Apes CAN swim, it turns out

2 Replies to “Apes CAN swim, it turns out”

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   August 16, 2013 at 5:49 pm

   “Apes CAN swim”,,

   yes but can he throw a 100 mph fastball?

   How Humans ‘Evolved’ to Throw a Fastball By Becky Lang | June 26, 2013
   Excerpt: Roach knew from previous work that the human throw was something distinctive. He had earlier studied throwing mechanics in a group of retired Hollywood chimpanzees and found that, while they can throw with accuracy and are able to toss balls overhand and underhand, their top speed is just 20 miles per hour. Chimps’ shoulders are shortened, rising up toward the head, while human shoulders are more relaxed.
   The researchers used the motion capture data to construct a computer model of the physics at work. They found that the key was elastic energy. This energy is stored in stretched ligaments and tendons when the arm is cocked. When the arm is released, the upper arm rockets around and the force causes the elbow to straighten and deliver the ball at high speed.
   And they determined that this shoulder rotation is actually the fastest motion of the human body. Professional pitchers can reach a rotation of 9,000 degrees per second. At that speed, if the arm could rotate a full 360 degrees it would complete 25 rotations in one second.
   http://blogs.discovermagazine......g6zUm00Eit

   Despite their claim that ‘evolution did it’, when one looks under the hood at the muscles themselves to see what this ‘elastic energy’ is all about, one is immediately struck with brilliant design, not with happenstance evolution:

   Muscles act as metamaterials due to collective behavior, physicists show – June 21, 2013
   Excerpt: Metamaterials are defined as artificial materials that have been engineered to have unusual properties that are not found in nature.,, ,,scientists in a new study have found that biological muscles exhibit a mechanical response that also qualifies them as metamaterials: when a tetanized (maximally contracted) muscle is suddenly extended, it comes loose, and if it is suddenly shortened, it tightens up without using any of the metabolic fuel adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The researchers explained that this behavior is due to the folding and unfolding of proteins called myosin cross-bridges that play a crucial role in muscle contraction. Most interestingly, muscles appear to be finely tuned to perform close to a critical point, at which they can exhibit highly synchronized microscale behavior.,,,
   A remarkable phenomenon reported by Caruel, et al., is that, in contrast to known smart materials, the micro-mechanisms inside muscles are finely tuned to work in unison, which allows them to perform a highly synchronized stroke. Behind this collective behavior is an internal architecture with domineering long-range interactions, which has been previously overlooked in muscle studies.,,,
   Quite surprisingly, the cooperation at the nanoscale in muscles was found to be similar to magnetism; moreover, the critical point at which muscles seem finely tuned to perform near is, in this case, a direct analog of the ferromagnetic Curie point.,,,
   Why and how muscle systems are tuned to criticality is an open problem,,,
   Tuning to criticality in muscles has many intriguing parallels in other biological systems. For instance, in a 2011 paper published in Physical Review Letters, Patzelt and Pawelzik showed that when humans perform control tasks like in upright standing or while balancing a stick, their behavior also exhibits power law fluctuations, which suggests a fine-tuning of the underlying mechanical system to a critical point.,,,
   Overall, the discovery that muscles act as metamaterials due to collective behavior suggests that determining the cause of the critical behavior of muscles may lead to a paradigm change in the biomimetic design of new materials.
   http://phys.org/news/2013-06-m.....cists.html

   as to the rampant misuse of the word and concept of ‘evolution’ in the articles by Darwinists:

   “Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology”
   Excerpt: “Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.,,, In the peer-reviewed literature, the word “evolution” often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for “evolution” some other word – “Buddhism,” “Aztec cosmology,” or even “creationism.” I found that the substitution never touched the paper’s core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.”
   Philip S. Skell – (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
   http://www.discovery.org/a/2816

   At the 7:00 minute mark of this following video, Dr. Behe gives an example of how positive evidence is falsely attributed to evolution by using the word ‘evolution’ as a sort of coda in peer-reviewed literature:

   Michael Behe – Life Reeks Of Design – video
   http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5066181/

   a few more assorted notes:

   Da Vinci Vitruve Luc Viatour – interactive image
   http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi.....iatour.jpg

   “Speaking as one who has examined the original Vitruvian Man drawing, I can say that Leonardo was looking for a numerical design scheme that informs the proportions of the human body.
   The drawing began as an illustration from Vitruvius’ book, De Architectura where Vitruvius justifies the use of the square and circle as design elements because those shapes are integral to the human body: a man’s height is equal to his width (with arms outstretched) as a square, and a circle drawn with the navel as center and feet as radius is coincident with the hands’ reach.
   Leonardo also notes the other proportional relationships from Vitruvius such as the head height measures to the whole as well as the arms and hand sections.
   Leonardo then continued measuring (from the evidence of pin point indentations made by walking dividers, especially along the left vertical edge) to find more proportional relationships. He would take a measure of a part of the figure with the dividers and walk that measure along the height to see if the measure would fit an even number of times.
   From this drawing and others where Leonardo was working on the same type of problem it is evident that Leonardo believed there was a something like a unified field theory of design where everything in nature was related by numerical and geometrical design systems.
   He was one of the original ID thinkers.”
   – Dr. Ford – UD blogger
   Of note: The Vitruvian Man is a world-renowned drawing created by Leonardo da Vinci c. 1487. It is the one commonly associated with the science of physiology

   Also of interest:

   The predominance of quarter-power (4-D) scaling in biology
   Excerpt: Many fundamental characteristics of organisms scale
   with body size as power laws of the form:

   Y = Yo M^b,

   where Y is some characteristic such as metabolic rate, stride length or life span, Yo is a normalization constant, M is body mass and b is the allometric scaling exponent.
   A longstanding puzzle in biology is why the exponent b is usually some simple multiple of 1/4 (4-Dimensional scaling) rather than a multiple of 1/3, as would be expected from Euclidean (3-Dimensional) scaling.
   http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~dre.....18_257.pdf

   “Although living things occupy a three-dimensional space, their internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional. Quarter-power scaling laws are perhaps as universal and as uniquely biological as the biochemical pathways of metabolism, the structure and function of the genetic code and the process of natural selection.,,, The conclusion here is inescapable, that the driving force for these invariant scaling laws cannot have been natural selection.” Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 78-79

   Human Anatomy – Impressive Transparent Visualization – Fearfully and Wonderfully Made – video
   http://vimeo.com/26011909

   Verse and Music:

   Matthew 10:31
   “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. “So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.

   Live – Heaven (official video)
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff3NUP-xzqQ
2. 2
   mjazzguitar says:

   August 17, 2013 at 8:40 pm

   Speaking of swimming, I recently figured out why there are no fossils of rodents becoming bats. They were probably aquatic using the webs between their toes to swim with. Aquatic animals usually get eaten before becoming fossils and the bones dissolve. The webs got larger and larger because the ones who swam better survived more. One day one was sunning himself on a branch when a fish who was growing feet climbed up on the branch to make a meal of him. He jumped off and found he could fly and that is how the first bat was formed.