Just to tie up some loose ends - all quotes from the closed thread: Waterside hypotheses of human evolution assert that selection from wading, swimming and diving and procurement of food from aquatic habitats have significantly affected the evolution of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens as distinct from that leading to Pan. - Elaine Morgan and Algis Kuliukas, 2011 That is an adaptation to aquatic foraging. Here’s the link from thee other thread: https://www.nature.com/news/science-gets-a-grip-on-wrinkly-fingers-1.12175 You have reversed my posted direction of implication, for some reason - you got it backwards: I’m arguing from the lack of reasoning on evidence in good faith to the predominance of social consensus among the scientific community. The more accurately drawn similarity would be between the dismissal of CO2 as a driver of climate change and the dismissal of aquatic evolutionary pressures in human evolution. That’s hardly a good reason to make bad and slipshod arguments of one’s own. I’ve actually been booted from a science forum for failing to toe the line on this topic. Seriously - I was warned that insisting on observing that wade foraging was a perfectly sound and well-supported source of Darwinian pressure toward bipedal locomotion, matching the timeline and trace physiology and with solid mechanism as well - in fact far better supported by reason and evidence than the standard hypotheses, which are kind of goofy if you actually look at them - would result in infraction points, and I did it anyway. That was an interesting lesson in the nature of conventional wisdom in the sciences. There is no immunity to the emperor’s wardrobe dysfunction - PhD biochemists told me I was an anti-intellectual fad-monger equivalent to climate change denialists. They didn’t even come around when Ardipithecus was discovered, exactly in accordance with the predictions of the amphibian hypothesis, and the entire savanna scene suddenly faced an ugly fact to go with the unfortunate “seeing over tall grass” and “carrying tools” brain glitches. But that’s not the argument. Nobody’s arguing that it’s “required” - just that it’s solid and reasonable and backed by the evidence, that it incorporates proper Darwinian mechanism and matches the timeline and so forth. And that it possesses these strengths in greater measure than the competing hypotheses, for many key features (especially bipedal locomotion). No, there is not. That hypothesis as currently formulated doesn’t match the fossil sequence, or the timeline, or the visible and plausible mechanisms of Darwinian pressure correctly reasoned, or the current interactions between these features and human intelligence, or the physiological details of these features as we know them now. For example: the canines appear to have shrunk before the brain grew. Bipedalism likewise predates the big brain. So, apparently, does breath control physiology. etc. And that is as one would expect. Because the big brain is so useful now, we tend to make the sequence error of assuming it was likewise in the beginning. Big brains are handicaps, in most animals - there’s a reason they’re rare. The physiological support had to be there first - the adept hands, the bipedal stance, the rich diet, the weaker jaw and its musculature, the complexity of circumstance and lack of one overriding demand on physical performance, etc. We had to be hominin first, before the incremental growth of the brain could pay off incrementally. And wade foraging tree dwelling life reasonably accounts for that. Hypothetically.
It would be helpful to your readers to be able to refer to both the closed thread in question, and to the poster that you are quoting. I would like to be able to read the quoted passages in-context. I've heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis before, but it was a long time ago. Don't know how much water it holds today. (see what I did there?)
The closed thread: http://www.sciforums.com/threads/michael-odent-on-homo-the-marine-chimpanzee.160477/ The quotes are from various - just some stuff left misleadingly hanging, imho, from my two cents worth. I think it best to omit the context - buries the lede. If you want, they are unanswered posts from the end of the thread, last page or so (esp 81 and 90) and the context would be the entire thread's worth of odd missing of points.
