by The Rebel 15 Replies latest jw friends
Last friday my boy of ten was very late back from school, so I called the school, they called the police, and to cut a long horrible exsperience short he had been helping a younger boy fly his kite.
But what has occurred to me is that when Orlando was 5 years old he was totally dependent on mummy and daddy, whilst horses, cats, birds and other animals are born and are independent within days.
So my question on natural selection is, how are we humuns still here?
The Rebel.
@Rebel.........oooooh bad feeling......i remember searching for lil Ray one time.....found him in the school yard playin marbles with his buddies. But the panik , And fear are inexplainable....just all bad. I think animals in the wild have instinct that tells em get up, or die laying there. Sounds harsh, but i think thats how it is. Babies have the instinct called hunger.... Tellin em get milk in my tummy NOW !!!!!!
Mad Puppy
Hi Rebel,
Whilst watching a documentary on penguins, what struck me was the anxiety exhibited by parents and chicks when they were lost to each other.
We lost our eldest daughter when she was 3 in a furniture store. Store was closed down. Staff and public searched frantically for nearly 45mins. I was traumatised and sinking into unconsciousness the longer this went on. Police were called because a little 5yr old girl missing in Edinburgh had just been found murdered that weekend. Daughter was found in a lounge setting sitting comfortably, swinging her legs, humming the tune to her favourite tv programme, staring at a blank tv screen. Waaaah!
So my question on natural selection is, how are we humuns still here?
Some species have few offspring and invest lots of time nurturing them, other species have thousands of offspring 99.9% of which become fish food within hours.
Different evolutionary strategies but as long as every human on average produces one more human the species goes on.
Pleased to hear Orlando is ok - horrible feeling!
In addition to cofty's post on r and K selection theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory), I'd like to add:
Some offspring are born nearly fully developed. They grow up quickly. These offspring are termed precocial (hence 'precocious'). Species which produce precocial young are typically herbivores that must grow up quickly to avoid being eaten by predators. Within a few hours of being born, young zebra and wildebeest can run and keep up with the herd.
Other offspring require round the clock care and nourishment from their parents. They develop much slower. These are called altricial. Examples are predators such as cats and dogs. Human babies are altricial, too.
Sorry, didn't answer this: how are we humuns still here?
Well, we humans are apex predators, and so were some of our ancestors. Our ancestors were capable of planning, of hunting in groups. Of fashioning weapons so that a group of Neanderthals or early Homo sapiens could separate a mammoth from its herd and kill it with spears or, exploiting its fire of fire, drive it over the edge of a cliff to its death. Complex language no doubt facilitated this.
We also have culture and technology. We have knowledge, and a way to acquire further knowledge - science.
We can use our knowledge to manipulate the environment around us, so that we can mass produce food.
Really, a better question would be: how can we humans not be here?
These offspring are termed precocial (hence 'precocious'). Species which produce precocial young are typically herbivores that must grow up quickly to avoid being eaten by predators. Within a few hours of being born, young zebra and wildebeest can run and keep up with the herd.
Yeah and there's another thing with precocial species. Their brains are pretty much hard wired (mostly instinct). Human babies on the other hand have all the brain hardware but its not all wired up yet. This is because the wiring can change depending on the environment. What and how one learns is determined by the surroundings.
Some species have few offspring and invest lots of time nurturing them, ...
The whole thing is a tradeoff. Do you want to reproduce with thousands of offspring which are hard wired but cannot really learn a lot of new things. Or do you want few offspring which require a lot of nurture but can learn and adapt to new surroundings.
One of the penalties of walking on two feet as opposed to the usual mammalian four is the size of the pelvis.
With body weight and locomotion focused in the middle of the body the birth canal tended to be reduced. An alternative was that Homo sapiens developed a duck-like waddle as did earlier hominins such as Australopithecus. Humans want to be elegant. The gorillas took the Soviet tank approach and Homo sapiens in order to avoid being cat-food, reckoned that being fleet of foot was a good thing as well as standing upright to observe and avoid danger on the savannah.
By contrast Homo heidleburgensis, an immediate forerunner of H sapiens was tall and built very robustly both in jaw and muscle attachments hence a real tough guy.
But back to the point; with the small pelvis, giving birth was not easy for the more graceful human ape. Remembering that natural selection filters out the losers in evolutionary change the only successful breeding mothers were those favoured with giving birth to immature young. The consequence was that humans require infinitely more assistance to be nurtured from a state of complete helplessness and still require help to survive for the first ten or so years.
The upshot of these compromises including large brain and less brawn and the need to be born small was that H sapiens used intelligence to hunt for meat and kept out of danger whilst the mothers bonded emotionally with their helpless offspring for an extended period, allowing for a family and social sense to develop in the child.
Behold: the modern human! Being so recent however, around only two hundred thousand years, it seems to me we still have a long way to sort out the nature of the human animal and put aggression behind us.
Why are we still here? Because we have flexible thinking which employs imagination to project a future so we can make strategies. Our imagination makes us human but also subjects us to the weakness of assuming our imagination represents truth.
