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The evolutionary origin is alleged to be recent: Other animals do not have a preference for dissonance and consonance. (McDermott & Hauser, 2004).
Humans have new auditory regions in the brain for predicting and processing speech, and processing the emotions conveyed in the voice. The human voice mostly has harmonics in the 3rd and 4th note due to the ...
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If you read the subsequent paragraph it is clear that he is speaking of the difficulty in drawing borders between species.
It is not possible to draw definitive species boundaries, especially if you follow species over time rather than classifying organisms with a snapshot in time: these issues come up time and time again on this Stack. Some examples:
How ...
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It isn't necessarily true that individuals with different numbers of chromosomes are infertile. Even though common wisdom has it that horse (64 chromosomes)/donkey (62 chromosomes) hybrids are invariably infertile mules, that's not true; a significant number of fertile horse/donkey offspring have been documented. Here is an example where the chromosomes ...
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In the context of Darwin's Variation under Domestication, "true breeding" is a phenotypic characteristic rather than a genetic one. True-breeding organisms produce offspring that are identical to themselves, concerning some trait -- i.e. white fantails, when bred with white fantails, produce characteristically white offspring. For diploid organisms, true-...
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That's one of — quite a few, we have to say — the mistakes Darwin made in his edition from 1859 (I have to confess that this is the only edition I've read, and I reckon this is the only edition anyone should read). This mistake is even more contrasting if you realize that he failed to apply the very same reasoning he had made just a few pages ...
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I know this is too late, but since this is something I'm struggling with too I thought I'd post here in case others also find there way here. I don't have an answer but, here are some quotes that might help (I found them at least partially helpful).
Yang (2004): "Marginal reconstruction is more suitable when one wants the sequence at a particular node, as ...
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Case A: Not Breeding True
If you cross-breed two random dogs, the offspring are likely to only vaguely resemble either parent. If you could clone a random dog to obtain two genetically identical dogs with different sex, you would likely still only get offspring that vaguely resemble their parents, because the chromosomes of the parents would come in pairs ...
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The answer is complicated. In the early days of molecular phylogenetics, it was extremely difficult to demonstrate whether chimps or gorillas are our closest relatives. This is because the common ancestor of chimps and humans lived between 5 and 8 million years ago, and the common ancestor of gorillas and humans (and chimps) lived around the same time, just ...
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http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/woodpecker/woodpecker.html
Hopefully this should answer your doubts, it both debunks the "impossibility" of such evolutionary pattern and explains how it happened.
The unusual appearance of the woodpecker’s "tongue skeleton" has inspired creationists to use it as an example of a structure too bizarre to have evolved ...
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"has human intelligence evolved as a costly male signal which has, over time, been passed to females too, but whom are just not as interested to use it to attract mates?"
(I am ignoring that last part)
So you suggest intelligence (the modern human brain) evolved solely as a sexual dimorohism which then migigated over time?
I find that particular ...
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Yes it is thought to provide safer milk, less vulnerable to every bacteria that respires and multiplies on sucrose, and which lets the baby grow faster due to higher sugar content.
Milk has evolved from pouch mucus, antimicrobal secretions of the immune system, Lysozyme in mucus is a glycoside hydrolase which ruptures bacteria cell walls. So the origins of ...
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"Do species mutate their genes so they can reach an optimum state". No, for several reasons.
Species do not mutate their genes. Individuals suffer mutations.
Many species are in an environment that changes as fast as they can evolve, because of geophysical change, or other species including H.Sapiens. In these cases there is no optimal state to reach.
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