Your Hands Were Made For Punching According To New Study 240
They are capable of delicate surgery, creating beautiful works of art, and comforting someone feeling down, but according to a new study your hands evolved to smash someone in the face. From the article: "Human hands evolved so that men could make fists and fight, and not just for manual dexterity, new research finds.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, adds to a growing body of evidence that humans are among the most aggressive and violent animals on the planet.
'With the notable exception of bonobos, great apes are a relatively aggressive group of mammals,' lead author David Carrier told Discovery News. 'Although some primatologists may argue that chimpanzees are the most aggressive apes, I think the evidence suggests that humans are substantially more violent.''"
Fist walking (Score:5, Interesting)
Context is important! (Score:3, Interesting)
Context is important. Violence is not ubiquitous. See this:7 Things Bonobos Can Teach Us About Love and Sex
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201202/7-things-bonobos-can-teach-us-about-love-and-sex
I wouldn't say humans are more violent (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's all about masturbation, Mr. Carrier (Score:4, Interesting)
Not having to impregnate women you don't even like just because you feel horny, for one.
Re:As a boxer... (Score:2, Interesting)
Bullshit, your fists are not properly adapted to bare knuckle boxing, which is what TFS implies. The human face has tons of small muscles, each muscle is anchored by tiny bone ridges. The skull itself is adapted to handle whatever knocks it takes.
So, what you end up with is breaking your fingers and similar damage. If you really must hit somebody in the face, you do that with the heal of your hand which is much sturdier than your knuckles anyways. It's braced for times when you fall forward and need to use it to keep from smacking your head into the ground.
IIRC, the term heal claw strike or similar is used in Ninjitsu to refer to that type of hit.
this is a joke (Score:3, Interesting)
Other articles she wrote:
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Re:Fist walking (Score:5, Interesting)
Orangutans are the only great ape that walks like that, though, and they're primarily brachiators. Chimps and gorillas walk on the second knuckle rather than the first.
Re:It's all about masturbation, Mr. Carrier (Score:5, Interesting)
But convincing women to have sex with you requires not being a pathetic drooling moron, which means having a way of bleeding off the excess horniness during sexless courtship. Low horniness means you don't try and drop out of the gene pool, high unrelieved horniness means you don't succeed and drop out of the gene pool. Horniness + ability to masturbate means you can select your level of horniness to fit the situation. Win.
But there was a side effect: When women breast-feed, it lowers their sex drive on average. A normal horny animal would just go off and find another mate. This limits the resources available for the child, so the species evolves young that are independent early, which limits intelligence. However, because masturbating human males could relieve their horniness, it reduced their need to constantly find other mates. This increased the resources for children, allowing the minor evolutionary pressure for greater intelligence to finally overcome the greater evolutionary pressure to reduce resource use. Thus modern humans evolved.
Re:As a boxer... (Score:4, Interesting)
Your hands will fracture, break, bend, and sometimes emulsify... Especially the forefinger middle knuckle and the top pinky knuckle = 'the boxer break.' Over and over.
Strange, I would take this as evidence that our hands are NOT evolved for punching, but rather that our bodies are amazingly adaptable to what we put them through.
It's hard to see the thumb as an adaptation used for fighting, as the article suggests.
Re:It's all about masturbation, Mr. Carrier (Score:5, Interesting)
Values, yes. For example, there surely were many of loving parents in Nazi Germany, and the sense of duty and honor they instilled in their kids -- with the best and most loving of intentions --made those perfect fodder for the Nazis. Of course, there was also the resistance. You know, the ones who died a lot, too. While Nazi scientists kind of went on to continue their career in the US. Gotta lurv me some values!
Values can be routed around and used for whatever if you couple it with deception, and even then there is the whole external forces stuff... You can instill values that would make your kid rather starve than become a murderer, but wether they will have to make such a choice is not up to you or them, ultimately. You can keep your kid from participating in war or slavery, but not from catching a bullet or being enslaved.
It's kind of ironic: unless we care for all people, our own children (and their children, and theirs..) don't really stand much of a chance, and will not have much of a say. They will pick from choices others engineered and think they are their own. That's even worse than being in prison, where you even know you are.
We are embedded in society, we breathe it, and the question is, who drives it. Special interest groups, or all? Whom does it serve for the most part? We are being driven, probed, manipulated, divided and conquered, and you tell me your parenting is going to win out? I mean, I get your point, and I agree with it in the scope it applies, but do you hear me, too?
Even when you say "your beliefs" I have to ask, how many of those are yours, how many have you adopted without looking too closely? And never mind you, how about most people?
Likewise, if what you said was true, that either means a lot of parents raise their kids to be tools for robbery, murder, and being experimented on.
And yes, I am exaggerrating. To make a point, because this cute little "my family tree" stuff is boring me to death. I appreciate the love, but I hate the naivity. Put bluntly, even the most successful kid is still just a slave and cannonfodder with mostly lies, toys and non-sequiturs in the brain, with so few exceptions they're not worth mentioning. It's not worth mentioning until it's at least two thirds, if you ask me :P I know we can't all be super duper grownups all the time, but this is abysmal bullshit. The whole last 100 years have been, at least.
And yes, once you see through a bunch of patterns [youtube.com] you'll find the world, in some ways, IS very grey and generic. Well, the human world, anyway. It's like the emperor has ten thousand outfits, and they all consist of his wrinkly dick swinging in the wind. And pretending otherwise doesn't make it actually colorful, it kinda dooms us... so let's kick the emperor in the nuts. He'll thank us when he snapped out of it, I bet you.
Re:Not for jacking off? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a guy that has suffered from various bacterial infections of the prostate and other reproductive parts, masturbation was one of the keys toward clearing out infections.
See, the ejaculate is designed to be a nutrient bath for sperm cells. And it's good at keeping OTHER cells alive too.
But it acts like mucus (snot) to clear things out if you are ready to dump lots of it.
Masturbation (twice a day if possible) is one of the key things to do if you've got prostatitis. So yeah, it's not good to hold your load too long. Why do you think wet dreams occur? Why bother doing that while asleep, couldn't it be completely confined to dreaming?
If you want to successfully reproduce, you need to be wanking it often, especially if there isn't modern medical care available.
Ps, I am better now.
Re:I call BS (Score:3, Interesting)
Where does it all end?
1. CHESS
2. POKER
3. FIGHTER COMBAT
4. GUERRILLA ENGAGEMENT
5. DESERT WARFARE
6. AIR-TO-GROUND ACTIONS
7. THEATERWIDE TACTICAL WARFARE
8. THEATERWIDE BIOTOXIC AND CHEMICAL WARFARE
9. GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR