[ExI] IQ and beauty

Wed Oct 21 22:10:53 UTC 2015

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015  Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 
> the Irish Elk, no doubt, had other anatomical changes to deal with the
> much larger antler size.
>

No biological adaptation can make the law of conservation of angular
momentum go away.

And n
o biological adaptation can make
 can make
the
Pauli exclusion principle
 go away either, and antlers are made of Fermions as are boulders tree
trunks branched and vines, so one can not pass through the other
unaffected. So antlers are going to get snagged.

> > 
> You might argue here, of course, that the antlers slowed the elk down

Could any rational person argue otherwise? Getting snagged does not make
it easier to move fast.

> > 
> Yes, it likely has some negative impact in some situations,

Huge antlers would be a negative in nearly every situation except
for 
the mating situation.

> > 
> but it's almost certainly counterbalanced by other traits.

Yes, and the counterbalance was that
large antlers
 looked sexy, otherwise the gene for
it
 would not have become dominant in the gene pool.

>
> >
>  
> humans would be very different from other predators

Humans were super-predators, and when one of those comes along strategies
to avoid predators, although always important, becomes even more important.
The Irish Elk got a C in predator avoidance on its Evolutionary report card
and that was good enough before the arrival of the super-predator, but not
after. The modern elk must have gotten a A because enough managed to avoid
the clutches of the super-predator to form breeding populations.

> > 
> The huge antlers, were they such a drag on survival, almost certainly
> should've killed them off much sooner.

Not necessarily, survival would depend on a number of things
, the sort of predators in the environment that would be encountered would
be one of the most important.  A mutant Irish Elk with a gene for smaller
antlers would have a longer life but probably not a happier life due to
sexual frustration. Such a gene could not become dominant in the gene pool
regardless of how beneficial it was to a individual unless there was a
second mutant gene, one for feeling that small antlers were more sexy than
big ones, and the 2 genes would need to be close together on the same
chromosome so they would usually be inherited together.

Unfortunately such a chain of lucky mutations never happened to the Irish
Elk's genome so it went into a positive feedback loop with females giving
birth to males who would have large antlers and females who thought bigger
was always better as far as antlers were concerned. And so the only thing
that could break the positive feedback loop was extinction.

> > how would this explain that species like the Indian peafowl seem to be
> doing quite well and are listed as "Least Concern" by conservation
> authorities?

T
he Indian peafowl
 breeds very easily in captivity and the top super-predator of the age
likes them and takes measures to preserve them and even keeps them as pets.
I don't know i
f Paleolithic

people liked Irish Elk but I doubt anybody ever tried to breed one or had
a Irish Elk as a pet.

> > 
> I do think the antler loss and regrowth issue [which you mention in the
> snipped portion] though might tell you that Irish Elk males might not
> always be hauling around huge antlers, so even if the cost of growing them
> is high, there's that they would also have periods when they lost them
>

And in every species of deer the yearly time of maximum antler size
corresponds to the time of peak fertility of the female. if antlers were
not the result of sexual selection how do you explain that? Coincidence?

> > 
> The main contending theories are ones that are neutral on antler size it
> seems. I don't think this is foolish in any way.

It's good to have a open mind, but not so open all your brains fall out.

> 
> Humans would be distance hunters with projectile weapons.

It doesn't matter if the hunting is close or distant, a stationary target
is always going to be easier to hit than a moving target, and a elk with
ridiculously large antlers is going to be moving slower than a elk with
smaller antlers, and if the ground isn't open and free from all
obstructions MUCH slower.

> 
> though humans also seemed to have little problem hunting other animals

Humans must had had problems

hunting a species of deer with smaller antlers because those elk are still
around today, it's just the Irish Elk that's dead.

> 
> no evidence that makes us select the model of a runaway sexual selection
> killing them off over things like habitat loss, inter-species competition,
> or hunting by humans.

Modern elk faced these same problems and must have found them to be less
than lethal, but the exact same problems stumped the Irish Elk. Something
must be different. What is the most conspicuous difference between the
Irish Elk and the modern elk?   

> 
> My guess here is it was a big animal with lots of meat and material for
> use, making it a better target. Plus, simply being larger
>  [...]
>

The modern elk has about as much meat on it as a Irish Elk had, and yet
one went extinct and one did not. Why? 

>> 
>> But we do have direct field observations
>> 
>> of physics, enough to know that a 9 foot wide 90 pound anchor on top of
>> 
>>  a head is going to severely limit the movement of an animal,
>> 
>> especially the movement of the
>> 
>> most important part of the animal, the head.
>> 
>>  It is just not viable to maintain
>> 
>> that the resulting huge increase in angular momentum of the head (never
>> mind the fact that the antlers would also hit things
>> 
>> and further restrict
>> 
>> movement) would be beneficial to a species.
>
>
> > 
> Yet from this one would expect the winterkills to go the opposite way, no?

In every species of deer I would expect large bodied individuals to do
better in the winter than small bodied individuals especially if it's a
very cold winter, and they had a lot of those during the Ice Age.

 John K Clark  

> 
>
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