Re: Lizard engines and rat engines
- From: "g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 08:46:38 -0400 (EDT)
"g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:...
>
> "dkomo" <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:daghdr$23qu$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Everybody knows reptiles are cold blooded and mammals are warm blooded,
>> but not too many people are aware just how exorbitant are the energy
>> demands of the heat engines that are the bodies of mammals.
>>
>> Typically, mammals require ten times the energy to run their bodies at
>> their rated 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F) as reptiles do, using basal
>> metabolic rate as a comparison.
>>
>> Chris Lavers in his _Why Elephants Have Big Ears_
>> --dkomo@xxxxxxxx
>>
> dkomo,
What I said previously may seem to have strayed away from your point, so let
me bring it home to the point.
It just jars me to see someone build an article on a title implying an
answer
to a question of "why" about anything evolution has done.
"Why do elephants have big ears?"
Because in the process of mutating they mutated in ways that happened to be
very successful in the scenarios existing for elephants (proto-elephants...
players
that were progenitors of elephants... or whatever...) in the particular
order of
increments, at the particular times and places, where big ears provided an
advantage, or an excess of advantages over disadvantages.
Lest we the author (or anyone else) get carried away with taking a single
player out of the context of all the rest, he has not addressed all the
issues if
he offers to explain WHY elephants developed big ears and WHY dinosaurs
(assuming some were warm-blooded) did NOT.
If you take what I said above and put a not in it, you will see how I would
hope
to account for the lack of big ears on dinosaurs...
Here let me do it for you. I will cut and paste and make the necessary
changes
in caps...
Because in the process of mutating they DID NOT MUTATE IN WAYS THAT
PRODUCED BIG EARS AT A TIME AND PLACE THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN
very successful in the scenarios existing for DINOSAURS (proto-DINOSAURS...
players
that were progenitors of DINOSAURS... or whatever...) in the particular
order of
increments, at the particular times and places, where big ears WOULD HAVE
provided
an advantage, or an excess of advantages over disadvantages.
Oh, well... it did take more than just inserting the word "not."
But the point is... one does not make a case for something's having occurred
in one
species as having been the result of a WHY, if he fails to account for WHY
it did
NOT occur for all OTHER species who had similar characteristics.
UNLESS... of course... you would wish to offer that as an argument for why
there
were no warm-blooded dinosaurs.
It's kind of like a chess game. When you move ONE piece, whether that is a
"good"
move or a "bad" move involves more than whether your opponent then is
enabled to
make a single move and yell, "Check !"
Too many so-called explanations for things that evolved for one species fail
to take
into account all the other pieces on the board... but for a board having
exponentially
more "squares" and kinds of "chess pieces" than a simply little ol' chess
board.
g
.
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