Better yet, President Bush in the next few days is going to fly to Pakistan and motor to Islamabad. This has to be the most outright dangerous excursion ever undertaken by an American president, yet in natural selection terms it doesn’t count for anything, because Dubya and Laura are past their reproductive years and their children are grown.

Mitochondrial DNA informs us that present-day humans were at relatively recent points in our journey very close to extinction. Seemingly superior types of hominids actually did become extinct. The wild card in all of this is that some extremely catastrophic things happen to this old world from time to time, asteroids slam us, volcanos rock us, and ice ages are always lurking so closely as to defy explanations as to why our planet ever really tends to be above “March of the Penguins” type conditions.

other primates are seasonal - meaning that new young dependent individuals are brought in ijn bunches, and this measn they can reamian in troop-daycare most easily.

but monthly estrus means that young dependent individuals are brought in all the time, and this dramatically changes the dynamic of the troop.

also: the young dependent human infant is less developed and mopre dependent on its mother than other primates (due to the fact that our head-size is bigger).

these are related: our increased socialness meant that a premium was put on intelligence/ability to maneuver socially and innovatively get resources to sustain this new ever-enlargening troop.

this premium meant that smarter individuals with greater brain mass and more intelligence had a higher differential of reproductve success and thereby contributed more greatly to the gene pool.

standing, walking upright and running are ways that more intelligent individuals might better assess and better respond to threats and opportunities; for example, standing and walking to explore over tall grass, and then running away from a threat in the tall grass.

remember the old joke: how fast do you have to be to escape from a lion? FASTER THAN THE GUY NEXT TO YOU!

better upright standers/wakers/runners got away from predators more often. and also found more food, and successfully brought back more food to their mates/children.

also, marital infidelity became part of the gene pool too: observations of primate behavior has revealed that adulterous women/mothers have more than one male brining her children food than a woman who was loyal to only her mate. more food means a higher survial rate.

thus women and men with a diathesis for adultery have a higher differential of reproductive success, and have contributed more to the gene poll.

also: men who are caught with another man’s woman would have to be bigger or run faster to get away from the mate when discovered. hence fast adulterers contributed more thasn even fast individuals or adulterous individuals.

we are all descended from fast adulterers.

also, this line of reasoning leads us to another explanation for LANGUAGE:

because HUMAN women were fertile every month, and producing pheromones that excitied and attracted men every month, they were always turning on men. they were probably truning-on men more than they enjoyed.

therefore probably the first word ever uttered was by a tired and sore woman to a horny man; the word was , “NO!”.

seriously.

Aw, man! (image)

The Teutonic word Lent, which we employ to denote the forty days’ fast preceding Easter, originally meant no more than the spring season. Still it has been used from the Anglo-Saxon period to translate the more significant Latin te…

I’m sure you’ve probably read Ian Tattersall (he’s a buddy of mine - no, really), but if you haven’t you should — his Becoming Human is a great trip through human evolution (if rather secular in nature). I haven’t read his i>The Human Odyssey yet but I shall.