Being yet another excerpt from the ongoing project that is The Beowulf Effect: Fossils, Evolution and the Human Condition. This part concerns the evolution of bipedality. Why, precisely, did humans get up on their hind legs and walk? I think it’s all about sex, as things so often are.
It happened a long time ago but the experience was so traumatic that I remember it as if it were yesterday – the moment when the outraged, elderly professor pinned me against a wall and harangued me for having rejected his paper on why human beings got up on their hind legs and walked. Human beings became bipeds, yelled the Prof, to free the hands so that mothers could cuddle infants close to their chests. How could I have had the temerity, screamed the empurpled sage, to have rejected a paper that made so much sense?
One of the problems with human evolution, as opposed to – say – rocket science – is that everybody feels that their opinion has value irrespective of their prior knowledge (the outraged academic in the encounter above was a scientist, but not a biologist, still less an evolutionary biologist.) It’s obvious to see why – we are all human beings, and we are all bipeds, so we think we know all about it, intuitively. What we think about bipedality ‘stands to reason’. Now, I’d be the last to disparage anyone who wanted to express an opinion, however cockeyed, but it is sometimes the case that the most perplexing problems are those that seem the simplest at first sight.
It is always a wonder to me that there is still much to be discovered about something so screamingly obvious as the way we humans walk. However, much about human walking is squarely in the realms of the known unknown. Why, for example, do we walk the way we do? Why, when moving faster than a certain speed, do we start to run? Why do we walk at all, when other animals get by perfectly well on all fours? These and other such questions are still being debated by scientists. I remember publishing a research paper showing that there was a perfectly feasible gait, somewhere between walking and running, that people never used. I enjoyed demonstrating the gait to my colleagues, as if it were something out of the famous Monty Python sketch about the Ministry of Silly Walks. We might not know the arcane secrets of the universe, but we are all perfectly familiar with walking and running, so how could there be a third, distinct gait, available all the time for our use, and we somehow missed it?
As anyone who has watched a cruising toddler will attest, simply the act of standing up on two feet requires a great degree of control, and scientists still have a great deal to learn about how this is achieved – and this is with modern human subjects who can be watched and their activities measured. And even after all this, robots that can walk with anything like the natural grace of a human have yet to be built. How much harder it is to learn much about how bipedality evolved, still less why. The very fact of bipedality remains a taxing problem for those versed in fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, mechanical engineering and robotics. It’s not the easy problem that people so often imagine.
The common-or-garden explanations put forward by armchair theorists tend to avoid the problems that engage serious scientists – problems of energetics, and posture, and balance, and anatomy, and neuromuscular control – in other words anything that might require some actual scientific training and a facility with at least the basics of mechanics – and cut to the chase of why the ancestors of humans became bipedal. These explanations are invariably teleological. That is, they are driven by some inherent purpose or striving, in the manner of Lamarck – or, indeed, of the popular model of evolution as ‘progressive’.
For example, humans got up so that they could free their hands in order to make tools; or in order to cuddle babies close to their chest; or in order to see longer distances; or in order to live better in open country rather than in forests, as our ape cousins still do. All such arguments are easily demolished – many animals make tools, irrespective of whether they have hands; non-human animals of all sorts have no problem cosseting their young close to their chests; many animals are tall, or can make themselves so, without being bipeds; many large primates such as baboons live in open country and do so on all fours without extravagant distress. So why should bipedality be in any way remarkable, a qualitative advance over what other animals can achieve? Why not stay on four legs and evolve longer legs? Or longer necks? Why not evolve jumping or hopping?
Another idea is that bipedality evolved in order to make it easier for people to keep cool in hot climates. A biped presents a much smaller cross-section to the Sun – just the top of the head rather than the whole body. The rest of the body, not pointing sunwards, is thus free to radiate away any excess heat. This idea makes sense, in part, because it seeks to explain a suite of other features of humans that don’t immediately seem connected with bipedality. Features such as our relative hairlessness, and the presence of large numbers of sweat glands in our skin. Taken together, you can see how a creature with exposed skin and plenty of sweat glands could have stood up in a breeze to cool off – an advantage in the hot, dry climates of Africa in which the human lineage is thought to have evolved.
This all seems fine, except that there are lots of other animals that live in hot climates that are both quadrupedal and very furry. The problem is that you can come up with any number of other ideas that ‘explains’ any suite of features you choose; all of which have much to recommend them, and none of which can be shown to have any more scientific validity than any other. Just come up with a scenario, and then cherry-pick the features of modern humans you need to make the theory work, and ignore any others.
An example of this kind of approach is the ‘aquatic ape’ theory, promoted for many years by Elaine Morgan. Morgan selects a range of features of modern human physiology and behaviour to suggest that there was once a period in human evolution during which humans were aquatic – that is, lived in and around water, and became adapted to an aquatic environment in a way that our close ape cousins did not. This idea is perhaps the most developed of all the various ideas I have described as teleological, and the subject of several books that have gained a degree of respectable support.
The anatomy of humans is peculiar in many ways relative to that of apes. Humans are much fattier than apes, and are much less hairy. In contrast to almost all other primates, humans are capable swimmers, and newborn babies appear to have an inborn capacity for swimming. In these respects humans are less like apes than – say – seals and other aquatic mammals, which are relatively fatty and hairless, compared with their purely terrestrial cousins. Humans, in contrast with apes, have historically eaten a lot of seafood, a diet that offers minerals and fatty acids essential for development – especially for the brain and nervous system – but otherwise hard to come by unless humans once spent a great deal of time in and around water.
There is a lot more to the ‘aquatic ape’ idea than that, of course, but from this brief description you can, I expect, already identify some flaws. The first is that it’s always a problem identifying features that humans have now and inferring that they must have had some adaptive value in the past. It’s entirely true that humans seem to have an unusual fondness for seafood – but we still do, and it remains an important part of our diet. But we humans also consume an extraordinary range of foodstuffs compared with other animals. What of body fat and hairlessness? If they were once selectively advantageous for water-loving humans, why are we still relatively fatty and less hairy than other apes? Presumably other factors have come into play that might have nothing in particular to do with an aquatic stage in our history.
Second, it’s notoriously hard to infer habits from anatomical structure. If a busload of Martian anatomists came across the skeleton of a goat, the one who said that goats would be good at climbing trees would be laughed out of town. With their long, spindly legs and complete lack of grasping hands or feet or tail, you’d think that goats could climb trees as handily as fish can ride bicycles. However, it so happens that goats are surprisingly good at climbing trees. Professor Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago told me a story about a drive in Morocco, during which he and the other passengers noticed a tree in the distance that had been colonised by what looked like large birds. Vultures, maybe. As they got closer, it became clearer that the birds were in fact a herd of goats that filled the entire tree from the trunk to he outermost twigs.
The relative hairlessness of humans is complicated, however, by sex. It’s easy to say that being relatively fatty and less hairy might be a sign of aquatic ancestry, but this doesn’t explain why human females are very much fattier and less hairy than human males. In addition, men become more hirsute as they mature. Morgan uses this difference to her advantage in a book called The Descent of Woman, exposing her views as in part politically motivated as well as allowing them to fall into the trap of the myth of progression. Women are fattier and less hairy than men because they are more ‘evolved’. However, sex differences in fat content and hairlessness are intriguing and beg explanation. Their presence might even shed light on why we humans are bipeds.
Jared Diamond suggests that relative hairlessness, combined with differences in fat distribution, might be connected with what Darwin called sexual selection. This is the tendency for the different sexes to exhibit their own traits which they use to attract the attentions of the opposite sex. The most famous example is the peacock with his extravagant tail, which he displays to attract the attentions of the much less extravagantly endowed peahens. Sexual selection arises because males and females contribute different amounts to the next generation. Typically, a male will contribute sperm, which are easy and cheap to make in large quantities, and will seek to inseminate as many females as possible. Females, on the other hand, contribute eggs, which are expensive to make and rare, and so will have much more at stake. This is why males are showy, and females are choosy – females make a much greater investment in the next generation, so have more to lose if this investment isn’t recouped in terms of numbers of strong, healthy offspring. It is incumbent on males, therefore, to demonstrate to females that they would be appropriate mates, usually by some proxy such as a display (showy plumage, mating calls and so on) that illustrate their suitability.
Sexual selection is a vibrant subject of study in modern evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biologists are still arguing about what, it is, precisely, that choosy females are selecting in prospective mates. We know that birds (say) suffering from parasitism or disease looker drabber and more droopy than those in the peak of health. Is showy plumage therefore a reliable mark of a healthy genetic constitution? Does a sports car, an indicator of high status or a fat bank balance, mark a man as a better potential mate than had he been seen riding a rusty bicycle? This is the ‘good genes’ idea – females choose males based on signs of good general health.
Or is the association of a showy male trait somehow linked – perhaps by chance, to begin with – with female choosiness for that particular trait, reinforcing one another down the generations? This is the ‘runaway process’ first elaborated by the brilliant geneticist and statistician Ronald A. Fisher. Peacock tails confer no obvious advantage on a peacock apart from attracting peahens, but why the elaborate tail rather than (say) a mating call, as in nightingales; or the construction of a bower, as in bower-birds? The answer could be that the male display trait – perhaps entirely random to begin with – has become linked, genetically, with the female preference for that trait. Successful partners have male offspring that display the trait strongly, and daughters that are strongly attracted to that trait, so that the two traits have become reinforced down the generations. Initially, there is no reason why the selected trait has any selective advantage at all, and its choice might be completely fortuitous.
Irrespective of its internal mechanics, nobody doubts that sexual selection exists. Here, by way of making my own contribution to the shuddering pile of teleological arguments that purport to explain why humans are bipedal, I’d like to suggest how sexual selection might have played its part. I’m not suggesting it’s correct, nor that it’s original.
Still less would I pin anyone against a wall and shout at them about it.
If standing upright does one thing, it exposes one’s breasts or genitalia to full view – especially if one has relatively little fur, and no clothes. No other ape is as habitually bipedal or as hairless as humans, and these features might be connected with another human peculiarity, that human females do not show any physical sign of when they are in oestrus – ‘in heat’ – that is, sexually receptive such that sex has a high probability of producing offspring. Other apes are not only hairy and quadrupedal, but their females make it perfectly obvious when they are in heat, by displaying large swellings in the genital area. The breasts of ape females are also tiny, covered with fur, and swell only when they are pregnant or lactating. When apes mate, they do so in full view of other apes.
Oestrus in human females is concealed, even from the female herself. No external sign betrays when a human female is more or less likely to conceive. In addition, the breasts of human females are more or less prominent at all times, and the fact of hairlessness makes them more prominent still. Being bipedal makes breasts more obvious even as oestrus is concealed.
It remains a mystery why oestrus is concealed in humans – just as it is not obvious why humans tend to have sex in private. The usual explanations concern the tendency in humans to be monogamous and form stable pair-bonds, but this argument has its flaws. Human societies are particularly variable as regards their mating systems – polygamy is widespread – and even when societies are nominally monogamous, both males and females cheat on their partners (what scientists call ‘extra-pair copulations’) more frequently than polite society admits.
In these respects human sexual habits have more in common with nesting birds than those of apes. Much work on nesting birds shows complex multigenerational family structures reminiscent of human ones, including the tendency to overt monogamy and covert extra-pair copulation – which by definition happens in private. Like birds, humans are prone to elaborate sexual display by males with consequent choosiness by females, and evidence has also come to light that in birds, females use their own appearances and behaviour not just to attract males, but to compete with other females – another notable human trait which I shall discuss again later. All this aside, it seems possible that bipedality is related to hairlessness, sexual display – particularly the display of breasts – and the still unsolved problem of the concealment of oestrus in females.
How is this related to sexual selection? Let’s look more closely at the secondary sexual characteristics of humans inasmuch as they relate to body fat and hairlessness. As any middle-aged male reader will know, males are in generally rather lean, and if fat starts to accumulate, it is round the gut and internal organs, and then generally after a male has done all his reproducing. Females, though, even when young, are much fattier than males – some 25% of a woman’s body weight is fat, compared with 15% in a man. Body fat in women is spread all over, just under the skin (‘subcutaneous’), and one effect of this is that the skins of females are on average paler in tone than the skins of males of similar ethnic background. Apart from that, fat deposits in females are concentrated in the upper arms, breasts, thighs and buttocks. This difference in fat deposition leads to very obvious differences in appearance and it seems likely that they have some connection with sexual selection. The historical male preference for plump, rounded women with ample emboinpoint is proverbial, from the Venus figurines of the Palaeolithic to the luscious nudes of Titian, Rubens or Renoir. It might be suggested that standards of beauty are in part conditioned by culture. For example, contemporary ‘western’ standards of female attractiveness tend to emphasize a leaner physique, so does the conventional picture of amply bosomed women have more to do with changing cultural norms than a more general, more ingrained tendency? A recent study of Peruvian men unexposed to western media showed that their idea of feminine attractiveness was strongly associated with fat. They preferred women with big breasts and behinds. Those men who had moved to urban centres, and who had been exposed to western advertising, festooned as it is in slender models, tended to find slimmer women more attractive.
It’s easy to find pat answers to such preferences. Historically, fatness in women has been associated with reproductive success. Women with more fat would have the nutritional reserves necessary to nurture a fetus to term, and nurse it afterwards. In the past, and in traditional societies, to be thin was to be ill – suffering from some threatening disease such as tuberculosis, or laboring under a large parasitic load. It’s easy to see why men have traditionally found fatter women attractive. Only today, when nutritional resources are more abundant and less episodic, is fatness seen as a disadvantage.
It might also be the case that men are looking for different things in women than women are looking for in one another. Competition between females over appearance has been documented in birds, and in this context it is noteworthy that pictures of slim, attractive women are aimed not just at men (in pornography, for example) but at women – in womens’ magazines, advertisements for beauty products, fashion plates and so on.
If it seems all too easy to find reasons why fat is attractive, it’s harder to understand hairlessness – or, at least, patterns of hair distribution. If humans are generally hairless, they retain hair on their heads, and, when adult, under their armpits and around the genitals. Why? Armpit and genital hair makes sense in terms of devices to trap secretions meant to attract members of the opposite sex, or deter rivals – except that the role of pheromones in human beings is very much an open question. Head hair is another problem entirely. In many cultures, luxuriant head hair is seen as attractive in women, whereas it is common for men to lose much of their head hair in adulthood. What is head hair for? There seems no good, adaptive reason for the presence of hair on the head (as opposed to anywhere else) than sexual selection, and this illustrates how secondary sexual characters need have no adaptive reason except that they are attractive to the opposite sex, very much in tune with Fisher’s ‘runaway process’. This applies as much to the distribution of fat as hair. Consider – why do men find women with pale skin, luxuriant locks and curvaceous figures attractive? One can come up with examples based on nutritional status, but only after the fact. There is no reason, a priori, why gentlemen don’t prefer bald women with hairy ears and enormous feet.
If females standing upright expose their breasts to view, men standing upright expose their penises. The connection between bipedality and penis display seems less fraught than that between bipedality and the hidden oestrus of females. Males are always sexually receptive – their penises do not lengthen and shorten with the seasons. The connection between penis display and sexual selection should be too obvious to underline. And it is a curious fact that the penis of the human male is much larger as a proportion of body mass than that of any other ape. This combination of unusually large size, open display and relative lack of body hair seems to speak loudly of sexual selection – as well as habitual bipedality. It is perhaps noteworthy that there are tribesmen in New Guinea in which the men are naked except for elaborate sheaths worn on the penis that emphasize their presence and exaggerate their size.
This topic touches on another distinctive feature of humans, which is clothing. Conventional explanations for clothing include protection against harsh environments, as well as compensation for lack of body hair (and the two might be related.) Such explanations are, like conventional explanations for bipedality, prone to teleology. To be sure, few will find Inuit parkas, space suits or protective goggles sexy (note that I didn’t write ‘nobody’ – we humans can get turned on by the darndest things, and it remains a known unknown, at least to me, why so many women of my acquaintance are so enraptured by, of all things, shoes) but I suspect that clothing in general is as much about sexual display as anything more utilitarian. The penis sheaths of New Guinea tribesmen conceal as well as emphasize sexual features – just as much as the swimwear displayed by a glamour model; the basque of a burlesque diva; or the bustle and corsetry of a Victorian débutante. I suspect that the evolution and development of clothing is connected with sexual selection, the strange fact of the hidden human oestrus, and, beyond that, bipedality.
If none of that convinces, try this. Sexual selection is distinct from natural selection because, in sexual selection, features can be emphasized which in normal circumstances would be highly maladaptive. The tail of the peacock is just such a feature. Bipedality is another. Standing upright introduces a potential for all kinds of injurious stresses to the head, spine and limbs that simply don’t apply to quadrupeds. Back pain, related directly to bipedality, is probably the single biggest cause of worker absenteeism in the world. Bipedality becomes even more problematic for women during pregnancy, and the evolution of the particular kind of spinal curvature typical of humans can be related to the need for extra lumbar support during pregnancy. To suppose that bipedality evolved ‘for’ some utilitarian reason or another is to belittle the immense changes in bodily form that the human frame underwent simply to stand upright as of habit, and the considerable disadvantages accrued in so doing. Only sexual selection has the power to generate something so maladaptive, so seemingly pointless, as a peacock’s tail – or human bipedality.
Much of the foregoing is written at least in part in jest. I do not claim that bipedality evolved for the purpose of sexual display. The point I am trying to make is one that armchair theorists of bipedality fail to understand – that there can be no simple relationship between a proposed cause and a proposed effect. The consequence of one change has an impact on many other traits or adaptations, until the whole body is affected. In no trait does this seem more true than in bipedality. Bipedality means more than just standing on two legs – it requires the wholesale modification of the body, not all of it very effectively.
Great stuff Henry.
Thank you. Sorry it’s a bit long. The post, I mean.
I’ve never understood why the black person in water sports do not protrude, are not good swimmers and there are very few. I hope not to be misinterpreted ?. If they are excellent in other sport eg. the athletics sing.
It really is a question that I’ve never posed to anyone, is difficult.
It’s probably just a matter of culture and opportunity. To ask the same question in a different way – why are British people excellent at cycling in the Olympics?
Maybe because exist the “Trek Madone Project One”.
(chuckle)
You know maybe, it’s because the origin is the African Savanna habitat and dry environments.
Have I got this right then?
Finding ourselves neck ddep in water, we stood upright so we could keep our heads above the surface and not drown. We then lost our body hair for streamlining, apart from the bits that point down hill, which came in usefull later for drainage. (i recall from Ms Morgan’s books) At the same time, we gained a layer of blubber to keep us warm. – Then we realised that standing up, our hands were free, finding this ideal for fighting off irate professors whilst cuddling babies and fumlbling about looking for erogenous zones under the waterline. – Browned off with this stupid life-style (women not quite as brownwed off as men though because they are whiter) we decided it was time to get back to dry land. – Up until then, penises were shrivelled little things (well mine shrivels swimming in cold water – and the water must have been cold or there’d be no need for blubber) so women were amazed to find that men really had big penises. So they grew bigger breasts not to be outdone – making them more attractive to men with sports cars which women decided went with even bigger – er what’s the word?
So Darwin just hadn’t a clue had he? – He said, and I quote, “It is not well understood that if the male of the species is to attract a female, and at that time of her season when she is most receptive, what is required perforce is a contraption such as is called a bicycle, with a pair of bycicle clips firmly attached around the trouser bottoms.This rarely fails.” – [see The Origin of Species - Chapter 17. The Rutting Male And Its Affinities To The Succession Of Organic Beings. p832.]
Has it not occurred to scientists that the most attractive thing about a women is her smile. And I’m sure she has a different one if she’s in the mood.
On a serious note, sexual selection has a peculiar pedigree. – Darwin only came up with this in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species specifically to counter Henry Fleeming Jenkins’ observation that species seem contained by some sort of limiting boundary.
Malthus too, regarding the efforts of agriculture to produce more abundant crops to feed an ever increasing population said:
“We may be quite sure that among plants, as well as among animals, there is a limit to improvement, though we do not exactly know where it is.”
Fleeming Jenkins pointed to the ‘fact of the day’ – that ‘blending inheritance’ would maintain a mean – that any advantage would be watered down in the next generation – so species would remain stable – that each species had its optimum performance and was stuck to be that way. – He pointed out that, even with selective breeding, race-horse ‘times’ had not significantly improved in two hundred years.
Darwin struggled to counter this, eventually coming up with sexual selection – that if a species variant had sexual advantage along with some other advantageous trait, then it would have double the reason for reproductive success. The advantageous trait would then become prevalent in the species population. – This effectively beat Fleeming Jenkins’ argument that blending inheritance disallowed an evolution marching ever onward to greater advantage and advancement.
The fact is that inheritance is ‘particulate’ not ‘blending’ – so they were both arguing up the wrong tree.
But whilst defeating the ‘blending’ basis of Fleeming Jenkin’s argument, by contriving sexual selection, Darwin had side-stepped the actual obsevation – that species do seem limited to remain as they are. – Of course now we understand more of the balance of performance and physiological limitations.
Never-the-less, it does seem that if you are dog you are obliged to continue to bark.
Rgardless of the fact that Darwin only came up with sexual selection to counter a falsely based argument, and made a new proposal based essentially on the falsehood, it has somehow become a cornerstone – playing some part in Ernst Mayr’s Sexual Isolation definition of species – now being slowly eroded as more exceptions are found and more genetic intricacies are revealed.
What if a peacock has a big tail simply because a peacock has a big tail – and it’s stuck with it..
Has anybody actually done a comprehensive study to check out if a peahen really does consistently prefer the pecock with the biggest tail?
Surely the size of a peacock’s tail has more to do with distracting a predator from the juicy bit, the peacock, than attracting a pea hen to the same juicy bit.
I’ll put my money on it that a peahen mates with a peacock that’s not been eaten – and that regardless of its tail she prefers the peacock with the nicest smile.
I believe that the question in evolution is not why does a trait or an organism survive, but why did those with less or none of the trait die. – In general its all about not being dead.
Connecting standing upright with sexuality then, look for advantage if you must, but condider more a fatal disadvantage. – Intercourse is one act where the pair involved are off their guard so at a disadvantage.- A similar offguard moment is drinking head down in a waterhole. – Goats and sheep mate in seconds – so they are offguard only a short time. Dogs however can be ‘tied’ for twenty minutes – but they perform the awsome trick of turning round back to back (makes me cringe to think about it) whilst they are at it – the result is a double headed dog with teeth at both ends – formidably on guard, whilst they are offguard. – Horses take a while, but a stallion is a fearsome beast when a mare is in season. Of course the trick is to balance the risk with the pleasure – if it wasn’t fun, life would have fizzled out. – Human’s seem to make meal of it to get the most pleasure so its probably a fairly good idea to stand up now and then in the middle of just to see if there’s a lion tiger etc. prowling about. Always bear that in mind – well you never know what you might come up against in Cromer on a dark night. – Of course an upright stance could have evolved so that a man can stand up when he’s finished, wave a fist in the air and shout Geronimo.
I love a teleological argument – they are so easy and no end to the possibities.
Indubitably.
= snigger =
Fascinating!
Oh–I have trouble conjuring up images of the old prof pinning you to the wall…
Perhaps it’s a sexual selection thing Steve.
Henry, as my internal editor never sleeps, and this is an extract, you might like to correct the line “As any middle-aged male reader will know, males are in generally rather lean, and if fat starts to accumulate” in your draft.
Sorry to be dim, but why is this wrong?
Well it’s in generally right.
There’s more, actually. The Prof was a transsexual. I thought s/he was a woman at the time. I was told of the gender issue later.
Ahh, the plot thickens…
I am so confused now.
When is this book coming out? Will it be possible to read it without all the comments?
P.S. Regarding Peacocks, searching PubMed with the three keywords ‘peacock tail size’ results in precisely one hit, a paper entitled “Thin film interference of colloidal thin films.” Which is (a) a bit irrelevant, (b) kind of a redundant title, and (c) coincidentally similar to something my father used to study. But disappointingly not about mate choice in asian fowl.
Of course, what I should have done is gone straight to My Favourite Weekly Scientific Journal Beginning With N, of course:
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110418/full/news.2011.245.html
Which doesn’t answer the question at all, really.
How unlike the home life of our own Dear Queen.
Alejandro – about the transition between wetter, wooded and open, dry environments. Well, that’s probably not true. Some work recently published in a well-known journal shows that there was no marked transition between forested and savannah habitats. The environment around the East African hominid localities has been open (less than 40 per cent wooded) for the past 6 million years. If anything, the environment got more wooded after bipedality evolved, not less. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7358/full/nature10306.html
But, to break into a run from the predator and beasts in open environments was necessary to learn how to run and to use some element to frighten them with the upper extremities. Perhaps the forced circumstances of survival, constitute the bipedalism, as well as, the origen of flight in the birds. Maybe…..
Somebody must have taken the first step, there is always a first and learn.
I remember a project in which participate on ecology in birds in Chiloe with a group of fellow biologists in 1986, at the edge of the shore and view burst of the border of evergreen rainforest at the small deer “Pudu-pudu” pursued by a horde of hunters and their dogs, the pudu what he did- ¿guess what? ….. he ran to the sea and began to swim and very well (incredible), as 20 meters in the interior of the sea . I thought going to drown and go to helping him with my friends Dr. Segura and Dr. Rozzi. After scare off predators, the Pudú had received several a dog bite. We liberate it in the undergrowth. The Pudú still looked at us as saying: “Thanks for saving my life” (for the expression, I say). But wait, there’s more; we were happy after this noble action and ¿guess what?, after following shore about 300 meters, the hunters had killed. Draw your own conclusions.
I very much enjoyed this in transit. One thing stands out for me so that I don’t have to scroll back up and then try to find this comment box again with my phone, a technical feat.
Subcutaneous fat is far below the melanocytes, embedded in the bottom layer of the epidermis but a good centimeter above the fat in most places. I think sexual dimorphism in pigmentation has more to do with the effect of sex hormones on melanosome production or transfer or something.
I could probably find you references if you are interested in hearing more. I also recall an interesting paper asserting that early humans became *more* pigmented when they had to adapt to dry climates with some intriguing support for the idea.
Thanks Heather – references very welcome!
My memory was kind of vague.
The first part of my remark could be addressed perhaps by these articles:
Thornton et al. looked at sex hormone influence on the dermal papilla, which underlies hair follicles and their resident melanocyte population. As you know, there is a great deal of differences between the sexes but also between different areas of the body as far as pigmentation and hairiness are concerned. They obtained somewhat different responses to estrogens in “non-balding occipital and frontal scalp and beard dermal papilla cells”.
Then Hirobe et al. seem to have demonstrated that a number of sex hormones can induce extra pigmentation of hair in the mouse. They can be produced systemically, of course, but in the previous paper, it’s mentioned that they are also produced locally. Anyhow, “estrogen increased pheomelanin content in female hair, whereas the hormone greatly decreased both eumelanin and pheomelanin content in male hair. High doses of progesterone, in contrast, increased total melanin content in both female and male hair. Moreover, a high dose of androgen increased total melanin content exclusively in male hair”…
Melanin content is determined by the distribution of melanin-containing packages, melanosomes, to the receiving keratinocytes. These can either be in the hair follicle or in the intrafollicular epidermis, giving our skin its hue.
This paper has to do with sexually dimorphic hormone responsiveness of fish melanophores. Sounds very pretty from the abstract. Anyhow, we’re all a complex mix of all of these hormones, including of course melatonin, and their control has to do with age, sexual maturity, and where one is on the somewhat discontinuous spectrum between male and female.
The “interesting paper” to which I had referred is this one and I see the authors came back to the idea of interfollicular pigmentation being a relatively late evolutionary development in humans subsequently. A little off-topic but I thought you might find it interesting in this context. Many hairy animals have colored coats because of the melanocytes in the hair follicles, but only in hairless regions do they have the cells in the epidermis between the follicles, too, the way humans do.
I was a little ambiguous in my comment above, but it was to say that subcutaneous fat, while attractive, doesn’t in and of itself account for the paler skin of females – except perhaps insomuch as it controls local hormone production by the overlying dermis – an intriguing and testable hypothesis. But the subcutaneous fat to which you refer is a secondary sexual characteristic and is not different between prepubertal boys and girls. Are little girls lighter colored than little boys in the same families, generally? I wouldn’t think so, but I don’t know of studies addressing that.
Please doff your editor’s hat when reading my comment, as I’m too lazy to go back and correct what needs correcting. Thank you.
Thanks for all this Heather.
May I take the liberty be to be critical even though I’m just a dyslexic plumber/farmer/horse-breeder and the only letter’s after my name on my business card are DBTC (Don’t Bend the Card)? – If the answer is no, then don’t read on.
Dear Sir
Forgive me but I fail to grasp the aim of your excerpt. You say that much is in part in jest – some then is serious even instructional – which is which? – In the first half you decry teleology – in the centre the ‘pendular run’ might stand on the fence in that regard. – Do you rebuke the pedestrian scientists responsible, or do you find their work (walk) (I can’t find score through on my computer) inspiring. – The second half supports sexual selection, which is “a vibrant part of current etc.” (who knows what goes on in Norfolk) but in this you include much teleology in apparent support of sexual selection. If evolution is seen as, ‘to evolve a trait, like ‘upright’, for a purpose – whether that purpose is to free arms in order to cuddle babies or simply in order to expose the organ of making them, which grows in order to be evermore attractive – either supposition follows a similar teleological line. – With this approach the future for us the upright ape, can only be that man ends up with the equivalent of a third leg (at least he won’t fall over drunk) whilst his left ear might adaptively evolve into his next attractive organ of procreation. – Of course then we would have to work out the means of ‘tripedal pendular running’? On the whole though your excerpt is not too bad.
Yours sincerely
Confused of Bacup.
On a serious note your final paragraph does tell exactly where you were going – but it came as a relief to me (the ordinary reader) when you finally made the point quite clear. – A few extra sentences after the first couple of paragraphs, stating your objectives (beyond the lead of simple v complex) would have helped me no end.
In the body of the text, I lost track of your direction because of the juxtaposition of humour and seriousness. Sometimes not sure whether you were serious or not. You appear to apply some derision to the idea that early man stood, up to his neck in water, for long enough to lose most of his hair. (Perhaps he retained the hair on his head for camouflage, so that passing ducks would mistake it for a clump of weed and he could grab the odd one for dinner, whilst the retained hair on his nether regions kept crabs at bay.) Then you give reasons to support Ms Morgan’s ideas. – For me there seems no doubt that early man for much time enjoyed a relationship with the waterline of lakes or seas, finding a living that way, and a route of migration – but Ms Morgan goes way beyond that. – O k – so don’t tread on toes perhaps – but if you’re going to be humorous, its hard to avoid treading on toes.
Similarly, there is humour in comparing ‘pendular running’ to Monty Python Walks, but you do seem to treat the idea, expressed in the paper you refer to, as good science. – I’m not so sure it is (I’ll soon come to my reasons why.) – so maybe that is where I lost the track of your plot and began to get confused as to when you were serious and when joking.
If I read you correctly, you appear to have five main elements:
That upright stance and bipedality is very interesting,
That teleology is quite wrong. (you make that view clear)
That sexual selection is as good as right. (you don’t really make your view quite clear – perhaps because of the humour)
That life is complex.
So beware the simple answer. (You may have ignored your own warning).
Try the following – then its your turn to be critical – and probably rip me to shreds. Sorry about the length but I gave up trying to do it any shorter.
Small Leaps in a Big Pond.
1. MAN EVOLVED TO STAND UPRIGHT SO HE COULD TILE HIS KITCHEN.
2. MAN IS ABLE TO TILE HIS KITCHEN BECAUSE HE CAN STAND UPRIGHT.
Statement no 1. is teleology and most likely untrue. – Statement no 2. is simple fact.
The directional teleology of statement 1., traces back to Ancient Greek ideas of earthly lives aspiring to mirror those of perfect Gods. (The Ancient Greeks thought Gods lived in polished marble halls – recent research however shows that Gods in fact prefer multi-coloured rustic tiling.)
The Ancient Greeks thought that aspiring for divinity in life could lead to an eternity with the Gods. The Bible makes things a shade easier – the aspirant merely has to be just be ordinarily good, not divine, (oh -and dead) to go heaven.
The Bible, through Adam, also gives man the head start of an elevated position – from which he can drop things on the rest of nature – such as large lumps of dominion.
Following this directional tradition, evolution has sought to find why man stands above apes, upright, elevated, bipedal and intelligent even.
Other apes of lower order simply ask intelligently – but with bewilderment – why is man destroying their planet. – To what purpose? – Surely not an intelligently designed one.
Chasing hard on the heels of divine purpose, Lamarckian blacksmith’s sons inherited bigger muscles than their dads so they would be born with advantage. Darwin’s directionality was satisfied simply by advantage leading to incessant advantage – summarised by Herbert Spencer as survival of the fittest, which he clearly thought he was.
(I simply wonder in all of this why blacksmith’s daughters were never famous for big muscles.)
Science has found it difficult, ever since the early days of the theory, to shake the idea of an evolution in which advantage is favoured and for a purpose – that purpose being to survive.
Yet this is teleology – and as such, leads to absurdity – like: – Man it would seem, had the advantage of evolving to stand upright – so he could be bipedal – giving him further advantage – like being able to walk and run whilst at the same time waving his arms – frantically – being chased by nasty four-legged sharp toothed beasts who could already walk, trot, canter, and gallop faster than him. – Luckily he could advantageously use his free arms and hands to climb a tree, and escape to ‘from whence he came’.
So much for the teleological argument of advantage leading to purpose (or should that be purpose demanding advantage) of statement no 1. MAN EVOLVED TO STAND UPRIGHT SO HE COULD TILE HIS KITCHEN, which seems all round false.
However, the simple truth of statement no 2. MAN IS ABLE TO TILE HIS KITCHEN BECAUSE HE CAN STAND UPRIGHT, seems self evident.
In terms of nature, this translates as:
MAN FOUND HIMSELF STANDING UPRIGHT – AND HAD TO MAKE THE BEST OF IT.
Of course the moment you ask the question – ‘How did man make the best of it’?– you invite yourself into the teleological danger of wondering how man got to write excerpts about evolution – only to be asked stupid questions by a plumber – simply by standing upright.
Of course many organisms stand upright – Penguins for instance – How come they didn’t learn to write? – But woooah – let’s no go there.
Of course ‘woooah’ is a word horses use. – It means, hang on a minute. – I know this because I have bred harness horses for the last forty years. – Once you understand their language (much of it body language) then you can have reasoned conversations with them. They have taught me much of what I know of evolution.
We can learn something of man’s bipedal ‘action’ from studying a horse’s quadrupedal ‘action’.
There is a difference between various horse ‘actions’ which stems mainly from the relative proportions of the limbs.
A short forearm gives a horse an ‘elevated’ action – handy for ‘picking its knees up’ when moving across tussocky boggy land – whereas a long forearm gives an ‘extended’ action – ‘daisy-cutting’ – characterised by the whole leg seeming to flick out straight from the shoulder – handy for skitting across desert land. Arab horses have an extended action.
Much of the way a horse moves relates to its centre of gravity. You will have seen a dressage horse ‘collected’ – its neck arched and its nose tucked in. A horse moving the weight of its head and neck back, moves its centre of gravity back. It can then coil its power onto its back legs, ‘under its haunches’, to move with ‘elevation’ – ultimately to ‘rear’. – Contrast this to a race horse, its neck stretched, its head pointing far forward, the jockey crouched nearly on its ears. – all moving the horse’s centre of gravity forward – with the the horse galloping flat out – effectively to keep its nose off the ground.
Another major factor in all this is the angle of the shoulder. The shoulder angle can be seen from the side of the horse, as the line on which the neck sits – the line separating body from neck. – If the shoulder is ‘laid back’, with the horse’s head and neck up, it has plenty of freedom of movement. – If the shoulder is more ‘upright’, the head and neck stand forward more and this can restrict movement.
The angle of the shoulder is generally reflected in the angles of the leg. – The more angular the joints, the more ‘spring’ can be accommodated. Think of a letter Z compared to a letter I.
The shoulder angle usually mirrors the the ‘pastern angle’ – the angle of the bones just above the hoof, and can greatly alter a horse’s ‘action’ and thus the use to which the horse might be put. – A more upright shoulder lends itself to a carthorse ‘leaning’ its weight on the collar to haul a load.
A horse stands (front legs) on the equivalent of our middle finger nail. – Its leg contains all the bones and joints, allowing the same angles, that we have – all the way from finger nail through elbow and shoulder to back bone. (In a horse, a few bones are fused together and a thumb and little finger are missing, and most but not all of the second and third fingers otherwise they equate.)
So – think of running on your middle finger nail – with your elbows tucked to your ribs – then you can gallop like a horse.
Why not try it – sit back – tuck your elbows to your ribs, wave your middle fingers in front of you, up and down – slightly out of step – there you go – horse. (The effect is even better if you click your tong in time.)
Extend this idea a bit – keep the fingers just a little straight and spring, hop and dance like a dear.
We are cripples walking horribly flat footed in comparison.
Our heels are on the ground. – A horse’s heels (if equated to ours) are the pointy bits which stick out backwards half-way up the hind leg. (We call them hocks on a horse, not heels.) – (I asked my stallion if he thinks his heels should be called ankles and his hocks heels, but he just gave me his look that says, ‘are you stupid or what’.)
So, a quadrupedal horse horse walks and runs on its finger and toe nails – with its heels (and elbows) way off the ground.
This gets us to the American scientists’ discovery of special bipedal ‘pendular running’.
First though, what of bipedalism at walk and at an ordinary run.
Here’s the first lesson. You have to stand up for it.
Stand up, then lift your toes of the ground , then walk forward just on your heels – keeping your toes up off the ground. – Its dead easy – then walk back – it’s fun.
Now try running the same way. – It doesn’t work.
Now try to run just on your toes – heels kept off the ground.
This doesn’t work well either – simply because you are trying carry all your weight on just two legs, unlike a horse’s four – so it’s hard for you to carry your weight, running, on toes alone. – Walking on toes alone – then it’s hard to balance.
Because we are only bipedal, we have to use a combination of toes and heels – just to get by.
To be bipedal then, we make very expensive compromises. – Imagine swinging through trees like an agile ape – or skipping and dancing like a fawn. – We missed out on a lot of joy in life somewhere, standing up to be wholly bipedal.
So, we’ve learned a little about the bipedal walk and run – but what of the mystical ‘pendular running’ – a third way of bipedal locomotion – ‘discovered’ by the American scientists?
The fact is that much comes down to musical limitation. – In reality we are stuck to a two/four beat rhythm (the bit about, ‘quick march – left right left right left.’) either walking or running. (We can play with a few interesting hop and skip steps when we’re young though, but sadly we soon grow out of them mentally.)
Peculiarly though, with four legs, a horse, and many other quadrupeds, can easily put in a three beats to the bar rhythm.
In basic terms, a horse walks and trots at a two/four beats to the bar, canters at three beats to the bar, then even faster, gallops at two/four beats. – (A lot is about which particular diagonal legs are moving, when and in which order, and how many feet can be off the ground at once, but we don’t need to go there.)
So horses have four gears and moving from one gear to the next happens precisely at one footfall – a horse does not just fall over into the next gear as it moves faster, and neither do we. (Dressage riders can tell you much more of this than I can. Dressage is about giving specific instruction to a particular leg at a particular moment, working perfectly in time to a horse’s rhythms.)
So a horse has four gears, but we really only have two.
So whilst we think we can dance the waltz to a three beat rhythm, we are really only messing about with our two beat capability. – Just think of running at waltz time like a horse cantering. – It’s not really there for us, is it? – (Of course rock and roll, that’s different again, think Chuck Berry and the rest – then give me the beat boys and free my soul.)
Now at this point we arrive somehow at elephants. – Horses use speed to escape predators. – Elephants are more inclined to stand, looking awfully big and threatening in preference to ‘running’ away.
Their legs are built to ‘stand’ an elephant’s weight. – They have a very upright shoulder, a very long fore-arm – ‘knees’ close to the ground – and the joints which we would call wrist and fingers are contracted and spread in a weight bearing pad.
To get an elephant ‘effect’ clench your fist, put your knuckles on the floor and lean some weight on it, still sitting in your chair (we are talking armchair science here).
That’s an elephants leg. – Do the same thing again, but this time on the tip of your middle finger – that’s a horse.
An elephant has a leg that is more like a letter I than a letter Z – more like a telegraph pole or a pit prop – a strut.
Elephants are obliged to walk as if they were on their heels – and as we found earlier (if you got out of your chair and tried), running on your heels doesn’t really work. – Elephants can only walk – or run peculiarly. – They cannot get ‘on their toes’ so to speak. – (I hope you did try the exercises, otherwise you won’t know what I’m talking about.)
Elephants then truly can only walk. – What we see as a galloping herd of charging elephants, is a herd of ‘walking faster elephants’ – and to do this, they put in an exaggerated swing of the shoulders and hips. You might have noticed the same, trying to run on your heels.
Is what the American scientists ‘discovered’ (the funny third gait of bipedal ‘pendular’ running) really just the way elephants would have to do the job if they were short of two legs – as well as being limited, as they are, by contracted ankles – in ‘effect’ having to do it on the heels.
The clue to this is in the report of the paper, referred to in the Cromercrox’ excerpt, which says after its preamble:
“The pair created a mathematical model that reduces locomotion to its fundamentals: a certain mass, representing the body, that must be moved around on two struts, the legs, that can absorb forces and expend energy to shift the mass.”
(Woooah – hang on a minute – struts are struts. – Legs are legs. – Our hind leg has five basic points of articulation, not counting the bones hidden in the foot -six if you include hip movement – and a horse’s foreleg has seven. – A strut is nothing like a leg – and even a strut which can absorb forces and expend energy to shift the mass – that is not a strut either – it’s a pogo stick.)
“They used the model to deduce the styles that require the least effort to move a mass.”
(If they’d used even less effort, they’d have discovered the tow truck.)
“As they report in their study, to be published by Nature1, walking is best at slow speeds, and running is the most efficient mode when moving in top gear.”
(I’d never have guessed that without help – honestly.)
“Although other models have investigated the efficiency of walking and running before, this is the first to work out the best means of locomotion from first principles. “It shows that the most energy-efficient way to move along is to bounce up and down,” says” [Mr R].
(For ‘first principles’ read – ‘using a strut’. – For the ‘most efficient way to move along etc.’ read ‘Yogic Flying’.)
“The model also predicted a third efficient way of moving, somewhere between running and walking. The style, dubbed ‘pendular running’, is not generally used in the real world. [Mr R] describes it as looking like an 80-year-old trying to run.”
(Certainly 80-yr olds are of not in the real world – and they have no business even trying to run.)
“It’s like a lumbering run, maybe for a fat or out-of-shape person,” he adds.
(OR AN ELEPHANT PERHAPS?)
The report moves on to
Upended monkeys
“When walking, each leg acts as a pendulum, swinging the body’s mass from leg to leg like an upside-down version of a monkey swinging from branch to branch. As a result, each footfall generates two force peaks: one as the foot lands, and another as it pushes off again.
Walking is most efficient at speeds where the body is moving slowly enough to be passed smoothly from one pendulum to the other. This explains why walking is still efficient even when though the body bobs up and down – this is simply a product of the legs’ natural pendular swing.
When running, the foot acts more like a ball, bouncing the body back up into the air in the same instant that it lands. Each footfall therefore generates a single force peak. At speeds where the body is going too fast to be transferred smoothly from pendulum to pendulum, the most efficient method is to bounce it along in a series of free-falling flights.”
(Credit where credit is due -a little sanity seems to return – but do not be tempted to put ‘strut’ in place of ‘leg foot and pendulum’ – I tried and got kind of sea sick.”)
The third way
“Pendular running falls halfway between the two. As in running, the two feet are never on the ground at the same time. But each foot stays on the ground long enough to cause the double force peak characteristic of walking, [Mr R] explains.
Perhaps the reason most of us don’t use this in the real world is simply because we don’t need to, he adds.”
(NO – the reason we don’t use it in the real world is because our legs don’t stop at the knee – we don’t have struts.)
“But some people may benefit from the odd gait. [Mr R] notes that his model doesn’t take into account our legs’ natural springiness, which would make bounce-running even more efficient. But some people, such as those who are very heavy, might lack this springiness. For them, a lolloping half-run might be the most efficient way to travel.”
(He’s finally got there. – People who have been in car accidents may benefit from ‘the odd gait’. – Mr R is beginning to see the light. – Struts don’t have the same natural springiness – unlike our legs, with springiness accumulated in 6 joints, which do.)
Scientists worry me at times.
However – as an example of your point, “there can be no simple, relationship between a proposed cause and a proposed effect”, it is excellent – the comparison between a strut, albeit a pogo stick, and an entire highly complex leg attached to a highly complex body, works well.
As an example of good science though, it’s looks a bit iffy. – You do not make it quite clear, not to me, how you stand on this – but then I’m getting old and not part of the real world, though I’ve still a bit to go before I get to 80.
‘Confused of Bacup’ tells me he is just a bit worried that Cromercrox sees the idea of ‘pendular running’ as having a little more worth than he does. – (I’m sure Confused of Bacup should correct this sentence somewhere.) – Confused of Bacup also says he thinks Cromercrox might consider deleting the word ‘publishing’ from para 3 line 4 of his excerpt.
Of course I might be doing our American scientists an injustice. – Possibly their research helped to produce the amazing ‘springy contraptions’ used by amputee athletes to awesome effect. – Of course if there had been intelligent design, maybe we would all have had legs similarly fashioned – even elephants.
So where does this leave us?
Man evolved to stand upright so he could walk efficiently? – Man evolved walking because he stood upright? – Man stood upright so he could have his arms free to put his hands in his pockets whilst walking and scratch … etc.?
1. MAN EVOLVED TO STAND UPRIGHT SO HE COULD TILE HIS KITCHEN?
Clearly codswallop.
(Confused of Bacup has told me though that it’s where you end up if slowly, with step at a time, joined-up change, you walk the route of evolution in the direction of all is for adaptation leading to advantage?)
Happen we’d better look into it.
2. MAN IS ABLE TO TILE HIS KITCHEN BECAUSE HE CAN STAND UPRIGHT.
Man found himself standing upright – and had to make the best of it.
MAN FOUND HIMSELF UPRIGHT – SO HE WALKS AND RUNS THE BEST WAY HE CAN WITH WHAT HE’S GOT.
Each animal, plant, virus, protein molecule, atom, quark, whatever, does as best it can, with what it’s got – or it might perish – its identity disappears – its matter/force particles dissipate back into the universe.
Simple fact.
Should we base evolution on 1 or 2.
If we base it on 2. – on fact – then the facts at our disposal are few.
Samuel Clements, ‘Mark Twain’, said:
“It is amazing what a large amount of speculation can come from a minimum of facts.”
The facts of evolution are sparse.
There is variety in life on this planet.
Life has been here for a long time.
Life’s reproduction is not replication – it can provide variety.
Life has a capacity to increase population exponentially – but resources are finite.
Some forms remain – whilst others have become extinct.
The fossil record indicates that new species are related to old – this backed by the study of genetics.
Simpler forms appear earlier in the fossil record than more complex late-comers.
In the fossil record there are gaps between species.
Those are the facts – all else is speculation.
A few hundred years of speculation has brought us to the point where evolution is all about slow joined-up change and adaptations – and we can make meaningful statements.
Cromercrox in his final paragraph: – “one change has an impact on many other traits or adaptations, until the whole body is affected.”
I go with that in the sense of, ‘Don’t think its simple. – Its not.’
I worry about that simple word ‘adaptations’.
The word adaptation readily lends itself to the question, ‘Adapted to what?’
Then it’s easy to fall into, ‘Adapted for what purpose?’.
Then the distinction between – ‘a colder climate, so getting hairier’ – and- ‘getting hairier which might suit a colder climate’ – becomes indistinct.
Yet the difference between – ‘I fancy a tiled kitchen, so I’ll change to standing upright’, – and – ‘because I stand upright I can tile my kitchen if I so fancy’ – seems quite clear.
There is a huge catch hidden here though involving that nasty teleology.
It is clearly stupid to say, getting upright to tile the kitchen
Its not so stupid to say, getting hairier to suit a cold climate.
It doesn’t seem stupid at all to say, adapting to a cold climate.
Polar bears adapted to a cold climate. – That is almost as good as an accepted fact.
Nor does it seem stupid to say, evolve a bigger tail, to attract a mate.
Which of these statements involves teleology – which does not?
The problem seems to be that if the ‘teleological gap’ is large – standing so to tile a kitchen – the teleology is obvious. – If the teleological gap is small – a few hairs here, a few feathers there, teleology passes unnoticed. – It can even become the basis of evolution theory.
Almost anything goes if we stick to ‘tiny adaptations’.
In this way an evolution based on tiny tiny step by step joined up change, can get away with teleology. – In this way though we end up with ambiguity and twenty-five definitions of species.
(I take my hat off to whoever is the prime author of the Wikipedia page ‘species’ – check it out if you haven’t looked up the word recently.)
Evolution is good at bipedal walking, in small steps, on its heels – when one foot is always touching the ground – try it – you know the drill. – Bipedal running though, evolutions not good at that. – Running properly using heels and toes, we can have both feet momentarily of the ground – just get yourself together (‘collected’ in horse terms ) and take a couple of really energetic running steps. You’ll see what I mean. – Of course, run at a stream, and take one last good running step and you will leap the stream. Slow step by joined-up step evolution cannot do that.
Evolution’s not good at leaping gaps – mainly because science sees only one mechanism of evolution.
Forty years ago, I found a second simple natural mechanism which science has missed – on rare occasions it allows leaps. Then much of the ‘species problem’ – and teleology and ambiguity – disappears.
p.s – If I persuaded you to do them, I hope you’re not crippled after the exercises. I was – after trying to work them out.
Good luck Henry; that was a blog post in its own right, John. My own longer comment with requested if off-topic references appears to be held up in moderation limbo.
Wow, John, that’s quite a dissertation. I think you are right in that I should make it a bit clearer where I am being serious and where I am not. Your comment deserves a longer answer than that, I know, but I promise I shall read it all through and govern my rewrite accordingly.
Heather – your comment now approved. No idea why it was in moderation limbo – your others went straight through unmoderated, and I haven’t been visiting my blog much in the past few days. Anyway, all corrected now.
Thanks for your promise to read my comment through. – I really apprecite that.
My comment is definitely long though, so try this comment first. (But do read the long bit some time – if only to learn more ‘silly walks’ – I would love to see the staff of a magazine beginning with N walking up and down their corridors of power practicing a new one.).
Your chapter, shorn (heaven forbid) of its (good) humour reduces to a very short list of elements – advantage, adaptation, sexual selection and directionaliy (simple to complex) – which are the heart of current understanding. (Can anyone add to that list – maybe not?) Your excerpt then holds the heart of any book on evolution, and as such ought not to contain any faux pas. Certain american scientists you refer to seemed to have fauxed quite a few pas – so I dealt with those at length, using knowledge learnt as a shoeing smith in my forgotten youth – (Hope I haven’t forgotten all about it ) -( I could write an excellent dissertation/tortured scribbling on the mechanics and multifarious methods by which a horse kicks.)
Much more important though is that your beautifully simple explanation of teleology – “in order to” – led me straight to the ‘naming’ of the thought I have had for years, ‘that growing a trait “in order to” be more attractive’ is wrong’. -(In the way it is used though, rather than saying that sexual attraction is not part of biological repertoire.) The concept, sexual selection then comes into question.
Much in evolution is problematical, contentiuos, open to criticism and leads to spurious science. This leads to the conlusion that something is wrong somwhere.
Whilst writing ‘the long bit’ it slowly dawned on me that there is nothing apparently wrong with the idea that a species adapts to its environement – however when this is written as, ‘a species changes “in order to” suit the environment.’ – then the obvious conclsuion is that the base tenet of evolution is a teleology.
To accept this conclusion might worry science., (The missed obvious often does.) It does not worry me thoughm because for forty years I have known the problem – but not managed to put so clear a name as ‘teleology’ to it.
Forty years ago, a simple observation turned evolution on its head for me – Forty years study later, I have a whole new version of the job, Its sits though in my plumbers world – i don’t know how to present it to the scientific world. I need some help there.
Darwin took 500 pages to get his version across. – Stephen Jay Gould 1400 pages in his opus.-
I’ll try to give you the gist of my few hundred pages in a couple of sentences.
Darwin asked – ‘How does life change in God given stability?’ – and answered, ‘Evolution.’
Einstein said all is change, there is no single stable point of reference in the universe..
The question evolution should ask now is, “How in an all changing universe does life, or anything else for that matter, ever appear to be stable – even if just for a while?.
My answer is, “Evolution”.
Evoultion is a process aiming to stability – not a process of change.
John, I think I see what you are driving at. But I would suggest that you consider your last sentence in this light?
“Adaptation is a process aiming to stability – not a process of change.”
I think that it is easy to misunderstand the idea of evolution: as you write “the base tenet of evolution is a teleology” I wonder if you imply that the idea of purposefulness – this “in order to” – is built into the concept. You don’t appear to contest that biological forms change over time. That is the base tenet. Evolution is an observation.
Then you can ask “why?” and “how?” – and we have a lot of potential answers to those questions, both generally and specifically, which raise questions in their own light. This is where real controversy arises. I entirely discount the people who contest that this is an “all changing universe” and that it was created in situ, as it is today, which is a rather shocking hubris.
Organisms adapt to an ever-changing environment. These adaptations can be behavioral, or stochastic variations in their constitution might be selected for, as advantageous, or against, as detrimental. Sooner or later this process can lead to speciation.
In my view – and this is clear in the entire book, if not perhaps in excerpts – the problem is not with Darwin but with how his work has been interpreted and spread. The popular image of Darwinian change is that of evolution directed towards some goal. This is quite wrong (and it also contributes to the ingrained, teleological style of argument). Darwin’s view, explicitly stated in the Origin, was of the ‘tangled bank’, in which natural selection is acting all the time, at all levels, without reference to the past or the future. This is what Darwin said:
‘It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.’
and here is what Heather wrote, which basically says the same thing.
‘Organisms adapt to an ever-changing environment. These adaptations can be behavioral, or stochastic variations in their constitution might be selected for, as advantageous, or against, as detrimental. Sooner or later this process can lead to speciation.’
Mm, I think so speciation is my argument, that supports my theory of “Behavioural forced change of survival due to adverse circumstances taking advantage of traits of the anatomy” (unless other one already has said before).
Distinguished colleagues,
Perhaps the title of my book should be the next: “Causal encounter with predators that trigger explosive behavioural changes, produces advantage or disadvantage to species in the speciation”
Thanks.
Kind regards,
AC
Heather of the rapid response team – 7 AM – 3hrs after I pushed the send button . How does your brain function so well at 7 AM. That’s not Natural but it supports the case for seedings from space.- Science should look for them in your back garden.
I worked on my reply to yours – then the other distinguished ones got there first. – Plumbers are always late. – Now I am in the middle of reply to all – but must go to bed – need the sleep – hard days plumbing next.
Evolution is the survival of those who can afford to eat.
Alejandro – Abolutely on the spot of the jist I think so speciation got there first first and I’m seriously
Cromercrox – nice. – First paragraph – absolutely correct. ( must be a relief to know that a plumber thinks you are right ha ha) But it’s just poosible I might influence your final chapter – or your next book.
.
I had my take on Darwins final paragragh in my unfifnished unsent reply to Heather – you got there first. – Plumber’s always late syndrome.
I doubt you can appreciate just how much I value your quality feed back. Thanks so much for being interested – and thanks in equal ammounts for being so interesting. – I’ve spent rather a long time sat at my desk bouncing my thoughts off only my own head.
Please watch this space. – Goodnight to one and all.
John, your insights are valued here and are considered as worthy of consideration as those of anyone else.
thanks – keep watching
An aside whilst writing a diabolical careful considered reply. (The words of that can be read in any order.)
I don’t ‘dis’ the americans ‘double bounce finding’ – (I think we make such a double bounce in our muscles and tendon spring, in on one walk step, to make the transition from walk to run. Is their pendular running a continuous succession of that transition step without actually breaking into run – no answer is neccessary – just post a video of you doing your pendular running for everybody’s edification.) – only the idea of comparing a pogo stick to leg.
Interesting though is the ‘double bounce’ effect in the gap between ‘continual’ and ‘continuous’ in water flowing, then dripping, from a tap. I don’t know of a ‘link’ to that on the web it must be their. It can be seen in a larva lamp. I have it as interesting bit filed in the lost and found bit of my brain as It might be relevant to the ‘gap’ between one species and the next – at a moment of speciation – if there is a gap – and a moment – and I think there is. Of course it’s all done by mirrors anyway.
In the meantime keep watching this space.
Nice post, Henry. Completely off topic, but in high school the kids used to pass around a well-thumbed copy of Diamond’s ‘The Naked Ape’ – bookmarked to the infamous Chapter Three.
Technical aside to all: Please note, if you’ve posted before and you’re hitting moderation, this is because you’ve failed to log in. No approved author is ever moderated again.
Thanks Jenny – good advice about logging in and whatnot. I think you mean ‘Desmond Morris’ – the chapter on sex is meant to be written entirely zoologically and dispassionately but of course it’s absolutely disingenuous. ‘Pre-Copulatory Phase’ my aunt
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Cromercrox – here’s the result of your foolhardy/welcome/appreciated (can’t find score through) encouragement. – Heather, Alejandro and too.
You say Heather and Darwin basically say the same thing – I beg to differ – The difference is all about capital letters and flat earth theory.
In Darwin’s final paragraph, he briefly makes his thinking clear. – His skill in this only beaten by Richard Feynman’s:
“There is a fact – or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law – it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy.”
To become an accepted scientific fact, any supposition must be accountable to all known fact – without exception. If a supposition complies with that condition, then we can say, ‘That seems to be a fact – a law even.’ – That is, until someone finds an exception to it, or an unknown further fact might offer an alternative supposition.
It’s the logic of a+b=d until somebody finds c.
So where do capital letters come in?
In his final paragraph Darwin listed the Elements of his evolution.
“Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.
It seems capital letters for his sure facts – lower case for his uncertainties.
Heather says.
“Organisms Adapt to an Ever-changing Environment.- Sooner or Later this process can lead to Speciation.” (My capitals)
Now pretend just for one tiny moment that my supposition, whatever it might be, is a wondrous new interpretation of evolution.
Then we would have three steps in the historical development of evolution theory – from Darwin – via Heather’s current synthesis – to my plumber’s version.
My version might be rubbish. – Let’s work on the difference between the first two.
It amounts to this. – Darwin’s evolution happened on a Flat Earth – Heather’s in an All-changing Environment. – Einstein stuck his nose in the Gap between.
The other notable difference between the two is in Heather’s use of Speciation and Darwin’s lack of reference to the word, with or without a capital. – Darwin steered round the concept species – perhaps he was unsure – perhaps that’s why he held back from publication until Alfred Russel Wallace became his catalyst.
Let’s check out Darwin’s environmental references – his flat earth – and his avoidance of speciation.
In his list of elements, he refers to environmental issues twice, one seems obvious. – “Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and use and disuse:” – The other may not be so obvious. – “Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.”
Let’s start at the beginning.
Ancient Greek philosophers pondering fossil finds considered that floods and earthquakes must have inundated the land, burying many creatures, and speculated that some process of petrification had then formed the fossils. They were off to a good start. – As fossils were found almost anywhere though, they postulated a great universal flood – but then that would bring an end to all life.
Noah’s Ark solved the problem – but for evolution it was a backwards step. The idea of a once and for all creation, albeit with a watery cleansing hiccup, had won the day. However, Noah’s story does concern environment change having effect on life’s future.
Sir Walter Raleigh in his History of the World [1614], calculated the size of the Ark with biblical mathematics. He decided that Noah took on board only sufficient species – that changing, the full array could develop from those.
John Ray though, in his History of Plants [1686] gave a reason for the absolute immutability of species. – He said, “… one species never springs from the seed of another nor vice versa.” firmly stamping on the idea of life changing.
Lamarck [1800] put forward a cause for slow change.. – Lamarck’s evolution was based on regular divine re-seedings of simple forms – then ‘environmental pressure’ caused directional change, from simple forms to advanced complex organisms – use and disuse – blacksmiths son’s inheriting bigger muscles – the External affecting the Internal seed. – In many respects, the modern synthesis involves the External affecting the organism.
(I just wonder why blacksmith’s daughters were never famous for big muscles.)
The big question in Darwin’s day was, ‘Could the Seed Change and How?’ – with sparse knowledge of genetics to help.
So Darwin’s ‘obvious’ environmental reference, “Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and use and disuse:” was in the nature of an acceptance of Lamarckian Slow Change by way of some form of External influence on Internal ‘seeds’. – But this was not environment change as we understand the idea.
What of Darwin’s less obvious environmental reference. – Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.
Paleontologist Georges Cuvier [1800] demonstrated that species really did become Extinct – dismissing the idea of a ‘once and for all time perfect creation’.
Cuvier’s studies of fossils indicated that life had certainly changed – but he was firmly against Slow Change. It failed to match his observation that new species appeared abruptly in successive geological layers. – This developed into Catastrophe Theory. – That a succession of catastrophic events eliminated previous species – then divine re-creation produced a new complete range of fixed wholesome species immediately afterwards. – Cuvier stamped on Lamarck’s ‘regular divine seedlings with slow joined-up change to develop them’ – proposing that the Gaps between species, and between geological layers, marked moments of catastrophic environment change extinctions (the like of which we may be witnessing) – then full-blown divine re-creations.
Darwin, giving Extinction a capital letter, was surely in acceptance of Cuvier’s idea of Extinction – whilst denying Cuvier’s environment change induced speciation.
Darwin, co-opting elements from Lamarck and Cuvier, had found a mechanism – ‘nature selecting as a stock-breeder’ – providing slow change – but in a wholly natural evolution – from the simplest of simple cells to the most complex – without recourse to spontaneous divine creations of any description.
Thus: [1859]
“Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.
He could perhaps have written this:
Life’s peculiar mechanism’s produce VARIABILITY (Uncle Erasmus’ forte) and a capacity for OVERPOPULATION with an ensuing struggle for finite resources (Malthus’ contribution) leading to – NATURAL SELECTION – entailing Divergence of Character.
Divergence of Character might be Speciation but equally refer to the Lamarckian notion of a divine path to betterment – some ‘characters’ on the way up, some on the way down – melding nicely with Cuvier’s Extinction – to be rid of less improved forms – a Survival of the Fittest in which Herbert Spencer was clearly up there with the gods.
Darwin accepted Cuvier’s Extinctions, but his slow change dismissed Cuvier’s dramatic environment change catastrophes as a means to speciation – and the Gaps such speciation would produce – at the same, denying Cuvier’s Gaps in the fossil record (An argument Darwin took up with Hugh Falconer.)
Going along with Lamarck, Darwinism set the dogma as slow-joined-up-change.
There we have the start of the species problem. – It’s about Gaps (Noah counted gaps two by two) – or Continuum (With one mechanism of joined up change you cannot have gaps).
(Are there Gaps in evolution or is it Joined-up change? – With non saltum naturalis, gaps are out – but I think I can demonstrate that on rare very special occasions nature saltums a fair bit.) – (O.k. So I got 2% in ‘O’ level Latin but I did remember the plumbum thing.)
Continuum had won for a while – Gaps retreated. – (Remaining so till Ernst Mayr found a Gap of sexual isolation to confuse the issue – but not before De Vries ‘Mutation Theory’ had put up a case for Gaps. – Thomas Hunt Morgan though, looking for proof of De Vries mutationism, found that whatever you inflict on fruit flies, fruit flies stubbornly remain fruit flies.)
Darwin’s evolution boils down to VARIABILITY and OVERPOPULATION providing an over-crowded flux of life – into which new variant ‘advantaged’ forms could hammer their way like wedges into the environment of all – to create their own Victorian empire environments. – Niches we like to call them.
Environment change was not a necessary part of Darwin’s plot. – The driving force was life’s production of variety. – Environment change as we know it, hardly entered into the picture.
He said, “Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of higher animals, directly follows. (Plumbers.)
(Darwin had terrible problems with his pipes at Downe House, it’s all there in his diaries, he had to keep going to spas for a bath – the famous plumber Thomas Crapper sorted it all out for him)
All Darwin’s evolution required was the production of an advantaged variant to induce a species to better adapt.
I like Walter Raleigh’s, “There being nothing wherein nature so much triumpheth, as in dissimilitude.”, in his preface to his History of the World – whether Darwin ever read it or not, who knows.
Darwin studied dissimilitude. – In Darwin’s evolution, dissimilitude fights it out between itself to see who wins.
Certainly Darwin was well aware of geological change – but his main concern in this was to prove the enormity of geological time – for life to have sufficient to evolve slowly, step-by-joined-up step. – His effort was to contradict the prevalent view that the earth was created 4,000 years earlier, give or take a bit, at 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon precisely as calculated by whoever it was I forget and I’m not looking it up now.
He studied the action of worms largely to demonstrate time. – He had a stone in his garden (a mill stone I seem to recall) to try to measure the rate it sank due to worm action in the soil. – He took a trip to Stonehenge for the same purpose.
He experimented to demonstrate that seeds could cross oceans and survive in salt water – observing that organisms could be adrift on the oceans – or carried by birds – to far-flung islands. Darwin’s Variability colonised new lands. – The alternative never occurred to him, that organisms could stay where they were and wait for continents to drift to them – that such was span of geological time.
Environment change hardly came into the picture. – Darwin had no idea that India could ever bump into Asia to form the Himalayas. – In comparison, Darwin’s was a flat earth.
In Darwin’s view, life changes by itself – and finds environments waiting.
Alfred Russel Wallace, supposedly of like mind to Darwin, had a different role for environment to play. – He noted that ‘environment’ restricted evolution. – That monkey species were unique either side of the amazon – and either side of his Wallace Line, which we now know as the division between the Australian and Asian tectonic plates. – To Darwin, variability was boundless. – Wallace noted something different – closer to our understanding of environment change.
“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”
Darwin – standing, sitting – certainly not running about – contemplated a tangled bank – the changing tangles of life tangled atop the bank – worms timelessly moving about the soil.
Darwin’s bank was going nowhere – his evolution was simply tangled over the top (bar the worms) – the production of variety driving the tangulation. (Spell check doesn’t like that word for some reason.)
Darwin was stationary – so too his bank.
In Darwin’s evolution, on his day of contemplation, life’s production of variety was the driving force – Variability – to become cannon fodder for natural selection’s competition – culminating in, “elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other”. (Oops – be careful of the Gap here Mr D.)
He might as well have been standing in a flat field – watching a farmer, a stockbreeder, selecting the milkiest cows to bear the next generation of his herd. Even in the middle of a flat field, Darwin’s evolution would still work.
Darwin argued for life’s slowly changing variety – in some ways back-pedaling the evidence of geology – earth changing – because geological evidence contradicted slow joined up change – hence his arguments with Hugh Falconer. – Darwin’s bank was static and life did all the work of evolution, “whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity”
We have not moved on from this, despite Einsteins best efforts. – Certainly we now have an understanding of the dramatic effects of environmental change – we even begin to worry a little – but with regard to evolution, we still concentrate on Variability. – The only difference between then and now is that we include environment change – as an extra cannon aimed at the average organism – alongside competition for resource. – In this we still see evolution as if on a flat earth.
Heather says. “Organisms Adapt to an Ever-changing Environment.- Sooner or Later this process can lead to speciation.”
We look for the means of change, and the changes in organisms, first – then contemplate the effect of competition and environment change – inflicted on what Variation has produced – to gauge the results. – At the same time we still attempt to spot improvement – calling it better adapted to environment.
In short – Organism’s change ‘in order to’ adapt to an ever-changing environment.
Heather provides a neat accurate summary of the current synthesis – and its teleology.
With thanks to Hugo De Vries, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan et al (a bit more Latin there) now we have Genetics to explain Variation.
Darwin said, – “Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and use and disuse:”
That’s how Darwin thought life and its seeds changed in his day.
We have moved on a pace or two – be we still ask the same question first. – How does life change? – Then we more or less give the same answer as Darwin – only we call it genetics.
But surely, life changes because all is change. – That is the essence of the universe.
Which gets us to speciation – Sooner or Later.
Species means Gaps – somehow – sort of – sooner or maybe later – perhaps.
It’s not good is it. – 150 yrs studying the Origin thereof – and science still cannot do better than 25 different definitions of the word – and no real way to say how and when. – Oh – but I’ve forgotten – there’s genetic drift. – Species kind of drift from one to the next – and really there is only one species because its all a continuum – and you cannot have anything else because its all Darwinian joined-up slow change.
Try telling that to the next hungry lion you meet – ‘Don’t eat me because there is only one species so we are both the same.’ – Then you’ll find there are two species – one called Lion – the other called Dinner.
I believe I can show a second natural mechanism – which makes for and marks a moment of speciation.
But there is a lot involved – otherwise every one would have seen it. I once wrote to John Maynard Smith when my ideas were half-baked – saying that I thought I had something new. – He replied that if I had, it must be small subtle and very well hidden – and it is. The rest of his reply left me pondering for the next ten years.
In the end its all about relative stability – the stability of a species for instance.
My Dog Pugsley has remained the same hairy mutt for the last 15 years – Me, a Man with the figure of an Adonis, I have not changed much either. – We both spend a lot of time dormant – stable so to speak – the only action involved is by way of Pugsley’s Fleas.
In this we defy Einstein’s base principle of Relativity – There is no stable point of reference in the universe.
All that we identify in the universe – all we put a name to – must remain relatively stable at least for the time it takes us to identify it. – So we understand existence.
We start with an expansion of random nucleic particles – we end with galaxies stars planets mice men dogs and fleas. – The process involved is fairly simple – I call it Evolution.
Limit randomness and you arrive at relatively stable molecular groupings.
What limits randomness for there to be any relative stability?
Alfred Russel Wallace, missed a clue when he noted a limitation – that species a monkeys are different either side of the Amazon. – Henry Fleeming Jenkins came closer – species are trapped as if in a bubble. – I have found an absolute limit to habitat – home – a definable limiting natural boundary.
The universe is full of such limitation.
In a universe, the very essence of which is change, change comes easy – it’s for free – relative stability is the hard won bit.
Most of what we have leaned of the evolution of life seems aimed to stability, limiting Darwin’s boundless Variability. – Mendel’s dominant recessive limits the expression of 1 variable allowing 3 a touch more stability. – Mayr’s sexual Isolation – limits what may otherwise be produced. – Natural Selection eliminates the less fortunate variables – a mechanism reducing variety – aiming to stability not change.
There is a problem though – The more successful you be come in the strategy of remaining stable – the less becomes your ability to change – and when all lives in a changing universe and “No man is an island” – then, when the bell tolls, extinction is the outcome. – (And if you are stupid enough to change your own environment – the bells start ringing loud and for all.)
If life has mastered the trick of remaining stable – evidenced in the fossil record by Gaps between species – that have in many cases remained relatively stable for millions of years – then this has been done at the risk of becoming Extinct.
It is estimated that 98% of all species there ever were are now extinct – demonstrating the point.
What we seem to have is a slow-joined-up change natural selection continuum – honing a species to ‘better fit’ its environment – maintaining stability – until an environment change it then cannot cope with causes extinction.
Life in a Darwinian continuum, leads to extinction. – Now with 98% of past ‘species’, past flows, ending up extinct, and many today at risk, this statement is certainly close to simple fact.
Of course we could say that when the sun burns out it will definitely be fact – but in the ‘middle’ of life and evolution, with perhaps a hundred million species on earth to play tricks with, we can accept this statement as being a reasonable truth without too much alarm
But there is a big flaw. – If we say, Life in a Darwinian continuum, leads to extinction. – If we apply that to the start of life, the first forms are really on a hiding to nothing. – Its a fifty to one shot against the first molecule of life – and second – and the next – and so on.
To cut this somewhat ‘naive’ argument, involving rather a lot extinctions, terminals Gaps, short at this point – life requires a second mechanism to leap the gaps caused by its attempts to remain relatively stable – or all was extinct before it started.
Of course I came to all this reasoning from the opposite direction to the way it is written.
Forty years ago I accidentally stumbled on a second mechanism – then began to study evolution – eventually coming to the conclusion that my mechanism, allied to science’s Darwinian mechanism, solved the species problem.
The complete opposite to – study evolution until you conclude there is a species problem, then try to solve it with the only mechanism you have.
On the way I took on board (in my fashion) Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, George Smoot, Democritus, Hubble and the rest.
Of course the essence of the whole problem is this. – In an all changing universe, how do you define stability? – That might not be too difficult. – The next question though is, – In a universe of all change, how do you define – A – change? – I like that one. – How do you sort the trees for the wood?
On the way to answering that, you might come to the conclusion that Evolution is a universal process – a strategy to what we call existence – staying around stable for long enough for us to name.
“There is a fact – or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law – it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy.”
To become an accepted scientific fact, any supposition must be accountable to all known fact – without exception. If a supposition complies with that condition, then we can say, ‘That seems to be a fact – a law even.’ – That is, until someone finds an exception to it, or an unknown further fact offers an alternative supposition.
My base supposition is that Evolution is a universal process – the outcome of which is the relative stabilities we see around us – species – typewriters – computer keyboards.
Evolution is the process ‘supervising’ the random particles of the universe as they form identifiable molecular groupings – ‘dictating’ – limiting – what may or may not happen – like gravity dictates that apples on earth are limited to falling down – not allowed to fall side-ways.
If there are laws of evolution (I have found a four of five I think) then they must apply to all life back to a simple cell – then to all the components of that cell – then to the molecules of those components – then to the atoms quarks and beyond. – So to all molecules atoms and nucleic particles.
Then a law of evolution must be applicable to all in the universe – not just life.
If it only applies to life – or only to the rest of the universe – then it is not a law of evolution.
Having decided Evolution is universal – then you can ponder the evolution of time light black holes god and infinity.
In the meantime, I’ll go and and attack Pugsley with flea-powder.
Thanks for you time. – John Somerwill – Bacup.
And at this time, enough editing – its’ grit your teeth and press the send button.