The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design by Wendy Northcutt Read Free Book Online Page B

fast. The roofer shot out of his wheelchair and landed on the street.
    The patient was repaired, and he recovered fully, much to the annoyance of natural selection. I don’t know if he ties himself off when roofing these days, but he hasn’t been back to my hospital. I’m not sure how long he’ll remain in the gene pool, though, and he certainly deserves an Honorable Mention.
     
    Reference: Personal Account

CHAPTER 2
     
     

Water
     
 
    Water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, so it’s little wonder that this is the medium in which many Darwin demises occur. We herein encounter the dangers of “snowmoboating,” the tide, frozen rivers, raging rivers, two waterfalls, one bungee cord, and even the kitchen sink! But first, an essay on the Aquatic Ape hypothesis.
     
     
     

D ISCUSSION : A QUATIC A PES A RE P EOPLE , T OO !
     
     
    Stephen Darksyde, Science Writer
     
    N ot everyone is comfortable with the idea that humans are animals, or that we’re apes. But the fact is, the cells that make up our bodies have nuclei and organelles such as mitochondria, we’re capable of locomotion, and unlike plants we consume other organisms to survive. That’s all it takes for an organism to be classified as an animal. And we’re mammals, primates to be exact, with large brains and no external tails. That puts us in the class of hominids along with our closest cousins: the gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan, and gibbon.
    But humans do possess a number of unique attributes in our form and structure, the most obvious being that we are obligatory bipeds: We walk on two legs, and we don’t have much choice about it. We’re not the only large vertebrates to walk on two legs—dinosaurs, birds, and kangaroos are bipedal, but they’re like teeter-totters, with their upper and lower bodies balanced over the fulcrum of their hips. Humans are like pogo sticks, with our heads balanced precariously atop a double-curved spine. This anatomy is unique in all the animal kingdom.
    Our form of bipedalism comes with many drawbacks thatfour-legged animals don’t suffer from. Fallen arches, shin splints, hernias, and back problems are all caused by walking upright. Given the high price we pay for walking on two legs, it’s tough to imagine what original, critical advantage was gained by our proto-bipedal ancestors, whose bodies were even less adapted to the rigors of bipedal locomotion.
    Why we became bipedal is mystery enough, yet other oddities are even harder to explain!
    Our unique human qualities also include being bald and chubby. We are nearly hairless, and to the detriment of our self-esteem, we carry a high body-fat content compared to most mammals. Much of the fat is stored just under our skin. Also unusual is that humans can control breathing beyond the capabilities of most mammals.
    Enter Elaine Morgan, a feisty Welsh feminist and writer. In the early 1970s, Morgan began to develop and promote a controversial hypothesis seeking to unite a number of human oddities within a single explanatory framework. Her hypothesis is that human ancestors lived in close proximity to water for extended periods, and spent so much time beach-combing, wading, and diving for foodstuffs that they evolved to suit their environment. We’re not merely apes, we’re Aquatic Apes!
    The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is astonishing, but Morgan makes some good points. For starters, take bipedalism: If a chimp tried to maintain an erect posture, the physiological consequences would not bode well for the animal. Over time it would incur problems keeping its blood pressure up, and suffer skeletal damage as it repeatedly moved from an upright to a reclined position. But if a chimp or a gorilla were wading on two legs and supported by water, those problems would begreatly reduced or eliminated. And there is an immediate survival benefit for a bipedal ape wading in three or four feet of water: The animal would have its head above the surface and be able to breathe!