On Fri, 10 Nov 1995 12:22:58 -0500 (EST) you wrote:
>Electronic Telegraph, Friday 10 November 1995
>
>The naked truth
>
>By Robert Uhlig, Technology Correspondent
>
>HUMANS lost their fur because they are emotional animals and prefer
>hairless women - albeit "with long, silky hair" - according to a
>controversial new theory put forward by a Cambridge professor.
>
>"Human nakedness resulted from sexual selection by the males fancying
>females with naked bodies," said Dr Charles Goodhart, a fellow at
>Gonville-Caius college, at the Linnean Society of London yesterday.
Hard to deny! :-)
>Natural selection also explains why women's hair grows longer than men's,
>argues Dr Goodhart. His thesis will be published in next April's issue of
>the Biologist.
He obviously hasn't seen my 20 year-old son! :-)
>He says women's hair grew so long as to be an encumbrance in primitive
>life, so its excessive length must have been evolved by men "preferring
>women to have long, silky hair".
On that basis, all women would be blondes and built like Pamela
Anderson?
>Dr Goodhart believes that humans lost fur which covered most of their body
>to signal anger, fear and embarrassment. If fur still covered our faces,
>nobody would be able to see our facial skin flushed with rage, or pale
>with fright.
>
>But Dr Chris Stringer, principal researcher in human origins at the
>Natural History Museum, said the ability to sweat was the more probable
>cause. "It's far more likely we lost our fur to control our body heat," he
>said.
Note the Lamarckian tinge to this, as there is to so many
evolutionary "explanations". Stringer has to show that this was
linked to more offspring surviving, if it is to be a Darwinian
theory.
Perhaps these imaginative but untestable speculations are what Gould
had in mind when he wrote:
"These tales, in the "just-so story" tradition of evolutionary natural
history, do not prove anything." (Gould S.J., "The Return of the
Hopeful Monster", "The Panda's Thumb", 1980, Penguin, London,
p158).
May I suggest a few more:
* They were frightened by a Mammoth and their hair not only stood on
end, it popped out of its follicles!
* They started swimming out to sea on the way to becoming whales,
lost their fur, then double-backed to land.
* Dandruff
:-)
Thanks to Gordon for a bit of light relief.
God bless.
Stephen
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