its reason. Well, we have to agree there. That's why the savanna hypothesis isn't widely accepted by anthropologists today.

I've always, personally at least, been made the double standard progressives often apply to religion in the public sphere. Creationism is ignorant bunk, certainly, but is Martin Luther King's religious objections to segregation? The Social Gospel movement deeply influenced modern progressivism as a whole. *shrugs*

The future of science fiction is on cable, I'm inclined to think. Networks just don't have the courage and the sticking power to do really ground-breaking work in that genre. I'm thinking of Battlestar Galactica big time, here. That show wouldn't have lasted two episodes on any network but Fox, where it would have played for a season before they canceled it for no reason.

There was a good article in the New Scientist about this. I'd have to find it. Unfortunately I don't remember enough to really communicate anything I 'learned' from it. I do remember that dolphins and whales actually have 'signature' songs that they use to identify themselves. I found that interesting. Oh, and generally primates don't like music, and the quieter and slower the better. Primates make very few noises that don't encode something specifically in their social setting. They are warnings or designed to elicit comfort, play, some other specific idea. That might be an important context to understand human singing. Where birds may sing simply to impress a mate or rival, primate sounds seem much more geared toward illiciting emotion in conspecifics, and that would seem to apply our songs as well.

A stick is still pretty much a stick, and they aren't really rare enough so that the perfect form is going to be worth evolving a whole new mode of locomotion just to hang onto for a few extra months. Good thing they didn't move out onto the savanna until Homo erectus. Apes don't walk like baboons, though. Baboons stride much like cats or dogs, putting a preponderance of their weight on the front limbs. Apes put most of their weight on their hind limbs and live a surprising amount of their time upright in trees. And it's amongst the trees that bipedalism probably evolved. Male proboscis monkeys have an pendulous nose, probably as a result of sexual selection. If this is an adaptation for swimming, females seemed to have missed the boat. Or rather not missed the boat, I suppose. I've never seen anything about them regularly walking upright. They have a fairly upright posture in the trees, but so do all colobine monkeys. It would seem much more likely that being upright was a preadaptation for swimming, rather than swimming was a preadaptation for being upright. I'm also not sure what structure of the human nose you're referring too. I get that all of them have hind-limbs that point more-or-less back away from the body (otters not so much). But the point is that even though they have this body arrangement, they all still walk quadrupedally on land. We're not swimming around typing on this message board, we're on land. So if aquatic ape is going to be able to refer to the body arrangements of truly aquatic animals as evidence, those arrangements are going to have to translate into a locomotion vaguely human-like while on land. Instead, we have seals that flop, otters that run like the weasels they are, cetaceans that just die, and penguins that waddle inefficiently (even if they are 'upright'). You (or someone, rather) will have to find some actual fossil or archaeological evidence. And then you would refer to it, and I would feel very sheepish and bemused. But not today! Which I can say with confidence since you probably won't post again today.

There's a difference between dog food and a leaf, though.

But there's not really any evidence of that. Early hominids (like Australopithecus) didn't even venture out into plains as such, only reasonably open woodland. It seems much more likely that bipedalism evolved primarily in a forest environment, being as that's where the Miocene apes lived and that's where the very earliest hominids have been found. And you're right, there were probably lots of little things. I had this clearer in my mind yesterday as I was walking the dog but I didn't have a computer then to share my brilliant thoughts with the world, but basically... You can think up this little selection pressure and that little selection pressure and any of them may very well have contributed to the evolution of bipedalism (although savanna based notions are somewhat suspect), but note that any of them should apply to any species. That should tell us that what really matters in the evolution of bipedalism, what really made the difference, were specific and serendipitous ecological conditions in the late Miocene and the group of apes that just happened to be best preadapted to take advantage of them by strengthening bipedal movement. What came before bipedalism is much more important to understanding it than what was happening during its evolution. Chimps will hang on to tools, actually. They'll carry them in their mouths or in one hand. It hasn't made them bipedal yet, probably because they don't really move that much, and even if you loose a really great stick, a pretty great one will do the job about as well. Patas monkeys actually do that intentionally. The males are big and red and generally pretty conspicuous, but they're also the fastest primates in the world. Their function in the group is to catch the attention of predators and run like, well, a patas monkey, to draw them away from the females and young hiding in the grass. I'm not really sure what the mortality rate is. EDIT: Actually, when I think about what a scarecrow actually is, patas monkeys don't do that... But it's still an interesting anecdote from the world of primatologica. I don't know, early hominids weren't that big or that smart. I certainly don't think I'd want to go up against a lion with a pointy stick, even if I did have some buddies. That was Raymond Dart's idea, the discoverer of Australopithecus africanus, by the way. So you're not in bad company.

As individuals, maybe, but early hominids almost certainly moved in groups. In a group it works fine to have individuals periodically pop up, scan and then go back down as you're moving. I believe in the army they call that bounding reconnaissance. Maybe you can catch me on this, but I'd think the selective preference would be to remain inconspicuous over remaining vigilant. If you're a primate out on the grassland and you see a lion, what are you going to do? Run for the tree-line? Try and scare it off? Either might work but I'd say you'd be better off if the lion never saw you at all. There's also a question of how far into grasslands early hominids really ventured. As long as you stick to open woodland, then best way to survey your environment is always going to be scampering up a tree. Some of the earliest hominids that have been discovered, like Ardipithecus ramidus, were discovered in what appear to have been full-blown forests, so savanna-based explanations are becoming more tenuous as open environments seem to have been at most only a part of the range occupied by early hominids. That's another solution that's been proposed, but again it doesn't really explain efficient bipedal movement. A lot of primates can stand up, but not a lot can move that way for long distances. I'm sorry I'm being mostly negative in this thread, but I don't think that bipedalism really something that has a simple, positive, clean, answer. It just kind of happened at some point toward the end of the Miocene, probably beginning in the forest, and then suddenly became the object of selective refinement.

C++ valiantly killed my high school GPA. But I did "use" it there for a while. cout<<"I hate you C++"

I don't mean "Marxist" as a criticism, necessarily, or mean to relate it to political Marxism. It's just a philosophical way of approaching and analyzing history. EDIT: Maybe I should have said "Marxian." That's what a lot of "Marxist" ("Marxian") historians prefer.

What were, for you, the hardest classes you took in the pursuit of your biology/bioscience-typed major? Now this is probably going to differ wildly between individuals and between different schools, but I'm just curious if any general patterns emerge.

But that doesn't really explain permanent bipedal movement. Standing above tall grass to look out for predators is fine, bit it also means you're much more visible to predators themselves. Walking upright makes you constantly so. Chimpanzees will simply stand up in place for short periods to see over grass (vervet monkeys have a much more amusing tactic, they bound through tall grass so that can see when they're up on their arc), and that serves them fine, so it would seem as though watching for predators couldn't be the prime motivation for evolving a whole new way of moving around.

Does anyone else notice how Marxist the "Iraq was over oil" argument is? I'm saying its illegitimate because of that or anything. After all, I don't think Alan Greenspan is a raving Marxist. But still, it's Marx's basic logic. Economics is the primary determinate of the course of nations; capitalist economies expand until they exhaust their markets and natural resources; they then must fight wars to access new markets and natural resources. Probably neither here nor there.

Uhm, there might also be some pretty obvious teeth issues, as well as muscular issues, skeletal structure issues, metabolism issues, issues of vitamin and nutrient synthesis, protein issues... I'm also not totally convinced of the point.

And of course the bloodiest conflict since WWII was the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was tied in with Rwanda. It killed 4 million, and I suppose machetes might have been involved there.

I know Tennessee militias were actively engaged in Indian wars. Andrew Jackson actually led the state militia in a full scale (relative to Indian wars) invasion of Chickasaw lands. So, some were better armed than others.

Does that include up-front costs? (I'm assuming it doesn't include collateral costs from environmental impact, which would vary from generation site to generation site in any event.)

The world is actually more peaceful today than it ever has been, in fact. Global deaths in warfare have been declining almost uniformly since World War II. Not relevant to the discussion, though. Another interesting possible fact: The weapon that has killed the most people in the last 50 years has been the machete. I read that somewhere at least. Could be completely made up.

I think you're forgetting a pretty major one, there... He got a few more votes that Ron Paul, too. But, yeah, the evangelical movement had very liberal beginnings, both socially and (relatively speaking) theologically. It's not, by its character, particularly suited to a monolithic conservativism. Evangelicalism is a revitalization movement, with a heavy focus on individual connection to God and letting his word and spirit alone guide decisions. The more radical and engaged young Evangelicals are, as the Christian youth movement has succeeded in doing quite well, the more likely some of them are going to feel led by the spirit to do things like help the poor and stop wars, and what-not. Christians are closer to hippies than you'd think.

I've wanted an axolotl ever since I read Ontogeny and Phylogeny. I don't know if they'd qualify as "fish" for the purposes of my dorm, though. That's an interesting question. Are amphibians related to lobe fined fish more closely than lobe fined fish are related to radial fined fish? If they are, I'm protesting on the basis that they've made a rule based on a parapheletic taxon. Edit: Aha! I found out. They are.

Quite a bit if we're talking about the present course of human evolution, especially in Western countries. Again, contraceptives. I'd have to agree with iNow, Paralith is pretty much the winner of this discussion in terms of the quality of her articulation of the issue. I defer to everything she just said.

But consider, as PhDp did, birth control. Would modern hypermales really want children, especially with the woman they were having affairs with?