Of Chimps and Men, 2001/07/31:07:54
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Human males are a kind of less-discriminating variety of bonobo chimp. |
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evolution
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(previous in thread, caro) : ~ ~ The Evolutionary History of The Business Suit ~ ~ It seems that males of the species did righteously evolve to wear ~ the Business Suit. For nowhere can be seen the skin of the male. ~ Yea, should male skin be revealed in howsoever small a swatch, the ~ lewd female surely would lose her mind with lust, tearing the rest of his garments from him and taking him by force. It is commonly understood today [1] that the ratio of coverage in men's versus women's clothing is a product of human sexual evolution. The intellectual capacity of the average human male is fully utilized by the act of respiration, leaving very little processing power available for other activity. Men have evolved to be basically mindless pleasure-seakers, flitting from one source of sensual gratification to the next: they drink, smoke, do drugs, listen to ear-damagingly-loud music, drive fast cars and of course, they have sex. One only has to look at the sort of advertising that gets aimed at men to see that this is an unassailable evolutionary truth [2]. To compensate for the male's insatiable desire for pleasure, human females were under strong selective pressure to become rational. Fortunately, males seem to get some rational capacity from their single X-chromosome--without this it is likely that males would have died out entirely. The voracious sexuality of the male presented early human females with a Darwinian competitive threat: males would fuck anything, including sheep, cows, trees and each other, with wild abandon. Attracting a male in one of the brief moments when he was capable of getting an erection but hadn't yet found something to stick it in, particularly as the population of males with members undamaged by indisciminant sexual experimentation shrank, posed a serious problem for the human female. To this end, she devised a series of strategems designed to ensure that human females were always and only the most sexually alluring objects in the male view. Keeping men's bodies decently covered is central to this approach, as is making sure that wherever a man looks he is continually bombarded by the view of naked female flesh. Making sure men pay little attention to fitness and personal hygiene is also important, as are vicious societal restrictions on homosexuality, which we all know are widely supported by women [3]. So all those naked females and clothed males aren't a reasult of male prefrences, but rather a result of females acting to preserve the species by ensuring that most of the time, when a male has sex, it'll be with a human female. References: 1) Committee for Common Understanding, Report #3141592, "Simple Minded Stories that Reinforce Popular Prejudices: the evolution of human behavior" 2) Simply stating this as an observation about current conditions would of course be pseudo-scientific, or sociology at best. Real men only use evolutionary arguments, because they absolve us from all responsibility for our bad behavior. 3) Blithers, I. N., Coherent, L. Y., "'What a waste!': Women's Views of Gay Men", Journal of the Society for What We All Know, 32 (1992) 123-124 |
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Biology
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Bonobo chimps (also known as pygmy chimps) are the closest thing to human on the planet. It is often claimed that chimps have "98% the same DNA as humans", but no one ever asks what this means. Does it mean that we have 98% the same GENES? If so, then how is it that this claim was made years before the human genome was sequenced? Does it mean we have 98% the same CHROMOSOMES? If so, then it is plainly false: humans have 23 chromosome pairs, chimps have 24. What is apparently means is that under certain types of staining (chromosome means "colored body", and was so named due its efficient uptake of staining compounds used in early microscopy) the banding of human chromosomes is very similar to that of chimp chromosomes. How one arrives at a numerical measure of difference on such a basis is somewhat arbitrary, but so long as a consistent standard is used it is possible to show that humans and chimps are more similar genetically than humans and anything else. But is genetic similarity all that significant to behavioral similarity? Behavior is complex and socially mediated--human behavior is at leats as strongly affected by learning and social conditioning as genetics. Our great evolutionary trick is to not be restricted to relatively narrow stereotypical behaviors of our closest relatives. And we'd do well to remember that at least one biochemical catastrophe separates us from the chimps: human chromosome #2 appears to be a fusion of two chromosomes from the common ancestor to humans and chimps. Events like the fusion of two chromosomes probably don't happen slowly, and indeed it's hard to imagine how they happen at all, unless by severe inbreeding. One individual who had a high probability of producing offspring with this particular genetic defect probably had a lot of children in isolated circumstances, and the children bred with each other (they'd likely be sterile with their non-defective kin, although not necessarily so) until they formed a distinct species. Given that single-gene defects can make the difference between life and death, a major event like this, plus a few million years of subsequent evolution, is likely to limit just a little the conclusions we can draw from comparisons between ourselves and chimps. And as I've pointed out previously, the massive behavioral differences between bonobos and chimps, who are far closer to each other genetically than either is to us, should show just how unwarrented attempts at inference from any kind of chimp to humans are. |