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This is dumb. If a single human survived a punch that otherwise would have killed them before breeding age than Yes, we did "evolve" to handle punches. Evoluti

This is dumb. If a single human survived a punch that otherwise would have killed them before breeding age than Yes, we did "evolve" to handle punches. Evolution is not driven, it is all the little things that worked over a long period of time. The sum of all factors. There will be no smoking gun that says we did this or that for this or that, only our modern form that says "this worked".

pessimizer 12y ago
Did our feet evolve to avoid slipping on banana peels?
- batmansbelt 12y ago
  Mythbusters did one on that. The demonstrated fairly convincingly that it's not that easy to slip on a banana.
  - Torgo 12y ago
    The variety of banana (Gros Michel) that was commonplace when the "slip on a banana peel" comedic device was invented was a different breed than the one that is commonplace today (Cavendish.) The Gros Michel peel was reportedly very slippery.
    - soperj 12y ago
      as an addendum to that, the reason you don't see Gros Michel today is because "Panama disease" (a wilt fungus) wiped out most of the plantations in South America/Africa. You can still find Gros Michels in Thailand today. Someone should write myth busters, maybe they could import a gros michel to test it.
- gambiting 12y ago
  If any person has ever been saved from dying from slipping on a banana peel by the shape of their foot, then the answer is yes.
  - gress 12y ago
    How would you determine whether the cause of them not dying was 'the shape of their foot', and not any of thousands of other features you could arbitrarily pick, such as 'the balance of their skeleton', or 'their gait', or 'the thickness of their skull' or 'the responsiveness of their reflexes'?
    - monochr 12y ago
      You don't and neither does evolution. All that the DNA knows is that it got into the next generation and it will keep doing whatever it was doing before plus or minus a few small random mutations.
      - gress 12y ago
        Exactly, so these just so stories are just that.
  - vacri 12y ago
    Only if that person had offspring at some point.
monochr 12y ago
I sometimes think even most biologists don't understand how evolution works. Especially when I read about people taking the idea of spandrels seriously. Legs didn't evolve "for" walking, ancestors with leg like appendages survived better than those who didn't have them in the Savannah. It didn't matter if they did that by walking, swimming, running or kicking threats and opportunities as they came along. The same is true of fists and skulls. They didn't evolve for punching, but any ancestor who threw a punch - even if by accident - and didn't have their hand broken, and anyone who received one and didn't have their skull broken had a better chance of survival that those who did. The only question is if this happened often enough to warrant the extra resources that went into strengthening the bones of the hands and skull compared to using those resources into some other area of the body.
- Peaker 12y ago
  Saying that "legs evolved for walking" is a completely legitimate statement. Something can be said to have evolved for a purpose -- as a short-hand for saying that random changes that helped that purpose increased fitness and were selected for by natural selection.
  - monochr 12y ago
    If legs evolved for walking why are they so useful for swimming? There is a set of genes that encodes for the behavior of walking or allows us to learn it and a whole other host of adaptations from our vestibular system to the angle at which our neck connects to our skull that taken together as a whole are adaptations for walking. Each on its own has many, many other uses that have nothing to do with walking and provide benefits that have nothing to do with walking. So no, legs didn't evolve for anything. But in combination with a lot of other adaptations they make walking easier than would be the case without them.
    - Peaker 12y ago
      I agree that legs didn't actually evolve for walking exclusively. They evolved for a myriad of purposes, including walking, running, jumping, swimming, and more. The fact other parts of the body also evolved to facilitate these features is not a contradiction. Evolution is like a parallel computation looking for a local optimum. When climbing the hills of the possibility landscape, various features that exist at the top of these hills can be described as the purpose of a particular search path.

pessimizer 12y ago

Did our feet evolve to avoid slipping on banana peels?

batmansbelt 12y ago
Mythbusters did one on that. The demonstrated fairly convincingly that it's not that easy to slip on a banana.
- Torgo 12y ago
  The variety of banana (Gros Michel) that was commonplace when the "slip on a banana peel" comedic device was invented was a different breed than the one that is commonplace today (Cavendish.) The Gros Michel peel was reportedly very slippery.
  - soperj 12y ago
    as an addendum to that, the reason you don't see Gros Michel today is because "Panama disease" (a wilt fungus) wiped out most of the plantations in South America/Africa. You can still find Gros Michels in Thailand today. Someone should write myth busters, maybe they could import a gros michel to test it.
gambiting 12y ago
If any person has ever been saved from dying from slipping on a banana peel by the shape of their foot, then the answer is yes.
- gress 12y ago
  How would you determine whether the cause of them not dying was 'the shape of their foot', and not any of thousands of other features you could arbitrarily pick, such as 'the balance of their skeleton', or 'their gait', or 'the thickness of their skull' or 'the responsiveness of their reflexes'?
  - monochr 12y ago
    You don't and neither does evolution. All that the DNA knows is that it got into the next generation and it will keep doing whatever it was doing before plus or minus a few small random mutations.
    - gress 12y ago
      Exactly, so these just so stories are just that.
- vacri 12y ago
  Only if that person had offspring at some point.

monochr 12y ago

I sometimes think even most biologists don't understand how evolution works. Especially when I read about people taking the idea of spandrels seriously. Legs didn't evolve "for" walking, ancestors with leg like appendages survived better than those who didn't have them in the Savannah. It didn't matter if they did that by walking, swimming, running or kicking threats and opportunities as they came along. The same is true of fists and skulls. They didn't evolve for punching, but any ancestor who threw a punch - even if by accident - and didn't have their hand broken, and anyone who received one and didn't have their skull broken had a better chance of survival that those who did. The only question is if this happened often enough to warrant the extra resources that went into strengthening the bones of the hands and skull compared to using those resources into some other area of the body.

Peaker 12y ago
Saying that "legs evolved for walking" is a completely legitimate statement. Something can be said to have evolved for a purpose -- as a short-hand for saying that random changes that helped that purpose increased fitness and were selected for by natural selection.
- monochr 12y ago
  If legs evolved for walking why are they so useful for swimming? There is a set of genes that encodes for the behavior of walking or allows us to learn it and a whole other host of adaptations from our vestibular system to the angle at which our neck connects to our skull that taken together as a whole are adaptations for walking. Each on its own has many, many other uses that have nothing to do with walking and provide benefits that have nothing to do with walking. So no, legs didn't evolve for anything. But in combination with a lot of other adaptations they make walking easier than would be the case without them.
  - Peaker 12y ago
    I agree that legs didn't actually evolve for walking exclusively. They evolved for a myriad of purposes, including walking, running, jumping, swimming, and more. The fact other parts of the body also evolved to facilitate these features is not a contradiction. Evolution is like a parallel computation looking for a local optimum. When climbing the hills of the possibility landscape, various features that exist at the top of these hills can be described as the purpose of a particular search path.