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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your observation. I'm not equating evolution to religion, but it's interesting when you think about it. In the past, if you asked why humans had "x", it was because God designed us that way.

If you ask it now, the answer is "because our environment selected for it."

Neither answer provides a useful explanation.

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One can be tested and improved upon, the other can't. Just don't sign me up for a face punching trial.

That wouldn't test for whether we evolved for it. We could, at best, simulate early human societies with various levels of violence and see if one led to large jaws. (Though currently we have insufficient information to model such societies.)

Most people grossly underestimate the forces of genetic drift and personal preference on phenotypical evolution. The null hypothesis for any gender-linked trait having evolved should probably be "it made them more attractive to a fertile population of the opposite sex."

Even if you can show experimentally that lots of face punching will lead to stronger jaws, that doesn't prove that it's what happened historically. We could have evolved the same strong jaw for a completely unrelated reason.

There's a world of difference that you're not choosing to notice!! One requires blind faith (and so is completely useless for another other that providing comfort for those that don't want to understand the way nature works, and the other is based on scientific evidence that can be tested.

"can be tested in a lab" is different from "would take thousands of years of test"

I'm certainly not equating the two, but honestly, if I ask why humans have heavy jaws and person A says "to take punches" and person B says "to chew on meat", I'm left with two reasonable explanations that come from opposite directions. I'm no better off than I was before.

What did you make of the discussion toward the end of the article, where it discusses ensuing lightening of the jaw bone?

God said: OK, now that they're done bashing each other and I'm no longer at risk of loosing the lot so let's get back to business.

But then that gets shattered because, well, because we just bash with drones and chemicals.

So I, at least, find myself back at square one... : The planet is dying and you have the capacity to launch 25,000 people in one direction with one hail mary. What do you do?

Yeah, we definitely need to get our evolves on. The odds still seem pretty stacked against.

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