Actually, it takes no more than three miles or so to run down a deer. And if tribes expand by 3 miles a year, they can cover the earth in 10,000 years. So it's not implausible.

Run, Forrest, run!

pj:

A)It must have taken quite some time to evolve from an inability to run to an ability to run down a deer for three miles. They sure must have been hungry when they finally did it.

B)Have you ever seen a map of the routes supposedly taken by the Israelites in the Sinai or the Inuit migrations? Sort of like a parking lot in Beijing.

What, no "Tramps Like Us" in the title of the post?

It's certainly curious that humans are so good at running; other than dogs and horses (and maybe some other related animals - not deer, but perhaps Bison?), no animals can outrun us over long distances, and in a hot environment even dogs can't.

Then again, we're also outstanding swimmers and divers for a large land mammal, which means... um...

Running: The difference between catching dinner or being caught for dinner.

Mike:

Right you are.

In the African bush even today, hunting parties typically follow their faster, larger, prey to its exhaustion.

Peter:

Why?

It would be interesting to know the evolutionary changes that make us so much better at throwing than any other animal, including our nearest relatives.

Jeff:

Got any theories on how come women evolved the ability to run and throw?

Women developed the ability to throw, when the frying pan was invented.

It is amazing that while Chimpanzees never evolved the ability to run long distances they did evolve the ability to ride bicycles.

Peter:

Women can throw and run?

That's a bit tongue in cheek, but only a bit.

Evolution is conservative. They can throw and run for the same reason we have nipples.

Horses cannot outrun humans. No mammal can, and as far as I know no animal of any kind can, if the course is long enough.

Peter's somewhat elephantine attempt at derision merely shows that you need to know some natural (and cultural) history to discuss the subject.

In fact, one way humans captured wild horses (before we evolved helicopters) was to run them into the ground.

We evolved for endurance, not speed as such.

Even a crocodile is faster in a short sprint.

You couldn't prove it by me. But some of those guys from east Africa can still get it done.

Never mind the East Africans. A proud Englishman from my corner of the country, Bob Brown, just won the 'Race Across America'

http://www.bobbysrun.co.uk/

That's over 3000 miles in 71 days.

That's almost two marathons a day, every day, for 71 days, with no rest days.

When it comes to endurance running, humans are really quite impressive.

Brit:

No, some humans, very, very few actually, are impressive, and only after years of intense training and cardio-vascular development. Same with swimming, which was almost an unknown skill until the 19th century and still is in much of the world. Go watch a swimming class for five-year-olds and then tell me their instinctive ability to swim is evidence that we are descended from marine mammals. C'mon.

The flaw in this, the latest of evolution's ripping good yarns, is that it conveniently skips over the need to explain with some degree of plausibility the million's of mid-steps that would have have been necessary to take us from laughable runners to the scourge of the fleet-footed. We are told all the time by you guys that evolution is non-teleological, but suddenly you are describing an historical process where the whole race is striving over eons in some pre-historic Olympiad to capture ever-swifter game. In order to make this work, don't you have to argue that all the slower animals were progressively dying out for some reason and survival depended on man's becoming unconsciously faster and faster to get the swifities, all the while ignoring those luscious fruits and leaves our ape cousins were munching on as they watched the madness below?

And I note I have no takers on why women evolved the ability to run.

Peter:

The point is that you can give a deer all the cardio-vascular training you want, and it'll never beat Bob Brown over 3000 miles.

The marine animal your swimming point most resembles is a red herring. Who cited the backstroke as evidence of our descent from marine mammals?

Re: the intervening steps and teleology.
The biologists here are suggesting that the human body form is how it is because of strong selection in favour of running. The reckon it took a few more million years after the evolution of bipedalism. Nothing teleological about that. Might turn out to be wrong, but it's sound darwinist theory.

Jeff answered your point on women above.

Peter:

You asked the same question a few months back regarding how our brains developed. The thread turned into a discussion of engineering tradeoffs the human anatomy has to make. One being, of all things, female mobility.

But in that thread you asked how is it beings so compromised in hunting skills could survive long enough to get big brains. That was a false dichotomy, and so is your question above.

It was a false dichotomy then because there was another option you failed to state: there are other factors beside prey involved. What if a slight increase in ability to run opens more of a previously forbidden niche for exploitation--savannah instead of forest?

Survival is as much about space as resources.

Brit:

"Might turn out to be wrong, but it's sound darwinist theory."

Hmmm.

No, Jeff didn't answer it. Nipples can presumably be traced back far down (up? sideways?)the evolutionary chain. Running can't, if these guys are to believed.

You know, I've always been struck by the resemblance of evolutionary theory to Genecis and other creation myths, but now I'm beginning to see a lot of connections to traditional Catholic theology. You answer what you can, proclaim it to be "fact" or objective truth and then chant "mystery" whenever your theory seems to take you to embarassing places.

Peter:

Speculation, not mystery.

Nothing at all wrong with speculation. Science always starts out as speculation.

But it mustn't just stay as speculation. You have to test it. If it fails the tests, you chuck it out. If it passes the tests, you add it to the knowledge bank and call it a scientific fact.

If you can't come up with any decent tests, it stays as speculation until you can.

Brit:

From the article:

""We are very confident that strong selection for running -- which came at the expense of the historical ability to live in trees -- was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form," Bramble said in a statement."

I guess these guys "speculate" the way Dawkins, Harry and Jeff speculate.

Peter:

They're just doing what scientists of all disciplines do: trying to come up with natural explanations for why things are like they are.

When the scientists are dealing with meteorology or chemistry or even astronomy, nobody questions their method of working. Apply the same method to anthroplogy though, and suddenly the toys are well and truly thrown out of the pram.

Here are the known facts:
1) Humans are descended from ape-like tree-dwelling ancestors.
2) Humans have certain unique physiological features, including: "tendons and ligaments in the legs and feet that act like springs and skull features that help prevent overheating, and well-defined buttocks (if you're lucky!) that stabilize the body."

The questions (or 'mysteries') that the scientists are trying to answer include:
1) why did the pre-humans physiologically diverge from these ancestors?
2) why do humans have these particular unique physiological features?

Their speculation: because of strong selection for running.

The tests for this speculation might include: does the evidence about the environment human ancestors and their prey lived in support this theory; are there better explanations for this physiological development; is there fossil evidence to support it, and so on.

"Here are the known facts:
1) Humans are descended from ape-like tree-dwelling ancestors."

Brit, here is an article from today's Guardian. It is yet another boilerplate announcement in the great game announcing breathlessly that somebody has found the missing link--one of those common ancestors we've been looking for for a hundred and fifty years. How many of these have you read in your life? How many artists' stylized drawings have you seen?

Now, this is all based on a few tiny bones found in the wrong continent (yes, I know, backed up by that mysterious body of inaccessible knowledge called "the fossil record", which seems to have a didactic will of its own, as in "the fossil record shows..."). If the great trek out of Africa didn't begin until man was man, what the heck was this guy doing up in Spain? The article tells us Africa is "rich" in all kinds of fossils of all kinds of exciting creatures, but nobody apparently found this dude.

The point is, you don't make a "fact" out of speculations like this just because you have a lot of them. Admit it, you still don't know what the common ancestors looked like or where they came from.

Peter:

It's true that there's an awful lot we don't know about human evolution.

But, as you would know yourself if you had any interest in the subject other than doing the occasional bit of scoffing at articles in the mainstream media, in the last 10 years or so there has been an extraordinary convergence of evidence from palaeontology, genetics and molecular biology for a number of very specific things.

There is overwhelming evidence that, for example:
1) the genus Homo first appeared around 2 to 2.5 million years ago

2) that approx 7,500 generations have passed since the appearance of modern humans;

3) that everyone person alive today is descended from a relatively small group of people in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.

4) that there are three definite species of Homo (sapiens, erectus, habilis) (quite a few more have been speculated, including the recently found �hobbits�). We know plenty of things about all three of these, including their dates, where they lived, the size of their brains and teeth, and what tools they used.

So while there are lots of known unknowns, and probably some unknown unknowns, there are still plenty of known knowns.

Recommended read: "Mapping Human History" by Steve Olson.

Peter:

"No, Jeff didn't answer it."

Actually, I did. Nature is conservative. ALL mammals start with a female body plan. Therefore, we have otherwise useless anatomical features.

Similarly, since all mammals start witht the female body plan, that plan has to include the requirements for the male body plan.

On that point, there is no speculation.

Jeff:

One of us is headed for the asylum.

So we started with a "female body plan" which foresaw that males were going to have to learn how to run to survive, so it provided the evolutionary flexibility for men to do just that when the time to come down from the trees arrived, and the plan made the female body evolve along with the male body in roughly the same way and at roughly the same pace, even though the females weren't running.

Have I got that right?

Human (or any other) bodies have to fulfill many, often competing, requirements.

It would be of little value to evolve to be able to run a straight line course very fast if you couldn't change direction (think of Woody Hays's fullbacks).

Humans have great endurance on long courses. They are terrible at low speed chases with frequent changes of direction, as anyone who ever tried to catch a chicken in an open field knows.

We have considerable endurance with regard to going without new food, very little (compared to some other mammals) to going without water.

There are no 'right' or 'best' answers in evolution. You get by by getting by.

That's why it isn't teleological.

Peter's derision of fossils is weird. If new fossils do not provide new information, thus requiring adjustments of overall interpretation, why look?

By his reasoning, the 'first draft of history' that we newspapermen write would be sufficient forever, and there would be no reason for professional historians to delve into the secret archives later on to try to discover what really happened.

A fortiori, there'd be no call for all those books of Biblical exegesis.

Harry:

No, no. The fossil record is evidence that is consistent or inconsistent with a historical theory. It is not a test or direct proof of that theory. It is, and always will be, circumstantial evidence. Now, of course overwhelming circumstantial evidence can be sufficient grounds to conclude something, but only when a) the conclusion is plausible; and b) there are no other explanations consistent with the evidence; and c)there isn't other circumstantial evidence inconsistent with the theory. I'm afraid that, when you take a hard look at human nature, you've still a ways to go on all three.

Sure we do.

Only Orrin and his kind claim final certainty.

We darwinists claim only likelihood for a range of possibilities, though we are able to exclude some.

Darwinists rely mostly on your 'b'; though you wouldn't know it from the way Orrin presents his platonic pseudo-darwinism here, the real argument for the real darwinism presents a huge array of interlocking circumstantial evidence.

'a' does not count. We do not know what is plausible in the universe, because we have no way of knowing whether anything could be different. Probably it could, but how would we know?

I know of no evidence to fit 'c,' as regards darwinism. Orrin's arguments are primarily rational. He never presents evidence.

Just in the past few hours, he has made mocking reference to Darwin's finches, and I didn't bother to call him on it, but it was a misrepresentation.

Controversialists more confident of their argument would engage the enemy more closely.

Harry:

Sure "a" counts. I agree it is difficult to talk about plausibility with respect to the whys and wherefores of the universe, but not the natural history of humans. The great trek out of Africa to parts near and far, the transition from tree-hugging herbivore to fleet-footed carnivore for food even though the "cousins" didn't make that transition despite coming from the same place, counter-survival changes like the loss of smell and body hair(always explained by artfully conceived trade-offs), the development of a running ability to catch game while the game itself doesn't evolve any greater speed to escape us, etc. etc. These are all pretty fantastic stories that I suggest are adhered to fervently on the skimpiest of evidence because THEY FIT THE MOLD. I won't even start on the religious impulse, consciousness, morality, war, the artistic impulse and alienation.

Game animals wouldn't evolve to avoid being caught by humans because not enough of them would have been caught to threaten even one herd, let alone a species.

The far greater threat to such animals would have been predators which could run much faster than humans, for far shorter distances.

Every species but humans are sprinters.
We're marathoners.

For the vast majority of human history, there weren't enough humans to make any difference.

Apes like us, baby we were born to run!

Peter:

No, you don't.

First, let's unload the discussion a little by getting rid of some freighted terms, by neutralizing the effect of the explanation one chooses to frame how life at this instant came to be: I'll make up a new word.

Gonkobah (actually, my son made it up when he was three--it refers to anything going over a fence by whatever means) is extremely conservative. There are myriad elements of any organism's design that a moderately competent engineer couldn't easily make better. The human knee and lower back come to mind.

But since Gonkobah is very conservative, existing designs remain in use so long as they are not wholly inadequate to the task.

Which means Gonkobah, to the maximum extent possible, is going to use the same design for both sexes, and as a result, some design elements will appear in one sex or another, despite their lack of utility to that sex. Male nipples and female orgasm come to mind.

Looking more broadly, Gonkobah's approach has seen fit to leave human embryos with tails and gills, to the extent it is very difficult to tell a human embryo at 7 weeks from embryos of an astonishing range of animal species at the same gestational stage.

Therefore, because of the way Gonkobah operates, human females will retain some functions, albeit often diminished with respect to males, and vice versa.

Gonkobah could have, in theory, made two extremely specialized designs that had only sufficient compatibility to reproduce. But that isn't the way Gonkobah operates, preferring instead to produce variants upon the same original design.

Hence, human females can throw, but not, in general, nearly as well as men, in general. And can run, but not, in general, nearly as well as men.

(My wife, being the best naturally skilled athlete I have ever personally known, illustrates the point perfectly. She can throw a baseball more accurately than anyone you are likely to see, but her combination of speed and accuracy puts her at no better than the 60th percentile for men.)

Peter, if all species evolved in the same direction, there wouldn't be any variation to explain.

So that objection won't wash.