Strong inference

<< Owen Lovejoy suggested that the primary advantage of bipedal walking for early hominids was
freeing the hands so males could bring food to females who were encumbered with young.

Could someone help me formulate a strong inference and make a prediction that will test this
hypothesis.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

This is obviously a male hypothesis. I would think a more accurate one would be that it frees
the hands to
1. carry, rock, and cuddle the baby thus promoting social ties, language, love, education, cultural
transmition etc.
2. tool use and hand dexterity..

Either idea by themselves is half right IMO and has a slant towards either males or female thinking.
Also remember that dolphins do not have hands and seem to have highly developed brains. So bipedal
walking is not a necessity for brain development - but social bonding probably is (and the warm
blooded behavior that leads to more care for newborns that leads to the social bonding - etc.)

[email hidden] (Cleo Trotter) wrote in news:bmdauj$vf5$1
@darwin.ediacara.org:

Quoted message said:

Owen Lovejoy suggested that the primary advantage of bipedal walking for early hominids was
freeing the hands so males could bring food to females who were encumbered with young.

Could someone help me formulate a strong inference and make a prediction that will test this
hypothesis.

I always love students who use newsgroups to help them with their homework
:-)

But this is an interesting question. I tend to agree with Tom that the Lovejoy explanation is
somewhat male chauvinistic - I would argue instead that the primary advantage is allowing females
to carry babies so that the infants can be even more altricial, in turn allowing for even more
learned behavior.

If I were to accept Lovejoy's hypothesis, I think it would follow that the females of early bipedal
hominids would be eating foods from a much larger radius around a camp area than females of related
quadripeds (i.e. chimps). Given perfect historical data I suppose you could actually test this, but
I don't know if it is a practicable test in the real world.

Yours,

Bill Morse

"Cleo Trotter" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
"]news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Owen Lovejoy suggested that the primary advantage of bipedal walking for early hominids was
freeing the hands so males could bring food to females who were encumbered with young.

Could someone help me formulate a strong inference and make a prediction that will test this
hypothesis.

No a hypothesis should be based on facts.

there were probably hundreds of reasons the primates went bipedal. Many paleontologist believe
that the move to the savanna woodlands, grasslands selected for it but just what it was remains
a mystery.

1 Ability to see over tall grass. 2 Ability to use hands for weapons since apes were at a
disadvantage with predators. 3 Ability to cover long distances and search for food at the same time.
4 No longer needed hands to climb trees. 5 A move to cave life instead of living in trees. 6 Change
of dietary habits. 7 Social reasons

The list could go on and on as there are many advantages to walking upright. It was just an entire
change in the primates way of life that wandered out from the rain forests.

Lane

in article [email hidden], Lane Lewis at
[email hidden] wrote on 10/14/03 10:27 PM:

Quoted message said:

"Cleo Trotter" <[email hidden]> wrote in message "]news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Owen Lovejoy suggested that the primary advantage of bipedal walking for early hominids was
freeing the hands so males could bring food to females who were encumbered with young.

Could someone help me formulate a strong inference and make a prediction that will test this
hypothesis.

No a hypothesis should be based on facts.

[snip]

The philosophical issues involved in what should constitute a hypothesis is not as clear as this
statement suggests. Popper, for example, strongly disagree and he is considered the most influential
philosopher of science when it comes to hypothesizing. The notion that hypotheses should be based on
facts is a rather recently common notion, which I think has been driven by the operation of funding
agencies. It is, after all, more appealing to grant money to those proposing to test hypotheses
founded in facts than to those proposing to test factually unfounded hypotheses. It is not clear,
however, that this funding procedure is in the best interest of science in the bigger picture. It
might, for example, tend to lead to codification of preconceived notions and penalize more creative
good ideas.

Guy