Unintelligent design

Skeptic Ginger said:
This is sarcasm, right?
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Not at all. It's a hypothesis proven by many facts, one of them being that human lice and chimpanzee lice started diverging genetically some 7 million years ago, while human crabs started genetically diverging from gorilla lice some 3 million years ago. This means that head hair and pubic hair became fairly disconnected patches millions of years ago (besides attesting our ancestors were very friendly with other species)
 
jimbob said:
Nope, Google " persistence hunting"
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This may be one of the reasons why zombies are inherently frightening. They use our own tactics against us.
Humans had the stamina to pursue prey animals that were faster than us for long periods, eventually wearing them down until they could be caught. Humans are faster than zombies, but no matter how fast you run, you'll eventually get tired and stop. They never will. They just keep coming, slowly and inevitably.
 
Armitage72 said:
This may be one of the reasons why zombies are inherently frightening. They use our own tactics against us.
Humans had the stamina to pursue prey animals that were faster than us for long periods, eventually wearing them down until they could be caught. Humans are faster than zombies, but no matter how fast you run, you'll eventually get tired and stop. They never will. They just keep coming, slowly and inevitably.
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This might be true if zombies existed. Do you have any evidence for this, other than countless films and fantasy books?

But (question not directed specifically to you), what kind of god designs hair that continues to grow without also creating barber shears that humans can just pick up and use to cut that hair?
 
xterra said:
This might be true if zombies existed. Do you have any evidence for this, other than countless films and fantasy books?
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Obviously, I was theorizing on the psychological aspect of why humans would find these particular fictional beings frightening, despite their physical inferiority in some areas. I remember seeing an argument that the fast zombies found in some modern movies are more frightening than the classic shamblers because it's harder to run away from them, but a relentless pursuer that never stops is also frightening for different reasons.
There's also the uncanny valley, but that's a separate issue.
 
jimbob said:
Nope, Google " persistence hunting"
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I'm with Skeptic Ginger on this one. I Googled "persistence hunting" an found this in Wiki:

Grey wolves, African wild dogs, spotted hyenas, lungless spiders,[citation needed] and humans are adapted to using this hunting strategy.

Don't know about lungless spiders but there is plenty of fur on the other animals, so this heat shock thing that aleCcowaN in banging on about, doesn't make much sense.

The further justification of his involving the evolving of different lice as somehow supporting the hypothesis, (whatever that is), is just crazy.
 
Our cells basically self-destruct if not provided with a continuous supply of the chemicals needed to maintain metabolism. How much better it would be if they instead went dormant, able to be revived when conditions improve. It would mean the end of death by drowning, starvation, exsanguination, etc.

Of course this wouldn't be of much use without modern medicine able to repair damage and manually restart blood flow with necessary nutrients infused, so it is no surprise that such an ability did not evolve naturally for us. An intelligent designer would have no such excuse for making our cells so fragile. We don't design cars to break down permanently if they run out of gas.
 
Lukraak_Sisser said:
if you want to up that, you can boil saliva first and then show the enzyme stops working after being heated. With some care you can even do temperature curves.
If properly prepared this is something 12 year olds can understand to a degree (don't go into enzyme structure and all that).

A similar experiment can be done with pieces of potato and hydrogen peroxide solutions.
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How do you get enough spit, though? Does everyone contribute? Or are there very tiny test tubes? You don't need more than a quarter teaspoon I imagine. Middle school kids would enjoy spitting and chewing white bread into soggy masses. Which they would inevitably throw at each other, I fear. [/derail]

What are some things we've lost that we'd be better off having, though? I guess by definition statistically we aren't or weren't better off having them at a population level or we would not have lost them.
 
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Forget the trivial cell and survival stuff!!

Does this mean that no one wants to discuss the ineptness of "bad hair design"? How hard could it be to design hair over the entire body that didn't grow beyond some relatively-optimal length? Look around you. This is IMPORTANT, people!
 
xterra said:
Forget the trivial cell and survival stuff!!

Does this mean that no one wants to discuss the ineptness of "bad hair design"? How hard could it be to design hair over the entire body that didn't grow beyond some relatively-optimal length? Look around you. This is IMPORTANT, people!
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I'd be happy just to have it on top of my head and pay someone to cut it.
 
Sure, but why does it grow (did it grow when you were younger, anyway) there so that it needs constant cutting, and not on the rest of the body?

And incidentally, how did early male hominids keep their beards from getting so long that they would trip over them when doing this persistent hunting gig?

How is this intelligent design???
 
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So if we do have some instinctive behaviors that we have lost to guide us, I wonder if there are remnants that could be enhanced. There was a poster here some time ago who was very interested in a newborn's walking reflex. A newborn, with its body supported and held upright on a surface, will start taking steps. It's quickly lost and there seems to be little application for it to supplement the practical trial-and-error way we actually learn to walk months later. The poster, who hasn't been around recently, was interested in accelerating learning in children (his own) and had strong opinions about what he saw as lost opportunities to raise smarter, stronger kids.

As far as body hair we started pulling some of it out in caveman days as far as I can tell. I still don't know what would be wrong with slight allover furriness, it could be nice. It does make sense to select for hands that can manipulate objects, but how long did it take for man to start building dams? Beavers had been at it much longer. I don't think humans ever damned rivers instinctively.

I picture a lot of cold people with goosebumps snuggling up in caves and trying to feed themselves with stone tools which would mean raw rabbit meat or maybe grubs and leaves. I don't know when hominids first used fire for cooking but I bet it was some time before anyone learned how to start one. There were many things we had to work out by trial and error and many came much later than fire. How long ago did we learn to tan skins, make textiles and mine/smelt ore? I can understand how we got ahead once we had warm clothes, superior weapons and stored foods that could be cooked later into bread or mush. But from what I understand these are not evolutionary adaptations; the acceleration of technology in the past 15,000 years have not in themselves wrought evolutionary changes. They haven't had time.
 
Head hair only needs constant cutting if you're picky about its length. It does not grow indefinitely. The maximum length it will grow for any given individual varies, though.

I cite the authoritative late 20th century scholarly work on the subject matter, appropriately titled Hair:

I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy
Snaggy, shaggy, ratsy, matsy
Oily, greasy, fleecy
Shining, gleaming, streaming
Flaxen, waxen
Knotted, polka-dotted
Twisted, beaded, braided
Powdered, flowered, and confettied
Bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied!
Oh say can you see
My eyes
If you can then my hair's too short
Down to here
Down to there
Down to where it stops by itself
(No never have to cut it 'cause it stops by itself)

The reason it stops by itself is that individual follicles periodically (but not simultaneously) go into a dormant phase where that hair strand falls out. The time and growth rate between dormant phases determine the maximum length. Those timings and growth rates vary on different parts of the body as well as between individuals.
 
xterra said:
Myriad, look at my original post (#126) on this particular design feature. My acquaintance's hair does not seem to support your authority's position.

Nor does this:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smit...thsonian-home-worlds-longest-beard-180953370/

(I know that the link says beard hair stops growing at about 5 feet [1.5m]. My original point remains: How is this intelligent design?)
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You point out to outliers. You might as well link to adults that grew to 8 feet of heigh ot only 3 feet, with all the problems such unusual growth is baggaged with; or to people who are exceptionally obese or exceptionally skinny due to their outlying personal metabolism; and question the wisdom of such "designs".

Perusing the German language Wikipedia, I find these typical numbers for human head hair:
  • Number: 100,000
  • Lost per day: 80
  • Growth per day: 0.33 mm
So each hair growth, on average, 100,000/80 days = 1,250 days (about 3.5 years) before falling out, and in that time reaches a length of 412.5 mm = 41.25 cm = 16.25 inches. That's not powerfully burdensome, or is it? Perhaps women's hair grows somewhat longer than men's hair, and I'd guess in either case, there is some sexual selection at play (same goes for male beards and female lack of the same). 40 cm of hair is no worse a burden than the peacock's tail or the deer's antlers.


With 100,000 hairs growing at 0.33 mm/day, you add 33,000 mm (33 m) of hair every day - whether you are shaven bald or have long hair
When your hair has reached full length of (on average) 41.25 cm, losing 80 hairs per day means losing 80 * 41.5 cm = 3,300 cm = 33 m - just what you gain by growing -> Dynamic equlibrium. You are no longer adding mass.

The average diameter of hair is something like 0.008 cm. This gives a full-grown hair a volume of 41.25 cm * (0.008 cm)2 * pi/4 = 0.002 cm3.
For 100,000 hairs, that's a total volume of a bit over 200 cm3 (equivalent to a 6x6x6 cm cube)
It seems that keratin, which is the major substance that hair is made of, has a specific gravity of about 1.3 g/cm3, so now we known that our fully grown head hair amounts to something like 270 g, or 0.6 lbs. (Note: I worked with rounded geometric means of numbers that are given as ranges. Of course, any individual may stray off these numbers by some factor).

For a fun comparison: Weigh your (clean!) underwear (underpants, undershirt, perhaps bra) on a kitchen scale: You will find that you cary much more weight in underwear with you than what most women with long hair have groing on their head - and I presume you never feel that you'd stand a significantly greater survival chance if you left your house without underwear!
 
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Oystein said:
For a fun comparison: Weigh your (clean!) underwear (underpants, undershirt, perhaps bra) on a kitchen scale: You will find that you cary much more weight in underwear with you than what most women with long hair have groing on their head - and I presume you never feel that you'd stand a significantly greater survival chance if you left your house without underwear!
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It's not the weight but the length and the risk of getting tangled. As well as providing a good nest for parasites.

(On a trip to Jorvik they commented about how nit combs were a badge of status in Viking society)
 
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