Politics and Religion

Why Are Things The Way They Are? Part II
willywonka4u 22 Reviews 796 reads
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I've always wondered, why are human beings so very different from every other species on the planet? Why aren't there other species that have their own civilizations? If we're related to other primates, when why do we have a complex language when they don't? Why are they covered in fur (like almost all land mammals) and we're not? What drove our particular species to be so very different?

In our previous installment, we talked a little bit about the different mating strategies for each gender. Now let's look at some physical differences. Differences between the male and the female in a species will form due to sexual dimorphism.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism

This varies by species, both by it's degree, and which gender it favors. There are many species in which sexual dimorphism favors the female. This is the case with many insects, spiders, hyenas, and the anglerfish. The anglerfish is a deep sea fish with extreme sexual dimorphism. The female is far larger, and the male attaches himself to the female, feeding off her blood, where he eventually just becomes a sperm producing appendage. This is a rather efficient survival mechanism, given the extremes of it's environment.  

Looking at primates, we have varying degrees of sexual dimorphism. With bonobos, we see very little sexual dimorphism at all. What's noteworthy about bonobos, is that they live in a fairly isolated region in central Africa, living in the trees, where there's plenty of food to eat. With plenty of resources, and few predators, the evolution of bonobos favored very little sexual dimorphism at all. Human beings are very closely related to bonobos, but not as closely related as chimpanzees.  

Chimpanzees (our closest cousin in the animal kingdom) had to compete with others for food on the ground, and this likely drove significant sexual dimorphism, favoring the male. In chimps, the males have large jaws, fangs, and deep eye ridges. Here is an image of various chimpanzee skulls.  

http://www.imagecoast.com/images/willywonka/chimpanzeeskulls.jpg

You may notice something a little odd here. And that is, despite that chimpanzees are our closest ancestor in the animal kingdom, their skulls look nothing like human skulls........with the exception of an *infant* chimpanzee. And that should strike you as a little strange. Why would an *infant* chimpanzee skull look pretty damn similar to a human skull?  

This oddity will be explored in Part III.

I'll check it out. Another recommendation is Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale.

H.Sapiens would wipe out every similar competitor. There were quite a few branches in the intelligent pirmate evolutionary tree including lots of variations of Homo and we swept through them like scarlet fever as we expanded across the planet. Killing off Neandertals was child's play. There's only room for one creature as lethal as we are. Kind of like what could happen when computers reach the artificial intelligence singularity, although most probably we will have destroyed ourselves and most other animal and plant life before then.   :-)

-- Modified on 10/28/2015 5:20:32 PM

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