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"We have nothing to fear but fear itself.....and snakes."
Typical evolutionary mumbo-jumbo. They try to use evolution to explain how primates use their eyes and limbs, to conceal the fact that evolution can't explain how they got eyes and limbs in the first place.
The perfect analogy of Hezbollah, the snake who hides among the Lebanese people to do their savage work……………
This doesn't look good for the Irish.
Or, following the theme of this brilliant research, maybe the lemurs evolved such great eyes that the snakes just gave up on the arms race and decided to leave Madagascar altogether. Have you seen the size of those lemur-eyes? Those are "star-wars" eyes, the SDI's of evolution. They need to pay this lady a lot of public loot for this amazing discovery.
Pfft. I'll believe it when a Pikachu evolves wings.
It's all jibber-jabber. I don't want to hear no more of this jibber-jabber, do you understand? [/TIC]
I wonder if they tried to explain exactly how many primates were eaten by venemous snakes, which tend to be too small to eat even small primates. I thought close up vision was more useful to keep from hitting your head on obstacles, or stubbing your toes on rocks, or determining if you had food or junk in your hand before eating, or seeing if you had the best looking mate available, etc.
"snakes were likely the first serious predators of modern mammals"
BALDERDASH.
Mammals eveolved in the mid Mesozoic era. The "Age if Reptiles" That meant dinosaurs. Not all dinosaurs were giants and my guess is smaller dinosaurs were a far greater threat to evolving mammals than snakes.
Tests done on pirmates which have never been exposed to snakes indicate no inherent fear of snakes - rather curiosity.
Ophidiophobia is an acuired trait and I doubt if one can learn much from a poisonous bite as an individual. And, as a group, the immediate consequences of a snake nite might not be manifest for some time.
I think this woman is stretching for things on this subject.
Aside from Judaeo-Christian society, which is fixated on the Garden of Eden episode, MOST earliers societies didn't fear snakes - they worshipped them as Gods.
So I think this person had better go back to the drawing board.
OK, let's be sure that everyone understands how absurd this hypothesis is.
No simian prior to the "appearance" of poisonous snakes could see color. Snakebites had to be so common and invariably fatal that EVERY simian with black and white vision was ultimately wiped out and could not reproduce, while ONLY those that could see color survived and produced surviving offspring. NONE of the colorblind simians were able to survive snakebite, while most of the color-seers successfully avoided snakes.
Never mind that many individuals would never encounter a poisonous snake before reproducing, or lived in any area with few, if any, poisonous snakes. And never mind that some simian individual had to have an accidental gene mutation that -- voila! -- produced whole rods or cones or whatever that could detect colors along with the brain cells capable of interpreting them.
OK, evolutionists, let's hear your howls of protest and derision. Your religion has been questioned! Paging John Derbyshire!
"The ability to spot venomous snakes may have played a major role in the evolution of monkeys, apes and humans"
Yes. And one day monkees may fly right out of my butt.
This is just another idea by a scientist and we will never have enough facts to either dispute it or back it up since these were one-time events in the distant past. Can't these guys find something more productive to do with their time?
Oh, wait. Let me save you guys the trouble. Okay, I don't know anything about the scientific method, I am disparaging these scientists that are doing noble and valuable work, all science proceeds from ideas such as these, blah, blah, blah.
She, in my humble opinion, is incorrect. Dinosaurs were chomping on small mammals since they started to differentiate from reptiles.
Well, a couple of our more recent responses are the 12 gauge shotgun and night vision goggles. Let's see the snakes match those.
What are your feelings on the current situation in the Middle East?
This reminds me of an article I read on fear & learning in monkeys a while ago.
Basically, monkeys aren't born with fear of snakes; they only start fearing snakes when they see another monkey fearing snakes.
However, if a monkey sees another monkey fearing, say, flowers... the only thing that that monkey learns is that some monkeys are crazy.
The conclusion of the article was that fear of snakes and other dangers were instinctive & genetic, but it was dormant by default and had to be "triggered" by external stimulus before it could be expressed. This fits in with a lot of genetic-influenced behavior we see (e.g., alcoholism; little kids don't steal from their parents' liquor cabinets--they have to take their first drink before becoming alcoholic).
What nonsense!