Re: Swimming - and diving - Macaques Re: Tobias 1995

On Dec 17, 3:03 am, RichTravsky <traRvE...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Just a quick note here...
The examples are about demonstrating capacity, not habitual events.

Bingo. Capability, not necessarily wanting to. I'm reminded of a murder comedy
movie with Roddy McDowell playing a butler in a motorized wheel chair. Later
he reveals he can walk after all and says something along the lines of "Of course
I can walk - I just don't want to."

The important question is not "can they?" or "do they want to?" but
"how *well* can they?"
Humans are clearly the best swimmers/divers in the primate clade and
by far the best of the apes. You are denial about this material point
because it means you'd have to admit that Hardy/Morgan etc may have
been right and we can't have that.

Even if all this is true the maximum total of anecdotes you have for
chimp swimming is now 6 compared to billions for humans.

Of course the fallacy in that arguement is that the Paleo hominid

The fallacy is the same as Marc's whining that only a few *men* run long
distances.

That's Marc's opinion. I disagree with him about that. To me a
differential ER ability in humans and chimps is almost certainly the
result of a differential in selection since the LCA. I have no problem
with this, why do you have a problem with the swimming diving?

You accuse Marc of whining about ER. I accuse you of whinning about
swimming. What's the difference?

[...]
It really
doesn't change anything. Ok, so what about bonobos - still zero. Orang

On the contrary, it pus the lie to the claim chimps don't swim.

Producing a photo of six men leaping out of a plane would not put a
lie to the statement "men don't fly." You are clinging. Why not,
instead, just accept it: humans swim and dive better than all the apes
and, most significantly, more than our nearest relaatives, Pan.

Now, watch macaques easily swimming and diving

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ObDgBLFo9w

Great clip, thanks. If you had similar footage in chimps I'd drop the
idea.

Note they haven't lost their fur or their tails,

Yes, they're OW monkeys, not apes. We evolved from ape ancestors.

they aren't habitual bipeds,
haven't lots of fat, etc etc etc for any AA argument you can think of

Look, it's a good piece of counter-evidence, I agree. It's just more
complex. I think body size is a key factor here as well as habitat.

When it comes to bipedalism I think gallery forest habitats that
seasonally flood but are on the edge of flat, relatively vegetation-
free substrates are key in the evolution of hominin bipedalism. A
tropical rainforest habitat is not enough. In other words I agree
there must be some terrestrial bipedal locomotion as well as climbing
and wading. The size is also key here. If the species is so small that
it did not evolve a more orthograde posture from vertical climbing (as
the thin branches could not support its weight) again it is much more
likely to remain quadrupedal. A larger primate is, in contrast, more
likely to flip to and upright posture in shallow water simply because
then it would tall enough to put its head above the water in most
depths in flooded habitats. A small primate would not.

The fat/nakedness arguments are similarly constrained by body size and
habitat.

Algis Kuliukas

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