Tenchimaru Draconis wrote on 01-30-2004 02:58 AM:
<img src=“http://www.rpgclassics.com/staff/tenchimaru/td.gif”> Do you still have your huge anti-aquatic ape theory thread somewhere? I can’t find it, so I think it was pre-purge. It somehow came up during our Database class (new teacher), and I’d like to prove the teacher wrong, but I don’t exactly recall all the points you made.
No I don’t. But I can give you a rant if you want.
Here are quick points for now and as a note, I teach evolutionary biology for the dept tutoring service at my university and I’m planning on getting an MD or MD PhD. I have a 3.8/4.0 GPA.
There are 3 conditions for evolution by natural selection (which is how you get things going quickly): there has to be variation in phenotype, there has to be a change in survivorship and fecundity due to a specific phenotype and the phenotype has to be heritable. This has 2 consequences, the mean phenotype of the parents will differ from that of the generation and the mean phenotype of the offspring will resemble that of the parents more than that of the parents’ entire generation. Though evolution can occur quickly, it will only do so if the variation is already there, a trait to start selecting for. If the trait has to evolve, it’ll take a loooooooooooooong time because individuals carrying a trait gradually outbreed individuals without the trait over potentially dozens of generations. And generational times for humans are pretty long, so evolution doesn’t move very quickly on us.
For evolution to occur under these conditions, you need to have REALLY powerful selection (ie live or die by the trait) and you have to have the variation for the traits. The aquatic ape shit had a lot of people with it and a lot of it is that it made no sense according to these lines and selectively ignored a lot of facts and common sense. It essentially said that somehow we developped AND lost gills within a very quick amount of time, we’re hairless individuals, there’s a gap of a few million years in the fossil record and a few other things that made no sense.
So let’s think about it: how powerful can selection be against the fact we have hair if we are to become aquatic? For evolution to occur quickly, it needs to weed out people that have hair. Is that such a big deal? No because there are still a lot of hairy people in society. Sure we might not all be as hairy as orangutangs, but there is a gradation of hairiness within society. I’ve seen some asian girls that have practically no hair, I’ve seen some men of European descent that did look like fucking gorillas. The fact we vary across species doesn’t necessarily have profound implications. Things can occur by “neutral” evolution by a process called genetic drift. Genetic drift refers to chance. Things happen because they do. That’s all there is to it.
Furthermore, let’s take a look at other sea animals: ok, most don’t have hair, they’re fish. The secrete stuff to make themselves more aerodynamic. However, let’s take a look at sea otters. They’re hairy as all fuck. They didn’t lose their hairinessby becoming aquatic and they play key roles in controling mussel populations and preserving coastal ecosystems. If you can find reasons why being hair would necessarily be a phenomenally bad thing, go ahead. Good luck!
Furthermore, let’s look at other aquatic traits (or lack of). Open a book that has pictures of whale fins and human hands. We’re both mammals and somewhere WAY down the line we had a common ancestor. Selection essentially favored a different reorganization of the bones. We all have the same bones, but they have different shapes and funtion. Even cat paws if you want to look at it. They’ve evolved to fit the requirements These structures have what is called “homology”. For us to have become efficient aquatic organisms, we would’ve needed similar structures. But this theory said that somehow we gained AND lost these structures within a few million years. They have no proof to support that statement. Furthermore, we also have to look at the structures we DO know we have: our hip structure is made for upright walking. We evolved over millions of years to be nomads, to be able to cross long distances. Nothing about it is made for swimming.
So there is a gap in the fossil record. Big deal. That’s what science is for. We’ve been investigating this for a far smaller time than other sciences and the problem with this study is that you can’t conduct lab experiments. You’re stuck looking for fossils in parts of Africa and across the world to find settlements of NOMADS. There are regions of Africa that are known to have a high fossil record. Have fun going there buddy, there’s been civil wars everywhere for decades. It kinda sends scientists scurriying around so they don’t get killed. One such region is Ethiopia. Furthermore, dating techniques are also limited, causing a variety of issues when you want to precisely figure out how old something is. When you do radioactive dating, you can use radioactive Argon and radioactive carbon and look at the half life,etc etc… Well if just so happens these compounds have specific optimal ranges of time that don’t match too well with the period we evolved in. Speaking of homologous structures, human evolution is often judged by the shape and size of the cranium and the shape of the hips. The hips of people look VERY different from those of aquatic mammals. You can go look at pictures. A blue whale probably has hips as big as ours. A blue whale weighs several more tons and is over a couple dozen feet long. It is not proportional. Also, our spine is made as a giant shock absorber. People with abnormal curvatures of the spine get fucked. It is greatly unlikely ALL these traits experienced great amounts of selection for their loss AND regain.
As for gills, I think that’s self explanatory. Water has to move across gills for fish. If it doesn’t you’re fucked and you choke. That would mean had we had gills, we would’ve needed to be in continuous motion after having magically evolved gills. Some people like to look at pharyngeal gill slits in developping embryos. Those are archaic traits and they don’t stick around beyond the embryo and I highly doubt cats and bears also had aquatic phases (its a vertebrate development thing). Furthermore, if you wanted to move continuously under water, you would’ve needed a lot of red muscle (red = high mitochondrial content) to be able to make sure you don’t get tired. However, which muscles would those be in our body? Not the ones that would’ve helped us swim. Though muscle may always seem red because of blood flowing through it, there are specific types of muscles cells we have and we all have them in different quantities. Its why some people are better suited for sprints and others for marathons. It doesn’t make sense there’s this much variation within the world since we all should’ve been running marathons. Also, even without gills, if you wanna be aquatic like a whale, you’d still need to move it so you don’t drown. And this doesn’t even go into details about how the HELL you escape predators OR catch prey. A population kinda does need to sustain itself and keep from dying. So how would you explain human social behavior under such a setting? There are lot of problems that arise when you start talking about this. How does a woman undergo childbirth under oceanic conditions, especially considering her hip structure which was built for upright walking? Anyone who answers such questions has no basis for that because they have no proof to support their claims.
1 more thing before I go because I have stuff to do (though I’ll say more later if you want me to): ocean fish and fresh water fish can’t be switched around. We have this thing called an osmotic balance in our cells. Put a cell in a high salt environment, by osmosis, it’ll shrivel. Put it in a less salty environment, it’ll swell if not explode. Osmosis is how water crosses semipermeable membranes to reach an equilibrium. Salt water fish thus evolved to have a higher salt concentration in their blood and a few other things. For example, the reason you have to bleed sharks immediately after capturing is that urea they have in their blood will spoil the meat. The urea is there to make the blood more concentrated. It saves them from dehydration. Similarly, fresh water fish don’t have a highly concentrated blood because they’d become over hydrated. So how do humans figure in all this? Were we aquatic in the sea? If so, how did we survive the aquatic conditions? Hell what was our source of water? You need to drink a lot of water as a human to survive and replenish that which lost. So did we live in ponds in the savannah? Go take a look at what the African savannah looks like. Tell me which pond we could’ve stayed in for millions of years. And this doesn’t even touch the migratory patterns that we have observed.
I gotta go. If you want more, as I said, ask.
-Sin
Does anyone else have the link to that shithole theory so I can bash it some more?
