Oh I know that but wouldn’t it be nice if many did? Maybe people doing God’s will of their own free will is the very best turn of events we could hope for.
Yes…it would be nice. But “many” would never be enough. “Many” are not doing “terrorism by drone,” which seems to be the newest thing. “Many” however, may be guilty of gossip — which is also a sign of rebellion against God (there are biblical verses to that effect). We just do not see a problem with it – and we like it as long as we are not the object of the gossip, of course.
. But yes…all doing God’s will of their own free will --even the bit about not gossiping and other things —would be great…
It occurs to me that if we do manage to maintain technological civilization for some time, I expect we’ll start editing our children’s genes and maybe even our own. So, cynically speaking, that should provide many new and exciting opportunities for particularly foolish humans to remove themselves from the gene pool of the future.
Actually this does tend to happen in civilized societies as healthcare gets to a point where child survival isn’t so much of a crapshoot anymore. But it takes a generation or two to modify cultural thinking, and meanwhile there can be a lot of kids born. In the US we would be leveling off except that immigrant birth rates are still high. If we could eliminate poverty, we should be able to maintain a level population, actually.
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True, but the factor that plays the biggest part in deciding to delay parenthood is female education. To my mind, the education of women holds the key to lowering birth rates in developing countries.
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It may already be widely known that it is kinky hair that protects best from sun on savannahs of Africa or elsewhere.
I love looking at why body part exist in relation to various animals and other biologicals. So not intending to distract from the running specific aspect, I wanted to mention what I read some years back regarding human male having one of the larger sex organs for body size.
Been years since I read that. It may have been the book “Sex On the Brain” by woman named Blum. Again I forget exactly or if more info exists in those regards.
A cats tail --male and female-- is used for balance when falling or running.
To run or not to run, is that the question. 
Independent of the intelligence factor, more infants with big heads are probably surviving childbirth because of medical research and lawyer pressure to perform c sections. I am not aware of any studies on it but I wonder if eventually c sections and modern medicine will change the growth curve …there are so many that deliver this way now (though there has been a backlash towards some “natural birth,” hopefully the right practioners move to c section when the baby’s life is on danger)
This book was required reading way back at the turn of the millennium in the only college biology course I took, Human Evolutionary Biology (taught in part by the now-disgraced Marc Hauser).
The book rocked my world. I had no way at all to fit it into my worldview at the time. None.
Good stuff!
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(also for @T_aquaticus and @Jay313)
The sexualized, peaceful bonobo tale is a myth. See the discussion of the faux-nobo here.
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What do you know…as more with big heads survive and pelvises do not expand to accommodate them, this paper estimates a 10-20% increase in problems with birth due to head size.
So primatologist Frans de Waal just made up a bunch of b.s.?
I don’t pretend to be an expert on this, but I did link to an article by experts. Did you read it?
I didn’t read it start to finish, but I did see this:
So what went wrong?
Observing bonobos in their remote forest habitat is very difficult. For this reason, writes Saxon, early research frequently focused on captive bonobos and artificial feeding sites. These groups were often quite small, had many sub-adult bonobos, and, of course, the captive bonobos were not living in natural settings. Juvenile and adolescent bonobos turned out to be far more sexually inclined than adults are. Rich concentrated food stores (artificial feeding sites) induce near-panic in bonobo groups and this provokes sexual behavior. It is not representative of typical bonobo life in the African wild.
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Were you at Harvard, Andrew? Interesting!
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Yes, but note that the appropriate spelling is Hahvahd… 
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I followed the link and found a blog post written by a non-scholar, talking about a book by an “independent researcher and author.” I did not find what I would consider to be “an article by experts.” @beaglelady is right to point you (and us) back to Frans de Waal.
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I meant to say, “an article summarizing work by experts.” A careless shortening on my part. I am well aware of the habitual massacring of actual science by pop science journalists.
Still, I should have dug further to see that the author summarized is an “independent researcher and author.”
Thanks for the corrective note. I’ll have to dig deeper and see how her work has been received in the wider scientific community.
Having now seen the cover of the book being summarized in my article, I’m thoroughly embarrassed that I didn’t investigate further. Shame on me!
That said, the claims are not entirely without merit, it seems.
Zanna Clay of the U of Birmingham, who has published with de Waal, also detracts from the stereotypical view. Emphasis in the quotation below is mine; it points to aggression in bonobos. They do not war as chimps and humans do, but they are far from peaceful. [Edited for accuracy.]
This is all true, but the public fascination with these behaviours has given rise to a view of bonobos that is a little extreme, says Zanna Clay of the University of Birmingham in the UK, who has spent years studying wild bonobos. “There is this perception that they have sex all the time, that they are like nymphomaniacs.”
The reality is more nuanced. The frequency of copulation in bonobos is not as high as most people assume, she says. “In terms of reproduction they are not more sexually active than chimps.”
The genital rubbing and touching is very common, but it only happens in very specific contexts, often ones that are not obviously sexual.
“People think they just do it for fun but it’s not really to do with that. It’s to do with uncertain social situations,” she says, summarizing the conclusions she and de Waal came to in a paper published in the journal Behaviour in 2014.
For instance, when a group arrives at a new feeding tree, there is tension over who is going to make the richest pickings. “The females will have lots of genital contact with each other and that will relieve the apprehension of this feeding competition,” says Clay. “Once they are calm they can actually feed together in the tree and be quite peaceful.”
Females will also often use genital rubbing to defuse tension between two rival groups, avoiding the kinds of violence seen in chimp wars. But this does not mean that bonobos are incapable of aggression.
“One of the reasons they have this genital touching is because they need to relieve tension after they’ve had fights.”
Things can get particularly nasty in zoos, where the artificial set-up can let females assume more power than they normally would in the wild. These super-dominant females can be pretty violent towards males, says Clay.
“There are lots of males in zoos that are missing digits. There’s a male bonobo that’s actually missing the tip of his penis because the female has bitten it off,” she says. “This isn’t quite [in line] with the stereotype of them being peaceful.”
My impression is that you found a cultural spat with relatively little scientific impact. The author (Lynn Saxon) seems to have made her name by attempting to rebut Sex at Dawn, a speculative lay-level book from 2010 that causes good people to squirm because it’s in part about promiscuity. It is surely the case that this dispute, about whether “we” are or should be monogamous, has spawned the misuse of science by partisans on both sides of the… “debate.”
What remains undisputed is the dramatic difference between bonobos and chimps. This difference is relevant anytime human culture or behavior is examined in an evolutionary context. Our closest living relatives are chimps and bonobos, which gives every propagandist or partisan a choice: to choose one or the other (and thereby mislead their audience) or to acknowledge the incredibly interesting complexity that the chimp/bonobo/human tree exhibits.
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No, I disagree. Huge kudos for acknowledging an error. No more shame.
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It’s funny noticing the anxiety one can feel watching the little “sfmatheson replying…” 
I guess that means I’m not an alpha male…
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