Why you are fat and the chimp isn’t

_{Denyse O'Leary

June 5, 2015

Human evolution, News}

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As a genus, humans, from Homo sapiens (that’s us) to our extinct ancestors Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus, are wanderers. Over the vast majority of our history, which spans hundreds of thousands of years, we have roved from place to place, inhabiting a wide range of habitats. We moved with the seasons, we moved to find food, we moved — perhaps — just to move. Our adaptability was our key adaptation, an evolutionary leg-up on the competition. The ability to store fat was vital to this lifestyle. Body fat cushions internal organs, but it also serves as a repository of energy that can be readily broken down and used to power muscles. Humans might fatten up at one environment, then move on to another. When food was scarce, we could count on our fat to sustain us, at least temporarily.

Chimpanzees, on the other hand, are localized to specific environments where food is often plentiful, primarily the forests of West and Central Africa. Fatty stores of energy aren’t required, but strength to climb food-bearing trees is. Natural selection favored brawn, causing chimps to shed fat as unnecessary weight.

Clever idea. But thoughts from readers?

(Who would want to be a chimp just to be thin?)

See also: Why human evolution did not go the way analysts would have predicted

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Comments

Mung
Fruit grows on trees so that chimps would not have to eat grass.
Brilliant! I believe you must be one of those "leading evolutionary theorists" we've heard about. And Zach is always nearby to help us with more scientific facts. RealClear Science tells us that perhaps 'we moved just to move'. Zach corrects Real Clear Science by stating: "Not exactly". That is excellent! We now know even more about it. Thanks for telling us more scientific facts, Zachriel -- and especially for correcting Mr. Pomeroy, a "zoologist and biologist by training".
We have plenty of direct observations of the habits of primitive tribal societies,
And as Darwin taught us, the more primitive the tribal society, the more like a chimpanzee you are. So, we have direct evidence of people who were around when chimp-likes split from humans.
as well as historical evidence.
That's the best. Nothing to dispute there when it comes to direct observations of pre-historic development of mammalian life.
We also have direct observations of chimpanzee habits.
Fortunately, evolution didn't want them to change very much for the past 13 million years. Humans changed a little -- but fortunately we still have some primitive-types around.
By adapting to trees, apes avoided many predators, while being able to find higher calorie, more digestable foods.
Good solid facts once again. Other mammals stayed on the ground, but chimps were able to go up in the trees. Plus, bananas taste a lot better and chimps didn't want to store calories in fat AND be able to climb trees. I mean, that's asking evolution for a little too much. Be happy with what evolution gives you.
It’s not that complicated. Humans without the ability to store fat would reproduce less frequently during times of scarcity.
Of course! It's all very simple. Humans "moved just to move, not exacty" so they didn't have food. That's the big problem with "just moving". You tend to go places where there's no food and then wonder: "Evolution, why did you move us here?" Ahh, but evolution is pretty smart. It gave humans fat. Not only did they not have to eat as much, but they could reproduce more. Nice job evolution!Silver Asiatic_{June 5, 2015
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Fruit grows on trees so that chimps would not have to eat grass. I think I got it SA!Mung_{June 5, 2015
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Silver Asiatic: We moved just to move. Not exactly. We have plenty of direct observations of the habits of primitive tribal societies, as well as historical evidence. We also have direct observations of chimpanzee habits. Silver Asiatic: Natural selection favored brawn because otherwise chimps would have to eat grass. Grass has low nutritional value, and requires special adaptations to digest. By adapting to trees, apes avoided many predators, while being able to find higher calorie, more digestable foods. Silver Asiatic: Evolution figured it all out. It's not that complicated. Humans without the ability to store fat would reproduce less frequently during times of scarcity.Zachriel_{June 5, 2015
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I love to see these new scientific facts. Words of evolutionary wisdom to pass down to our children.
We moved with the seasons, we moved to find food, we moved — perhaps — just to move.
We moved just to move. Evolution told us to move, so we did - because that's what evolution wanted. Trees didn't want to move, so they just stayed there.
The ability to store fat was vital to this lifestyle.
If we couldn't store fat, we couldn't move. So, evolution decided that we needed to store some fat. It would have been pretty stupid to tell us to move around without giving us some fat! Otherwise, we would have had to stay with the chimps, and that would have been a disaster.
Chimpanzees, on the other hand, are localized to specific environments
That's pretty complicated language. Hey, its science, it has to be. Ok, I got it. Chimpanzees didn't move around. They stayed there. But why (I must ask)?
where food is often plentiful, primarily the forests of West and Central Africa.
Of course, they didn't want to "move just to move" because there was a lot of food there. Humans were told to "move just to move" -- so they went to places where there wasn't any food. Makes sense! Thus, they had to have some fat. Otherwise, they would have had to stay where the food was, and that's what chimps do.
Fatty stores of energy aren’t required,
Of course - it's a lot better to burn up all your energy and constantly need to re-fill rather than store enough to get you through several days, months or a whole lifetime. Evolution figured it all out.
but strength to climb food-bearing trees is. Natural selection favored brawn, causing chimps to shed fat as unnecessary weight.
Natural selection favored brawn because otherwise chimps would have to eat grass.Silver Asiatic_{June 5, 2015
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It's an interesting derivative hypothesis, given that you accept the underlying hypothesis. Shame it's being presented as if it were an established fact. Houses of cards are fascinating. Wouldn't want to live in one, but that's just me.englishmaninistanbul_{June 5, 2015
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Moreover, where the genetic differences between chimps and humans are most 'striking', is the place where mutations are 'always catastrophically bad':
A Listener's Guide to the Meyer-Marshall Debate: Focus on the Origin of Information Question -Casey Luskin - December 4, 2013 Excerpt: "There is always an observable consequence if a dGRN (developmental gene regulatory network) subcircuit is interrupted. Since these consequences are always catastrophically bad, flexibility is minimal, and since the subcircuits are all interconnected, the whole network partakes of the quality that there is only one way for things to work. And indeed the embryos of each species develop in only one way." - Eric Davidson http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/12/a_listeners_gui079811.html
Thus, where Darwinists most need plasticity in the genome to be viable as a theory, (i.e. developmental Gene Regulatory Networks), is the place where mutations are found to be 'always catastrophically bad'. Yet, it is exactly in this area of the genome (i.e. regulatory networks) where substantial, ‘orders of magnitude’, differences are found between even supposedly closely related species. Needless to say, this is the exact opposite finding for what Darwinism would have predicted for what should have been found in the genome. Of related interest to the 'image of God' inherent to man:
Evolution of the Genus Homo – Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences – Ian Tattersall, Jeffrey H. Schwartz, May 2009 Excerpt: “Unusual though Homo sapiens may be morphologically, it is undoubtedly our remarkable cognitive qualities that most strikingly demarcate us from all other extant species. They are certainly what give us our strong subjective sense of being qualitatively different. And they are all ultimately traceable to our symbolic capacity. Human beings alone, it seems, mentally dissect the world into a multitude of discrete symbols, and combine and recombine those symbols in their minds to produce hypotheses of alternative possibilities. When exactly Homo sapiens acquired this unusual ability is the subject of debate.” http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100202 Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language - December 19, 2014 Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,, (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, "The mystery of language evolution," Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).) It's difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti092141.html
bornagain77_{June 5, 2015
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of related interest: Contrary to the claims of Darwinists, the best fossil, and genetic, evidence indicates that humans are devolving, not evolving:
Scientists Discover Proof That Humanity Is Getting Dumber, Smaller And Weaker By Michael Snyder, on April 29th, 2014 Excerpt: An earlier study by Cambridge University found that mankind is shrinking in size significantly. Experts say humans are past their peak and that modern-day people are 10 percent smaller and shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. And if that’s not depressing enough, our brains are also smaller. The findings reverse perceived wisdom that humans have grown taller and larger, a belief which has grown from data on more recent physical development. The decline, said scientists, has happened over the past 10,000 years. http://thetruthwins.com/archives/scientists-discover-proof-that-humanity-is-getting-dumber-smaller-and-weaker Human Genetic Variation Recent, Varies Among Populations - (Nov. 28, 2012) Excerpt: Nearly three-quarters of mutations in genes that code for proteins -- the workhorses of the cell -- occurred within the past 5,000 to 10,000 years,,, "One of the most interesting points is that Europeans have more new deleterious (potentially disease-causing) mutations than Africans,",,, "Having so many of these new variants can be partially explained by the population explosion in the European population. However, variation that occur in genes that are involved in Mendelian traits and in those that affect genes essential to the proper functioning of the cell tend to be much older." (A Mendelian trait is controlled by a single gene. Mutations in that gene can have devastating effects.) The amount variation or mutation identified in protein-coding genes (the exome) in this study is very different from what would have been seen 5,000 years ago,,, The report shows that "recent" events have a potent effect on the human genome. Eighty-six percent of the genetic variation or mutations that are expected to be harmful arose in European-Americans in the last five thousand years, said the researchers. The researchers used established bioinformatics techniques to calculate the age of more than a million changes in single base pairs (the A-T, C-G of the genetic code) that are part of the exome or protein-coding portion of the genomes (human genetic blueprint) of 6,515 people of both European-American and African-American decent.,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121128132259.htm "We found an enormous amount of diversity within and between the African populations, and we found much less diversity in non-African populations," Tishkoff told attendees today (Jan. 22) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Anaheim. "Only a small subset of the diversity in Africa is found in Europe and the Middle East, and an even narrower set is found in American Indians." Tishkoff; Andrew Clark, Penn State; Kenneth Kidd, Yale University; Giovanni Destro-Bisol, University "La Sapienza," "...but Natural Selection reduces genetic information and we know this from all the Genetic Population studies that we have..." Maciej Marian Giertych - Population Geneticist - member of the European Parliament – EXPELLED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z5-15wk1Zk
Also of note: The genetic similarity between chimps and humans is not nearly as similar as Darwinists have, for decades, misled people to believe
Comprehensive Analysis of Chimpanzee and Human Chromosomes Reveals Average DNA Similarity of 70% - by Jeffrey P. Tomkins - February 20, 2013 Excerpt: For the chimp autosomes, the amount of optimally aligned DNA sequence provided similarities between 66 and 76%, depending on the chromosome. In general, the smaller and more gene-dense the chromosomes, the higher the DNA similarity—although there were several notable exceptions defying this trend. Only 69% of the chimpanzee X chromosome was similar to human and only 43% of the Y chromosome. Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While, chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v6/n1/human-chimp-chromosome The Myth of 98% Genetic Similarity (and Chromosome Fusion) between Humans and Chimps - Jeffrey Tomkins PhD. - video https://vimeo.com/95287522 "Where (chimps and humans) really differ, and they differ by orders of magnitude, is in the genomic architecture outside the protein coding regions. They are vastly, vastly, different.,, The structural, the organization, the regulatory sequences, the hierarchy for how things are organized and used are vastly different between a chimpanzee and a human being in their genomes." Raymond Bohlin (per Richard Sternberg) - 9:29 minute mark of video https://vimeo.com/106012299 Podcast - Richard Sternberg PhD - On Human Origins: Is Our Genome Full of Junk DNA? Part 2. (Striking differences in higher level chromosome spatial organization between cimps and humans) 5:30 minute mark quote: "Basically the dolphin genome is almost wholly identical to the human genome,, yet no one would argue that bottle-nose dolphins are our sister species" http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2014/11/on-human-origins-is-our-genome-full-of-junk-dna-pt-2/ An Interview with Stephen C. Meyer TT: Is the idea of an original human couple (Adam and Eve) in conflict with science? Does DNA tell us anything about the existence of Adam and Eve? SM: Readers have probably heard that the 98 percent similarity of human DNA to chimp DNA establishes that humans and chimps had a common ancestor. Recent studies show that number dropping significantly. More important, it turns out that previous measures of human and chimp genetic similarity were based upon an analysis of only 2 to 3 percent of the genome, the small portion that codes for proteins. This limited comparison was justified based upon the assumption that the rest of the genome was non-functional “junk.” Since the publication of the results of something called the “Encode Project,” however, it has become clear that the noncoding regions of the genome perform many important functions and that, overall, the non-coding regions of the genome function much like an operating system in a computer by regulating the timing and expression of the information stored in the “data files” or coding regions of the genome. Significantly, it has become increasingly clear that the non-coding regions, the crucial operating systems in effect, of the chimp and human genomes are species specific. That is, they are strikingly different in the two species. Yet, if alleged genetic similarity suggests common ancestry, then, by the same logic, this new evidence of significant genetic disparity suggests independent separate origins. For this reason, I see nothing from a genetic point of view that challenges the idea that humans originated independently from primates, http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/scripture-and-science-in-conflict/
bornagain77_{June 5, 2015
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Who would want to be a chimp just to be thin?
Not me!daveS_{June 5, 2015
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Maybe because there are no McDonald's restaurants and reality television shows where chimpanzees live(d)?AdamBGraham_{June 5, 2015
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