The Trouble With Human Evolution

Modern human beings have developed over the past six to seven million years a quantity of traits that make us, Homo sapiens, a very unique species indeed. We by myself of all the mammals (as nicely as all invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles) have a bipedal gait. We on my own of all of our primate cousins are for all practical purposes hairless. Of all the animals that are, or have ever been, we're pinnacle of the pops with recognize to intelligence measurement as a feature of body size, and in terms of intelligence, king of the hill full stop. And whilst animals can speak by vocalizations and body language, none can communicate the extremely vast vary of sensible and mainly summary standards that we can. Last, but not least, human beings are almost special in making and the use of external tools, equipment unique in phrases of their sophistication.

All 5 primary characteristics mentioned above, and a lot greater this is associated besides, don't appear to be a requirement for primary survival, due to the fact other species live to tell the tale and thrive except them, and in fact all these main 5 defining traits (and more) seem to have some proper evolutionary drawbacks, not the least of which require very serious modifications to simple primate anatomy for curiously no enlarge in that Darwinian phrase "survival of the fittest". The proof of that pudding is that our remaining primate ancestor nonetheless survives - the chimpanzee; their last descendent survives - the modern-day human; yet all those in-betweens hominids who were most likely adapting through herbal selection resulting in all these evolutionary altering improvements, went kaput - over twenty species of them. If these "survival of the fittest" evolutionary diversifications were all that crash warm and necessary, then why was their demise? Any ancestral hominoids that went extinct prior to 200,000 years in the past can't have Homo sapiens as the villain. Those 20 plus extinct hominid species aside, why don't seem to be many of those natural determination enhancements absolutely so crash hot for us contemporary humans either? Here's the trouble with human evolution. But first think about this.

THE ROOT CAUSE & DRIVING FORCE

The current popular mannequin of human evolution explains the 'why' query due to fast and intense shifts in local weather in continental Africa over that six to seven million 12 months period. The central hassle there IMHO is why these shifts failed to substantially produce evolutionary adjustments in the rest of the animal populations like elephants, lions, hyenas, giraffes, zebras, wildebeests and different African landlubbers as the Dark Continent went from jungle to wooded area to savannah to arid deserts and back again.

Now of direction environmental exchange is a essential riding force in the back of organic evolution, at least when it comes to herbal selection. But one has to seem at the Big Picture, the entirety of the bio-realm and now not simply isolate one changing species and hyperlink the two and bypass all else. The environment changes and hominoids exchange but all the other species apparently do not change. That makes for an anomaly.

One of the key phrases in evolution is that "there is a rate to pay" for trade - no free lunch or get out of penal complex card is authorized. That "no pain, no gain" price applies whether you are dealing with herbal or synthetic selection. But I once in a while wonder whether or not one is getting a fifty-cent achieve return on a dollar investment well worth of pain. Consider the following.

OUR BIPEDAL GAIT

* Is an anomaly in that human beings, by myself of all the mammals, stroll mechanically on simply two legs.

* It known as for a complete redesign of our musculoskeletal system vis-à-vis our chimpanzee ancestors.

* That outcomes in an expand in all our quite a number painful awful back trials and tribulations.

* And it also requires a rearrangement of our inner organ attachments.

* A bipedal gait wants a tougher working coronary heart to pump blood up to our now greater higher reaches, like the head and neck, alternatively of in most cases sideways. A bipedal gait ability having to battle the better fight in opposition to gravity.

* A bipedal gait effects in an amplify in difficulties in keeping an upright stability (especially as one grows older) due to the fact the centre of gravity has shifted dramatically. It's a lot less difficult to push over a standing human than say a standing dog.

* A bipedal gait further outcomes in a minimize in survival value due to the ever feasible loss of or harm to a leg, foot, ankle, etc. Lose the use of a leg and in the wilderness, you are almost helpless.

* A bipedal gait has to the satisfactory of my expertise only arisen once before, and that was once in the theropod dinosaur branch, like T-Rex, etc. That was the branch that gave upward thrust to the birds, therefore they are also bipedal, however it originated with an early, early ancestor of T-Rex. Some may argue that kangaroos and their family like the wallabies are bipedal, but they don't put one leg in front of the different in a left-right-left-right-left-right fashion. They hop, which would not quite put them in the same category as human beings or even birds. Further, the theropod dinosaurs, the birds, and even the kangaroos all have tails to assist maintain their centre of balance, well, balanced. That's cheating!!! Humans lack that support structure (a as an alternative unhappy story I'm sure), so I'll argue that the human bipedal gait is nevertheless unique among all animals, previous and present. Humans stay the one and solely simply bona-fide bipedal entity. Okay, a few tailless primates can 'walk' for short intervals, however their ordinary locomotion is by their four limbs on the floor when no longer swinging in the trees.

C - A bipedal gait isn't a lifestyle walk-the-walk gait that is many times referred to in cats - in reality it isn't noted at all. Why cats? Why not cats? C is for Cat; C is for Comparison. So as a comparison, let's take cats, who have a multitude of pussycat household (tigers, lions, etc.) and who have survived and thrived for pretty some sizeable time. Why cats? Firstly because I'm familiar with cats and secondly due to the fact they are an superior multicellular tremendously state-of-the-art mammalian species, lots liken to us. Cats share a tremendous deal with us humans aside from being warm-blooded mammals. Cats, like people are curious, playful, tend to seem after number one, are territorial, like to sleep, dream, have a true memory, show emotions, and like people have colonized the globe - besides Antarctica - either as domestics or as ferals or as wild animals, etc. But, they don't walk-the-walk on just their two hind legs!

A LARGE HUMAN BRAIN

* Is an anomaly, along with that related Genius thingy high IQ or talent we have, relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, which jointly don't seem to be quite, by using any stretch of the imagination, in Einstein's league. Humans have the greatest intelligence measurement as a feature of body dimension in the entire animal kingdom, again, curiously each past and present..

* A large human brain makes for an an increasing number of hazardous childbirth. The tremendously large head of the foetus at childbirth, having to ignore through the space available with the aid of the hip opening, has resulted in no longer just a rather painful trip for the mother (and possibly the baby too) however has frequently led to the premature death of a lot of said newborns and/or their mothers. Now every other anomaly here is that if the human physique has accommodated all the big anatomical adjustments required for a bipedal lifestyle, you'll think an extend in the delivery canal hip opening dimension would have been enormously evolutionary child's play.

* The human intelligence takes years to develop fully, almost two decades well worth in fact, leaving kiddies completely structured on others for survival. Infants need care no longer just for a few weeks or months or seasons, however for many, many years, extending right through their teens, therefore cramping the life-style of the parents. This length of time for talent development and related obtaining of survival skills to wholly boost is unheard of in all other primates.

* A giant human brain is a very energy-intensive organ. In truth 25% of our strength requirements are required to fuel our upstairs grey-matter wetware. That in flip places extra pressures on searching and/or gathering for that greater in food assets required to provide that energy need. Apparently the expand in these energy demands is what drove us to commence to hunt down and consume meat and invent cooking (to make the meat less complicated to digest). Well, maybe.

C - Cats, alternatively endearing, are not a little tom cat model of Einstein.

A LACK OF FUR

* Is an anomaly given that humans alone of almost 200 species of our primate cousins are considered a "naked ape".

* Our relative lack of fur makes us dependent on sweating for temperature regulation, additionally making us pretty based on sources of freshwater and salt.

* Our relative lack of fur has the obvious gain of enabling humans to end up lengthy distance endurance runners considering that we can continuously preserve cool, even while running, by means of sweating, but what we are jogging after (prey), or from (predators), don't sweat and therefore are rapidly overcome by using heat exhaustion. We get a meal, or escape from being one. Well this is the popular scenario. I assume it would have made more experience to have used our social crew numbers, increasing IQ and device making abilities to hunt and ambush game as a substitute than strolling them down. As for escaping predators, possibly we have to have retained our tree mountain climbing abilities, and if no timber had been available, there are constantly rocks to throw and sticks to membership predators with. I'm now not satisfied loss of fur in order to sweat in order to run marathons in order to eat or keep away from being eaten are related in a cause-and-effect way. In any tournament strolling is also very power consuming and it isn't always commonly sound exercise to dissipate extra energy than you have to, specifically when you do not understand the place and when your subsequent meal is coming from. And if it is high quality for evolving hominoids to lose fur, take up sweating, take up jogging, and run to exhaustion large prey animals, then it additionally be superb for different predators, like the lion, to do the same. But that hasn't happened. Why not?

* Our relative lack of fur requires the need, as a substitution, for garb in cooler environments. Why a human, originating in and adapted to a tropical climate except need of fur, consequently barring want of clothing, would migrate into cooler, even bloodless habitats the place fur, or now a apparel alternative instead, is a close to requirement, is itself an anomaly. You swap fur for clothing, but apparel in itself requires a entire lot of exclusive abilities to produce - fur doesn't.

C - Cats, as well as their flora and fauna huge cat cousins, do now not lack a herbal protecting of fur.

A VOCAL LANGUAGE

* Is an anomaly in that solely people vocalise now not only everyday, routine, survival 'language' (all manner of animals do that) but summary concepts (which no other animals do).

* A vocal or spoken language required to talk summary ideas, as apart from just making sounds, requires an evolutionary rearrangement of the applicable internal organs required; lips, teeth, tongue, tough and gentle palate, larynx, etc.

C - Cats meow, lions roar, however their meow (or the lion's roar) has nothing to do with communicating summary standards like fundamental mathematics.

TOOL USE

* Is an anomaly in that whilst a few different animals can make and use tools, that relative degree of sophistication relative to what human beings have completed is akin to evaluating the survival capabilities of a day-old infant with that of an adult.

* Tool use requires an evolutionary rearrangement of the finger-hand-wrist-arm-shoulder configuration, as well as that extra-large talent thingy to parent out that a device is required, what sources are required to make that tool, and how to manufacture the integral put in force from those resources. A lot of just-so prerequisites have to be met to accommodate even the most fundamental of device technologies.

* Tool use may want to subsequently prove our undoing as tool use, or technology, is a double-edged sword. A gun can put meals on your table; it can also exterminate humans.

C - Cats are now not adapted at using tools. If they may want to use a can opener and a spoon they could get their personal meals! That would swimsuit me simply fine, however alas.

BREEDS or ETHNIC/RACIAL DISTINCTIONS

* Are anomalous in that when taking into consideration the relaxation of the animal and plant kingdom, breeds (groupings that seem distinct but can nonetheless breed and produce non-sterile offspring) have a tendency to be related with artificial, no longer herbal selection. Are human breeds therefore a product of synthetic selection, and if so, by using whom?

* Human breeds cannot be thoroughly explained in the simply 70,000 or some odd years due to the fact that one special racial kind of Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and spread all through the globe diverging into severa racial types. Even if there had been several migrations out of Africa, a wave of migrations, all these migrant waves were of one race or breed. The 70,000 12 months time length is very short, the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, to reap this uniqueness of going from a local African uni-race to a multiracial global society. Further, the evolutionary (survival of the fittest) gain or reason(s) for ethnic distinctions are lacking any rational natural explanation, apart from in some selected races, skin colour.

C - Your fashionable pussycat comes in more than a few breeds. That's artificial resolution at work, albeit the whodunit in this case is nicely known.

UNIQUE FACIAL FEATURES

* Are a incredibly human anomaly. Apart from identical twins, no two people from the neck up appear the same, and as a result this is how we inform human identities, as soon as seen, apart. We have a tendency to tell animals of the equal species or breed (if applicable) aside through size, colour, skin/fur patterns, abnormalities, or else we don't distinguish who's who at all. To me, all magpie faces appear the same. The query is, why human beings have special facial features and not the rest of the animal kingdom?

C - If you took a hundred pure short-hair black cats, identical size, same sex, identical eye colour, should you tell them aside by way of looking at just their face? I doubt if I could.

THE WHITES-OF-YOUR-EYES

* Are anomalous in that interestingly no different animal exhibit them, and based on all the animals and birds I see around my neighborhood environment, that absolutely seems to be the case. So why do we exhibit the whites-of-our-eyes? There would appear to be no rhyme or purpose for this natural human evolutionary (if it was once a herbal selection) trait. The whites-of-our-eyes: how very, very odd.

C - Cats have whites-of-their-eyes, solely you have to peel lower back the pores and skin surrounding their eyeballs to see the whites-of-their-eyes. Looking at a widespread cat, you will fail to see the whites-of-their-eyes.

EARLOBES

* Are anomalous in that curiously no other mammal (and clearly now not any fish, amphibian, reptile or bird) have them. So why do we have them?

* Earlobes? WTF you ask? Well we all be aware of that our earlobes serve a cultural motive or function as a top site as an accent to trend - pierced ears and earrings. However, earlobes serve no proper biological function. You could exist, live on and thrive besides them. Because we alone have earlobes, and due to the fact they serve no organic purpose, they are anomalous.

* On the other hand, earlobes apparently do not do us any harm. But, organic evolution tends to select for the effective benefit, no longer the neutral. Why would Mother Nature evolve them if they serve no biological purpose? WTF indeed!

C - Cats have ears; cats do no longer have earlobes.

RISK TAKING

* Is anomalous in that if carried out just for the sake of doing it, serves no effective evolutionary reason or result whilst accenting a bad one, giving oneself a 'Darwin Award' for casting off yourself from similarly contributions to the evolution of the human species.

* No animal will have interaction in any hazardous pastime that would not have some connection closer to its own, its immediately family brood, its community or its species survival. An animal doesn't take risks simply for the sake of taking risks and simply for the thrill of it all. Humans then again will often have interaction in excessive volatile activities, except any benefit to anyone, together with themselves, barring to perhaps remove themselves from the gene pool. Risky behaviour would possibly include right up to and inclusive of suicide which most decidedly removes you from the gene pool. Suicide is no longer a trait that tends to be shared by means of our animal relations, and apparent exceptions, like whales stranding themselves in shallow water, have a physiological explanation.

C - Cats are no longer acknowledged to take risks above and beyond the name of their feline duty, even if they do sometimes get caught up a tree!

PRIVACY AND EMBARRASSMENT

* Is anomalous in that no animal species, backyard of the human species, seems to be the slightest bit involved with privateness (not to be harassed with territoriality or personal space, rather simply privacy from being located below positive stipulations or in positive situations generally of a sexual or bodily characteristic nature). Nor do animals, in contrast to humans, go through any shape of embarrassment. That suggests that there is no evolutionary or survival element to the need for privacy or the suffering of being embarrassed. Somehow, in human beings on my own (but no longer yet in toddlers or infants), these principles have been imprinted onto our collective psyche. Imprinted via whom? What is the ultimate beginning and how far again does it go? Why is it so? Who knows! But the upshot is that this has to be a cultural quirk; it is sincerely not a biological one.

* There are apparently two actual taboo places in human society where intruders are now not welcome: the bed room and the bathroom, or put another way, sex and bodily functions, where privacy is paramount and when violated, embarrassment ensues. The latter in particular is puzzling in that bodily functions are universal. Every human has to go to the bathroom, all women have 'that time of the month', so why these be embarrassments if witnessed by way of others is anomalous. That's additionally highlighted in that sex and bodily functions are not biological occasions which animals discover requires privacy or reasons embarrassment to them if witnessed through others.

* Nudity per se does not seem to be the root cause, as people seem to be way much less shy of performing nude in pretty popular social situations than when engaged in extra personal bedroom/bathroom matters that require exposure.

* Embarrassment in human beings can be brought about via many other oops events, perhaps comical, like sporting mismatched socks, maybe incredibly greater serious like splitting your pants in public. But if an equal match takes place to an animal, no such response comes to the fore. For example, if you stumble and fall down, piss your pants, or vomit in public, you are embarrassed. If an animal does the equivalent, it simply preferences itself up and acts like nothing unusual transpired. Animals don't blush.

C - Cats don't care if you or another cat sees them mate or go to the litter box. They do not suffer embarrassment and they do not blush.

CATS

C - Its only honest to ask in regards to my feline comparison, does a cat have any anatomical or physiological or behavioural function unique to them and solely them? The stunning answer is yes. Cats purr, and the motives why and how are nevertheless no longer well understood. Humans do not purr. No different animal purrs. Their large cat family don't purr, however then once more lions and tigers, etc. roar, and your pet pussy cat doesn't. So possibly the two vocalizations are associated from way again when they all had a frequent ancestor! But purr or roar, there seems to be no evolutionary drawbacks, just fine survival benefits like warning off rival lions (my roar is louder than your roar) or mother/kitten bonding in cats.

CONCLUSIONS

* There are 4 possible explanations for the a number anomalies associated with the existence of the current human species relative to our alleged ancestral stock which goes proper back to the chimpanzees. In descending order of probability, IMHO, there is the simulated universe scenario inhabited by using us as digital entities (created by 'persons' or matters unknown and likely continually unknowable); there is artificial determination (the historic astronaut theory); there's herbal decision (the Darwinian organic evolution concept); and way, way last, by means of a wide, large margin, there may be supernatural advent (the dust-and-rib concept and variations thereof).

* Why this ordering of probabilities? There are many paths to a simulated universe, from wetware to software, with the aid of extraterrestrials or possibly a future 'human' society, that it borders on the near inevitable. There's but one pathway to the artificial selection scenario, even though that too is simply about inevitable. There are many problems to be had with natural determination as this essay demonstrates, even though that is the trendy model. Lastly, the thought of an all-perfect supernatural deity who would screw up things so royally is laughable - as is the idea of a supernatural deity in the first place.

* The fascinating bit is that a digital reality simulation ought to effortlessly be a simulation of an 'ancient astronaut' generated artificial selection, or Darwinian herbal selection, or even a supernatural creator deity! Truth be known, only the simulated universe scenario makes any actual sense, IMHO, due to the fact therein, "anything goes", and when it comes to the issues with human evolution, one wants an "anything goes" explanation.

Science librarian; retired.