Mommy backs show ridiculous Evolutionary flexibility

On December 12, 2007 in In the News, Science Related

I read an article on CNN today talking about how phenomenal it was that a woman can go big-belly during gestation and not tip-over when she tries to walk. This extraordinary (sarcasm) demonstration is the product of millions of years of evolution. You see, women evolved the ability to balance their weight to offer more mobility from predators as they blah blah blah, you could finish these crap-stories yourself I’m sure.

So I decided to take just a moment tonight and see what other websites were saying about this same “discovery”. I ran over to livescience to see what they were saying only to get a slightly more wordy version. I won’t go into detail about what they say, since it doesn’t really differ from CNN, but I wanted to bring up one comment on the livescience website.

Before I repost the quote here, I want to share with you all something that Walter ReMine, the author of The Biotic Message, wrote some years ago. “Evolutionary theory is structureless, and predicts virtually nothing. It adapts to data like fog adapts to landscape.”

Basically, any observation made can fit into the Evolutionary framework in one way or another - making the base-theory itself rubbish. Monkey is big, beneficial adaptation to fight predators; Monkey is small, beneficial adaptation to avoid predators. Blah blah.

So onto the statement made on the livescience page: “Early human women lived very strenuous, active lives, and pregnant females were forced to cope with the discomfort of childbearing while foraging for food and escaping from predators,” Lieberman said. “This evolution of the lower back helped early woman to remain more mobile during pregnancy, which would have been essential to survival, and appears to have been favored by natural selection.”

They go on to say that our “cousins”, the chimpanzees don’t have this same “adaptation”. They still carry their young while prancing through the forest on all fours - well, that is until we see one occasionally walking on their two back feet, which immediately becomes even more evidence for Evolution!

Anyway, so this difference helped the Moms when they were “escaping from predators” and thus was “essential to survival”. But the chimps don’t do it, and they still have moms today…so, did I miss something here? Did the chimps and their ancestors not have predators for the last couple million years? Their moms got to sit aside and watch the bipedal-primates get chased by predators?

Seems kinda stupid if you ask me. You can spin this crap anyway you like. You could say the chimps were better equipped because they could still climb trees whereas the bipedal monkeys couldn’t, and thus had to figure out other ways of escaping predators. Yet the bipedal-monkeys were advanced because they had this useless advantage called “bipedalism”.

See what I mean? This is all a bunch of play-doh nonsense. You can fit it and mold it anyway you like.

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