Raven VII said:
Isn't it strange how Homo sapiens is the last of the Homo genus, making it sound like the Homo genus isn't that successful, and yet only the sapiens rule the world today. Wonder what happened?
And maybe it's a strange question, but why aren't caucasians, Africans, Asians and Native Americans considered different species? There are significant differences - the skin color, bone structure, stature, etc. And because we can inter-breed doesn't matter - dogs can breed inter-species fine for example...
Or maybe I got this all completely mixed up.
There is more genetic and phenotypic variation between two
individuals of any ethnicity than there is between any two
ethnicities. In other words the statistical genetic difference between, say, Africans and Asians as a whole is less than the statistical difference between one African person and one Asian person. It is quite small really. I have done some forensic work determining age, sex and ethnicity on human skeletal material. I can tell you right now that while a highly trained physical anthropologist can determine the above with very good accuracy, ethnicity is the least evident and hardest to determine. I have seen a skull with a ton of diagnostic caucasian features that turned out to be 100% African, and so on. When it comes to our genes and our bones we are all VERY much the same. the variations we call race or ethnicity are just that - minor variations.
Actually the genus Homo and its phylogenic ancestors were NOT successful. If you look at the history of anthropoids as a whole you will find that hominids are some the most poorly adapted members. Hominids have very little physical adaptation to the world around them; the body is very gracile compared to other mammals our size (any full grown chimp can easily curl 160lbs - How many of us can do THAT?
), our senses of hearing and smell are poor. That is why we fared so poorly in evolutionary terms.
The adaptations we DO have are an advanced, color binocular visual apparatus, very large brain size proportional to body mass and bipedalism, which frees use of the hands to manipulate objects. These physical adaptations are all geared to serve the one behavioral adaptation that has made H. Sapiens so very succesful: the reliance on a large and dynamic set of learned behavior (known as "culture") over physical adaptations and instinctive behavior.
Though H. Sapiens has been very successful, EVERY other hominid species has gone exctinct because their "culture" has been insufficient to allow the species to adapt to its environment and out compete other species. Culture has allowed H. Sapiens to dominate the earth - but this "brains over brawn" phenomenon has only succeded just this once in natural history. It is actually not a very evolutionarily sound design from a Darwinian standpoint (without culture we are essentially big, slow hairless pieces of food for the rest of the animal kingom), but when allowed to mature it is fantastically successful, as our species has demonstrated.
I hate to sound like a textbook but I guess I'm just glad all that money I paid to my university bought me something other than a stupid little piece of paper.
