Quote:
Quote by: loser  I'm sure that I don't understand the TOE in all of its nuances so perhaps someone can answer this question for me.
It's my (mis?)understanding that evolution is triggered as a survival of the fittest phenomenon; that adaptations which give a species a clear advantage (a better chance of survival) are the ones that are passed on.
I was thinking about just how much of an advantage it is to have thick fur. My dog is able to withstand cold outside that would kill me. Some arctic animals swim in frigid arctic waters that will kill us in seconds. How much better it would be for humans to have such fur in order to live in the many hostile and extreme conditions.
Did we evolve away from having body fur so that we would have to kill animals and then make coats from their fur in order to survive in these conditions? That really doesn't make much sense to me. If we had more hair in the past, why did we lose it? For aesthetic purposes? Why couldn't we just evolve body fur with zippers for easy removal? Or, like other animals, the ability to molt or shed?
It's hard to accept evolution when so much of it goes against reason. Of course, there may be answers that I can't see that others can. Hence, the question. |
First a bit about body hair. We haven't technically lost it. We still have hair over quite a bit of our bodies. The DNA for body hair or genes for body hair are still present and making their presence known. Some people grow quite a bit of hair, and some people have just a little.
Imagine we take 100 humans, all with varying amounts of body hair and throw them in an environment where having body hair is a bad thing (bad thing = something that could lead to death, or at least, not getting any action). Now suppose we allow these humans to reproduce and keep them and their descendants inside this environment for 10,000 years. At the end of those 10,000 years, how hairy do you think this population of humans is going to be? Will they be more or less hairy on average? What if having hair was a good thing? What DNA would be more likely to live on through the generations?
That's kinda how evolution happens. The environment evolves (ice ages, meteor impacts, new predator moves into town, etc) and kills off or breeds out most/all of the DNA that doesn't help (or sometimes hinders) a species' survivability.
Why do humans today have less body hair? I don't think we'll ever know for sure but there are some really logical suggestions out there. I don't think it's extremely important to know exactly what pressures the environment was putting on our ancestors that led to us having less hair than them. More than a thousand factors probably came into play, likely more than that. What is important is that we recognize the fact that our environment does act upon us as a species.
If somebody can't recognize that I can completely respect their opinion, but mainly because I know that particular opinion is living in an environment that is not suitable for it. That opinion is going to go the way of our body hair.