Walking Upright Is Not Just for Pregnant Females
Pregnant women have enhanced curvature of the lower spine, which helps them support their babies during pregnancy. Obviously, this must have evolved that way because emerging apes rising to their feet had different physiological needs. Most science news reports are echoing this theme from a paper in Nature1 without any qualms about the Lamarckism or teleology of such language.
For instance, the EurekAlert entry begins, “The transition from apes to humans may have been partially triggered by the need to stand on two legs, in order to safely carry heavier babies.” Why living apes do not feel this need is not explained, nor how a need triggered the kind of random mutations that would conspire to produce a complex set of adaptations.
The article on PhysOrg envisions evolution rising to meet that need:
Walking on two feet, which happened early in human evolution, presents a unique challenge during pregnancy because the center of gravity shifts far in front of the hips, destabilizing the upper body and impairing locomotion. This is not the case for animals that walk predominantly on four legs such as chimpanzees, or even other bipeds.
To accommodate this shifted center of gravity, women’s spines have evolved to help offset the additional weight in the abdomen during pregnancy, so that the back muscles are not taxed in counter-balancing the destabilizing effects of the baby’s weight.
Very clever of evolution to engineer this solution. Evolution is never ever in question in such claims. The only question is how evolution did it:
When human ancestors first became bipedal, they set the human lineage off on a different evolutionary path from other apes, but in so doing created special challenges for pregnant mothers. One exciting discovery is that the ability of human females to better carry a baby to term while standing on two feet appears to have evolved at least two million years ago. The researchers studied two hominin fossils that were approximately two million years old, one of which – presumably a female – displayed three lordosis vertebrae and one of which – presumably a male – displayed fewer.
Early human women lived very strenuous, active lives, and pregnant females were forced to cope with the discomfort of childbearing while foraging for food and escaping from predators,” [Daniel] Lieberman [Harvard] says. “This evolution of the lower back helped early woman to remain more mobile during pregnancy, which would have been essential to survival, and appears to have been favored by natural selection.”
The original paper speculated that the demands of upright-walking females would have exerted a strong “selection pressure” for this adaptation, but did not even attempt to identify a chain of mutations that could have pulled it off.2 EurekAlert added this just-so story: “…the fall in body hair in primates could have brought on bipedality as a necessary consequence, through the strong selective pressure of safe infant carrying, as infants were no longer able to cling to their mother’s body hairs.”
Articles with similar claims can be found on National Geographic News and Associated Press. The rest of the news media tend to echo these announcements with only minor variations. None ever questions the evolutionary angle; design is always attributed to a Darwinian process.
1. Whitcombe, Shapiro and Lieberman, “Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins,” Nature 450, 1075-1078 (13 December 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature06342.
2. Sample: “Given the demands of fetal load and the importance of pregnancy for fitness, one predicts that natural selection has operated on the unique anatomy of the hominin lumbar region to mitigate the biomechanical problems that females confront.”
Evolutionists need to learn to walk upright. To walk uprightly is to be a person of integrity, balance, poise and righteousness. There is no way on earth anyone could ever know the things they are claiming. They see a wonderfully designed adaptation, and cast these pearls before swindling old Charlie. Here again we see evolutionary scientists and their lackeys in the press crawling all over the floor, paying homage to the Head Pig. The original paper’s first words, like those of a baby saying da-da, are “As predicted by Darwin…” Wise king Solomon said, “Folly is joy to him who is destitute of discernment, but a man of understanding walks uprightly” (Proverbs 15:21). Stand up, man, woman, and take a stand for uprightness of heart and mind.