Geeks among you might be familiar with TED, a series of conferences that started 0ut very tech-oriented but now deals with everything including complex global issues and cutting-edge science. Its motto is ‘Ideas worth spreading’. I used to be a big fan when I discovered that they made their talks public under a limited CC license. You can watch about 500 of them here. After a hardcore science talk by someone with no public speaking skills poring over reams of data in excruciating detail, these seem like a breath of fresh air.
But on closer inspection, I found that TED has two major issues:
1) Dumbing down. The flipside of the ’simple is beautiful’ 20-minute time limit and lay demographic, which makes the talks so accessible, is usually oversimplification of an issue or one-sidedness.
2) Dramatisation. They seem to love ‘revolutionary ideas’ (see how often that pops up in talks descriptions). Sadly, science and technology are not solely sudden breakthroughs by crazy geniuses. These geniuses require the more prosaically heroic work of tens of thousands of hours of plodding by unsung everyday scientists, and they are often wrong. As it turns out, crazy ideas are often just that.
TED, to its credit, doesn’t make any claims about the veracity of the claims but it does give people a shared platform with former US presidents, serving prime ministers, Bill Gates, and various Nobel laureates. That’s one big springboard.
So have they been over-promoting fringe scientific theories? Well they do feature repeated appearance of Craig Venter and Kary Mullis both of whom are mavericks with odd views when they stray from their own expertise (Mr. Venter wanted to use the reference human genome for commercial gain and Mr. Mullis is a global warming denialist and an AIDS denialist. Note the armchair.)
And then there’s this recently published talk. It’s Elaine Morgan, a distinguished writer and Oxford graduate who has been a strong voice in the feminist movement. She is defending the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, which other than writing and the feminist cause is one of her great interests. It broadly refers to the idea that certain unique feature of humans among primates such as our thinner hair, and perhaps even bipedalism, can be explained by a history of aquatic or semi-aquatic life after the chimp-human split about 5 Million years ago. As she outlines its, it sound really neat. It also has a certain romance. But note that she doesn’t discuss the evidence, just complains that it has ‘never been properly looked at’. She also uses an argumentum ad Davido Attenburgo. It has been, and is generally considered seriously flawed for multiple reasons. There is Oreopithecus, a swamp-dwelling extinct (partially?) bipedal primate which would be nice as supporting evidence but we don’t really have anything that relates to the human lineage.
Those who know Colin well know that Evolutionary Biology frustrates him mightily, for while its foundation is strong the minor specifics that acadamics spend most of their time quibbling over are often debated in a hypothesis-rich and experiment-free context. This is because evolution is difficult to experiment on since it operates on geological timescales far greater than a scientist’s lifetime. This results in what he calls ‘armchair science’: sitting back in your gown with a pipe and saying “Well, I think this explanation is the more sensible-sounding one, don’t you old chap? Hurrah, we’ve cracked it. Open the port, would you Jeeves?”
Much to his satisfaction, I’m sure, both Kary Mullis denying global warming and Elaine Morgan discussing a fringe theory of human evolution is done from a seated position.
In short, TED has given a lot of publicity to a hypothesis which probably did not merit it. For some serious discussion of the actual science, people far cleverer than me have discussed it on the blogosphere recently, presumably in response to questions arising from TED publicity. Highly recommended reading:
Greg Laden of Scienceblogs
Jim Moore’s comprehensive critique
***Edit 07/08/2009***
Oh, and so that I don’t bash TED too much, here is one excellent TED talks by Hans Rosling - the one that originally got me hooked:
Hans Rosling on the developing world
With the infinitely powerful lens of hindsight I now see that this is because he shows data. Lots and lot of it. In fact he has to talkveryfast and use an animated data visualisation tool to be able to present all of it in 20 minutes. Without these added bonuses, the amount of data in most TED talks is minimal.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:07 am
First of all, there is hard fossil evidence that hominins went through a semiaquatic phase. Its called Oreopithecus bambolii which is usually referred to as ‘the swamp ape’.
Between 9 to 7 million years ago,Oreopithecus inhabited the swamp forest of the ancient island of Tuscany-Sardinia apparently specializing in feeding on aquatic plants. Oreopithecus was also a biped with strange feet that possessed a highly divergent hallux (big toe). Of course, now we know that another hominin, Ardipithecus, was also a biped that possessed a similar divergent big toe.
But was Oreopithecus a hominin? The discoverer of the most complete skeleton of Oreopithecus, Johannes Hurzeler, argued until his death that it was. But is there any evidence?
If you compare the cranio-dental morphology of Oreopithecus with humans, australopithecines, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gibbons you discover that humans and australopithecines have the most cranio-dental similarities to Oreopithecus while gorillas, chimps, orangs, and gibbons have very few similarities with the swamp ape. And you find a similar pattern with the postcranial evidence.
But human ancestors probably went through two semiaquatic phases in their evolution. The first was a freshwater semiaquatic phase and the second was a marine semiaquatic phase. How do I know this?
Well, I know enough about marine mammals to know that there’s always a dramatic modification of the kidneys of marine mammals in order to deal with the ingestion of hypertonic fluids from the salt water environment. Being able to rapidly excrete excess salts from the body is essential for the survival of a marine mammal in order to avoid dehydration. Marine mammals have dealt with the problem of excess salt in their diets by developing kidneys with multiple medullary pyramids. This increase the surface area between the medulla and the surrounding cortex of the kidney, allowing for rapid processing and excretion of ingested hypertonic fluids. Most terrestrial mammals have unipyramidal kidneys except those that have semiaquatic marine ancestors. All catarrhine primates, including apes, have unipyramidal kidneys– except for humans. Humans have a radically different kidney morphology. Humans have kidneys that are unusually large relative to those of apes with typically 8 to 18 medullary pyramids. Clear morphological evidence of a marine phase in human evolution, IMO.
M.F. Williams Bioscience Hypotheses(2008)1,127-137 Cranio-dental evidence of a hominin-like hyper-masticatory apparatus in Oreopithecusbambolii. Was the swamp ape a human ancestor?
M.F. Williams, Morphological evidence of marine adaptations in human kidneys, Med Hypotheses 66 (2006), pp. 247–257.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
A video of bipedal wading behavior in chimpanzees can be seen at:
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2009/02/david-attenborough-on-aquatic-ape.html
October 8th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Hi Marcel,
Thank you for commenting.
The 3 arguments you have put forward are
1) Oreopithecus bambolii’s relationship to humans and bipedalism
2) Kidney physiology of marine mammals
3) A video of chimps wading bipedally in water narrated by David Attenborough
In response:
1) As I state in the article, Oreopithecus would be nice as supporting evidence but doesn’t tell us much on its own. It is unsurprising that some similarities can be found between it and some of its distant hominin relatives – can you, however, provide a quantitative analysis of these differences? Also, as far as we know, Oreopithecus evolved in isolation on an island in Italy, not as part of the human lineage.
In a PNAS paper by Köhler and Moya-Sola, the authors conclude:
“The morphology of Oreopithecus is not ape-like, because it is functionally designed for habitual and not facultative terrestrial bipedal activities, but neither is it hominid-like, as the special environmental conditions of islands engraved their peculiar traits. Nevertheless, the striking convergences with and differences from hominids clearly make Oreopithecus a key species for understanding human bipedality. ”
http://www.pnas.org/content/94/21/11747.full
Köhler & Moyà-Solà PNAS October 14, 1997 vol. 94 no. 21 11747-11750
2) This argument only makes sense if the hominin lineage went through a fully marine, rather than freshwater or wading, phase. The modern version of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis generally rests on freshwater wading.
3) The video you give of freshwater wading is nice but merely presents a plausible hypothesis. “Chimpanzees can wade bipedally in water” is not direct evidence for “hominin ancestors had to wade bipedally in water for much of their life”.
The two references you gave are from non-peer reviewed journals. To quote Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Hypotheses:
“Medical Hypotheses is a medical journal published by Elsevier that is intended to provide a forum for unconventional ideas without the traditional filter of scientific peer review. According to the journal’s website, it publishes “radical ideas, so long as they are coherent and clearly expressed”"
I agree that your ideas are radical and clearly expressed, but unlike the PNAS paper I linked above they are not peer-reviewed.
I’m genuinely sorry that I can’t agree with your viewpoint, because I find the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has a certain romance about. I would delighted and amazed if it were true, but the balance of evidence continues to weigh against it.
If we ever discover fossils of aquatic hominins, rest assured that anthropologists will reconsider their views. Until then, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis remains little more than speculation.