So your jaw hurts and you have big thoughts?

Now this I find this discovery very interesting.

One side claims,

Smaller jaws would have fundamentally changed the structure of the skull, they contend, by eliminating thick muscles that worked like bungee cords to anchor a huge jaw to the crown of the head. The change would have allowed the cranium to grow larger and led to the development of a bigger brain capable of tool-making and language

Now the big but

Other researchers strenuously disagreed that human evolution could literally hinge on a single mutation affecting jaw muscles, and that once those muscles were reduced, the brain suddenly could grow unfettered.

"Such a claim is counter to the fundamentals of evolution,'' said C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University. "These kinds of mutations probably are of little consequence.''

I'm not sure why the researchers who are biologists and plastic surgeons don't seem to be making anthropologists too happy, but I hope there is more in depth study to this idea soon.

[Theophylact]

Brains, schmains. What I really want to know is, why are we bald [practically] all over?

[vass0922]

how do they know the size of jaw isn't effected by the size of the brain? So effectively reverse of what they're stating?

Size matters

[M_Six]

I think this study supports something most of us have known all along, that those people with big mouths usually have very small brains.

See also: Jerry Springer guests

[nomaxim]

Oh Lord, here we go again.

Haven't seen this paper yet, but I have been hearing odd bits and pieces about it. So until I get around to reading it, here is some other rather odd tidbits that have to do with Anthropology;

The Aquatic Ape Theory

Piltdown Man

Peking Man

What I really want to know is, why are we bald [practically] all over?

We're getting taller too.

Edit; That sounds just like Dr. Lovejoy. His site, He's head of my Dept.

[zen]

Its all a bunch of hogwash anyway.


Look up the first two laws of Thermodynamics, and then tell me how the theory of evolution is possible.

Yeah, and there was once water on Mars.....

[Theophylact]

Originally posted by zen
Its all a bunch of hogwash anyway.


Look up the first two laws of Thermodynamics, and then tell me how the theory of evolution is possible.

Yeah, and there was once water on Mars.....

I suggest you tell that to the Nobel Prize Committee. Here's Ilya Prigogine's Nobel Prize speech (Chemistry, 1977). The presentation speech makes it clear what they gave the prize for:

Prigogine has been particularly captivated by the problem of explaining how ordered structures - biological systems, for example - can develop from disorder. Even if Onsager's relations are utilized, the classical principles of equilibrium in thermodynamics still show that linear systems close to equilibrium always develop into states of disorder which are stable to perturbations and cannot explain the occurrence of ordered structures.

Prigogine and his assistants chose instead to study systems which follow non-linear kinetic laws and which, moreover, are in contact with their surroundings so that energy exchange can take place - open systems, in other words. If these systems are driven far from equilibrium, a completely different situation results. New systems can then be formed which display order in both time and space and which are stable to perturbations. Prigogine has called these systems dissipative systems, because they are formed and maintained by the dissipative processes which take place because of the exchange of energy between the system and its environment and because they disappear if that exchange ceases. They may be said to live in symbiosis with their environment.

[sharder8]

Originally posted by Theophylact
Brains, schmains. What I really want to know is, why are we bald [practically] all over?

I'm not!

Harder

[M_Six]

There you go again, Theo, oversimplifying things.

[zen]

@ M_Six

When the "missing link" shows up, let me know.