Evolution

Color is funny. Anthropologists have long known that different cultures have different relationships, linguistically and in day to day practice, to the color spectrum. For example, the Efe Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers of the Ituri Forest describe things as white, black, or red, and that’s it. They live in a world of green. Going with the model for “Eskimos” having a hundred words for snow because snow is so important in their environment, one would expect that the Efe would have a hundred words for green. On the other hand, the Efe Hunter-Gatherers must have a fairly primitive culture, compared, say, to those of us living in Coon Rapids Minnesota, that of course they have fewer words for different colors.

Of course, this is all a bunch of hooey. First, we don’t call them “Eskimos.” We call them “Inuit.” “Eskimo” is a bad word. It would be like calling the Irish “Drunken Leprechauns.” Second, the “fact” that Inuit have a hundred words for snow is simply not true. It is an Urban Legend. Third, the great variation in something … any thing … does not necessarily demand a rich lexicon to describe it. You … yes, you … rely heavily on computers, right? Many computer users presumably need to have a concept of “memory” and the memory their computers use … related to the choices you make when buying or using a computer, where and how you store your documents, etc. But this concept is often appallingly simplified. I know many people who can’t distinguish between storage of data on a hard drive from storage of data in RAM. And there are many kinds of hard drive and many kinds of ram. And then there is processor cache, video memory, and so on. There are probably over two dozen kinds of memory, it matters to any computer user, and most computer users have either one word for memory or two. (”Memory” or “Hard drive” and “Memory”)

Finally, if the Efe are Primitive, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. Indeed, both are untrue. The Efe are far from primitive and I’m a monkey’s great great great …. great great nephew, not uncle. The Efe have one of the largest brain to body ratios of any people. I’ve never met an Efe man who knew fewer than four different languages. I’ve never met an Efe who was not very smart. I can’t say any of these things for the population living in Coon Rapids, or even Edina, Minnesota.

So why do the Efe not seem to even have a word for the color green? [Read more →]

Tags: Congo, Africa, Science Essays, Geographical, Behavioral Biology, mind-brain-behavior, Foraging, Hunting, Gender, Falsehoods, Language by Greg
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Please consider visiting The Creation Museum. This is a “web carnival” of Internet resources about the new museum in Kentucky.

Tags: Blog Carnival, Primates, Bible, Birds, Events, Science Tidbits, Science Essays, Plants, Other, Organisms, Humor, Creationism in the Classroom, Homeschooling, Blogging, Atheism and Religion, Hominids, Creationism, Commentary, Politics, Human Evolution 1001, Education, video, Spirituality, Falsehoods, Science Education by Greg
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I always get a few Michael Egnor hits a day, where someone comes to my site to see this post, But yesterday I had a surge, with about 500 people reading it by having encountered it via StumbleUpon. (The other page that seemed to get a lot of attention all of the sudden, is this one on Home Schooling.

This prompted me to have a look at the status of the Michael Egnor Google Presence. This is what I found. [Read more →]

Tags: Behavioral Biology, Health, Genetics, Presidential Election, Education, Bible, Creationism in the Classroom, Darwin, Falsehoods, Creationism, Commentary, Blogging, Atheism and Religion, Politics, Evolution, Uncategorized by Greg
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… kind of like creationism?

It just so happens that I’ve done some archaeology related to homeopathic medicine. Sounds strange, but it is true. I’m just a foot soldier on that project, so everything I know comes from the research of my colleagues. Minneapolis, it turns out, was one of the major centers for homeopathic medicine back in the day. (We have been the “medical state” … which is what we call ourselves … for a long time.)

In the old days, there were two kinds of western medicine practiced here: Homeopathic and regular. There was a debate as to which one was better. Eventually “regular” won the debate.

I suspect Homeopathic was for a long time thought of as better, and indeed was better, because it was totally ineffective. This meant that the pysician had no effect. Meanwhile, regular medicine was dangerous. So your chance of getting better and/or surviving “medicine” was to go for the kind that did nothing at all. But then they invented anti-biotic and stuff and “regular” became better at solving many medical probmems than “Nothing.”

Hey, that would be a great expression to use …. “Better than nothing…” I’ll have to remember that.

Anyway, check this out, from Nature news, hot off the presses: [Read more →]

Tags: Science Essays, Health, Falsehoods by Greg
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First, where does the idea that poor people have more babies than rich people come from?

When I think about this, four things come to mind. One is the comments I’ve heard from people I know who live in the middle east. Arab, Palestinian, Egyptian, Israeli, Jew, does not matter. It is often said in that context that the “other” people are trying to out-breed “us.” This is not strictly related to rich people vs poor (well, yes, but in complex ways beyond this post) but it reminds me that there is a paranoia about this issue.

Second, I am reminded of the common social construct of the welfare mother. She is black, usually corpulent, has signed up for nine different welfare and food stamp accounts, and has nine or ten children. This is part of what sociologists call the “Welfare Stigma.” Yes, there is such a woman, she was on the Today Show once in November, 1971. Maybe she got person of the year in Time Magazine once, I can’t remember. The point is that this world is not full of corpulent fast-breeding black women on welfare nine times over. This is just a version of the paranoia mentioned above.

Third, there is the baby glut of the 1970s and 1980s. Middle class American women stopped breeding during this period of time. Why? Ah, there are several theories, and I’ve got a really fun hypothesis on this one myself, but we will not discuss that here and now. Some other time. But, it is simply a fact that this happened. [Read more →]

Tags: Science Essays, Falsehoods, Human Evolution 1001 by Greg
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To review, these are the first three posts in this series of The Falsehoods:

1.False Pearls
2.Falsehoods Revisited #1
3.Is it true that human beings are no longer subject to Natural Selection?

And now on to the questions: “What is the future of Human Evolution?”

In his gentle critique of my earlier post in this series, Larry Moran proposes one reason why people sometimes mistakingly think that “evolution has stopped for humans.” The argument goes like this. First, you believe that evolution is what we in the business call teleological. This means that evolution is going somewhere in particular, towards a logical goal or resting place, to a state of some sort of perfection or ideal. Then you find out that there is a lot of “relaxed selection” going on. Relaxed selection is when some selective force is either reduced or removed so the population previously constrained by selection is now changing only through “neutral” or “random” effects (genetic drift). So now you are thinking, “Hey, evolution was going along just fine, with Natural Selection moving our fine species along in the right direction, and now it has stopped … with that relaxed selection thing … so evolution has stopped.” If evolution is progress and the progress is stopped then evolution must have stopped. Like if you are on a train heading towards Toledo, and the train goes off the tracks, then you might say that you are no longer going to Toledo.

But evolution is not progress. Evolution is change in allele frequency over time. If anything you think about evolution does not jive with that definition than you are on thin ice.

Not only is teleology belied by this principle, but so is overall directionality. Consider the following. (Careful, this is leading to a Trick Question that your gonna love!).

The distant ancestors of humans, not long after the chimpanzee-human split, can be compared to humans in the following ways:

Ancestors had larger teeth, humans smaller teeth.
Ancestors were very small bodies, humans much larger bodied.
Ancestors had small (chimp size) brains, humans have whopping big brains.

Compared to the last common ancestor of living humans and our closest relative, the living chimps, humans have teeth that are similar in size or smaller, bodies that are larger, and brains that are larger. But among all of the post-last common ancestor fossils, we see mostly large teeth. So it is reasonable to characterize human evolution as consisting of three trends: Reduction in tooth size, increase in body size, and increase in brain size.

Now, I’m going to “show” you (with words) four Australopithecine species that stand out from the crowd of the many other Australopithecines each in it’s own way.

Species A: Small teeth, small body, small brain

Species B: Large teeth, large body, small brain,

Species C: Large teeth, small body, larger brain

Species D: Large teeth, small body, small brain

One of these four is most likely in the direct lineage (or very close to it) leading to humans. The other three are almost certainly not in the direct lineage leading towards humans. Which one is closest to our direct ancestor, and why?

Well, since you know that this is a trick question, you know you must answer D, the one that has none of the traits that seem to be “leading towards” a human ancestor. And you would be right. The small teeth, large body, and large brain in each of the other three coincidentally seem to lead in the direction of modern humans. But do you know what? At the time that these species existed, there was not any such thing as a direction towards modern humans. Only in retrospect can we see a particular series of events or trend that led to something. And these particular traits, in these particular extinct hominids, just happen to appear to prenumberate modern humans. But they don’t. Coincidence? Well, yes.

This is not an unusual situation at all. For the most part, you cannot look at a given species or set of species and make predictions about what is going to happen in the future. If you see a trend going on, you might be able to use the trend to predict the short or medium term future of a particular feature. However, since you can only do that with features that happen to be changing with a certain trend, you may fail to recognize (because you can’t see into the future) some other major, and much more important change, that has not given any indication of happening yet.

So you are watching a species change it’s body size in a certain direction for a century or so, so you figure “In the future, the thing we’re going to notice about this species it that is will be bigger.” Then a while later the species also, and you did not predict or expect this, experiences a dramatic change in it’s diet which results in a change in social structure and thus mating system, and suddenly the big story with this lineage is all about it’s secondary sexual characteristics (like big antlers or something). Oh yea, and they’re a little bigger. But you missed your big chance to predict the future because, well, you can’t do that.

Frankly, you’ll do better with the stock market than you will predicting future evolutionary changes.

Here’s the thing. If we consider the question “What is the future of human evolution?” from an evolutionary perspective, the ONLY correct answer is this one: “We don’t know.” If someone shows up at your door (or in your favorite science magazine or newspaper) with such predictions, you know that they are not addressing this question from an evolutionary perspective. They are making it up, or they are misguided, or they are trying to sell you something.

If someone tells you they want to predict the future of human evolution, consider the words of the immortal Frank Zappa:

And I said look here brother-
who you Jiving with that cosmik debris? …
Don’t you know, you could make more money as a butcher?
So, don’t waste your time on me …

Tags: Science Essays, Falsehoods, Human Evolution 1001, Hominids by Greg
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In discussing The Falsehoods, I left off with with two questions that I’ll rephrase here as assertions (or hypotheses) to consider:

• Human beings are no longer subject to Natural Selection.
• Human beings will not give rise to a new species … what we got is it.

The first assertion is a widely held belief with absolutely no foundation, so it qualifies as a true Falsehood. The second question is not so widely held. In fact, in the press and in many discussions, the question is often brought up “What will we evolve into …what’s next ..etc” The reason this statement is listed here is because it is one of the necessary outcomes of the assertion discussed in a previous post that “Evolution has Stopped for Humans.”

In this post, I’m going to focus on the first assertion: That humans are no longer subject to the forces of Natural Selection.

Are human beings “still” subject to natural selection? This is a loaded question: Loaded with tricky words like “Are” and “still” and “selection” and “human being.” Let’s start with the Are-Still problem.

A species is an entity that has temporal (time) and spatial (geography) dimensions. So an expanding population/species covers more and more geography over time, and so on. The “Are-Still” part of this question must be referring to some part of that time-space continuum. I think what is usually meant is humans in this modern world of medicine and dominance over the environment, etc. In particular, it means humans as a population not subject to scarcities of food, ravages of predation, and suffering by disease. This is because evolution roughly equals natural selection and its effects, and natural selection roughly equals these listed aspects of the environment and their effects. The struggle for existence, the competition for food, and so on. And the struggle is over. (Remember, we’re talking Fallacies here … )

The other biggie, sexual seleciton, is often left out of the discussion. The popular mindset often seems to lack a concept of human mate competition or mate choice as factors in human evolution or human affairs in general. I think this is due to modern conceptions of monogamy. We fool ourselves into thinking that since there is the same number of men and women, [Read more →]

Tags: Science Essays, Falsehoods, Human Evolution 1001, Evolution by Greg
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As I approach the beginning of a new semester of casting true pearls, I am moved to write about Falsehoods in more detail. (Not all of them, lucky for you!)
I will do an easy one: “Evolution has stopped for humans.”

This is a true test litmus kind of question. Why? Because by understanding evolution it should be sufficient to get to the point where this question can not be answered! It can’t be answered because it really shouldn’t be asked. It’s like asking “OK, so the earth is a globe. Fine. But how did it get from being flat to being a globe?” That question has no answer. Neither does “Has evolution stopped for humans?”

The only species for which evolution has stopped are the extinct ones. Here’s why. [Read more →]

Tags: Science Essays, Falsehoods, Human Evolution 1001 by Greg
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Teaching Evolutionary Biology is hard. It is not easy, like teaching astrophysics would be. Nobody knows anything about astrophysics, so all the instructor has to do is to find the empty space in the student’s brain and put some astrophysics in there.

The problem with Evolutionary Biology is that everybody already knows lots of stuff about it. Everybody already knows all about animal behavior because they have a cat. Everybody already knows all about human behavior because they are a human. Everybody already knows all about mating systems because they have a mate. And so on.

On top of this, we have the venerable science press. Evolutionary biology, especially the part about human evolution, is very cool. Therefore, new findings by evolutionary biologists always get press. Even old findings get press on a slow news day. But reporters are not really reporting the science. They are writing for an audience; an audience that they have created over time with their particular way of reporting.

A very clear example of this is the concept of a Missing Link. [Read more →]

Tags: Science Essays, Falsehoods, Human Evolution 1001 by Greg
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