Comments on: How Seahorses Evolved To Swim Standing Up

By: Martin Geerts

Martin Geerts — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:22:18 +0000

According to the authors swimming upright was favoured by natural selection. As a proponent of evolution by natural experiment I believe that the enormous expansion of sea grass habitats allowed the ancestors of the sea horses to move into a new habitat in which was little or no selection pressure. That means that the upright position evolved because of a lack of selection, natural or otherwise.
Martin Geerts

By: GQ

GQ — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:27:04 +0000

Now granted, I didn’t read the paper that I’m sure they published on this but your header says they’ve “proved” how seahorses evolved to swim standing up. So where’s the proof? Saying “grass is upright, and so are the seahorses, therefore that’s WHY they’re upright” doesn’t sound very scientific to me… What about all those creatures that live inthe long grass that haven’t evolved to swim upright. How come they survived?

By: ted

ted — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:36:57 +0000

No, VonSkippy, man pees standing up because it’s so much fun.

Timm, get a life. The hypotheses of scientific thought are vastly preferable to blindly accepting the word of a cult leader with preposterous ideas and no basis in fact. For example, Jim Jones and L Ron Hubbard.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:08:20 +0000

See Neatorama article about “The Science News Cycle.”

By: Gambit

Gambit — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:39:57 +0000

that’s a bunch of bull crap.

By: VonSkippy

VonSkippy — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:36:43 +0000

“How Seahorses Evolved To Swim Standing Up”

Pretty much the same way that man evolved to pee standing up.

By: Timm

Timm — Mon, 25 May 2009 05:18:17 +0000

I have always been dumbfounded by how researchers profess to know how many things have come to be.

I mean without OBSERVING something first hand you can’t really KNOW how something developped.

Sure you can throw all matter of complexity, theory, hypothesis, etc. at something and say it’s true when you are all done lookingat the data as you see it, but you’d just be kidding yourself if you said you knew it came to be this way or that because of whatever factors you decided to look at…

But to their credit at least they throw in words like think, may, could, etc. That way in ten years when their idea look like total crap they can never take less responsibility for their crap ideas.

By: Kalel

Kalel — Mon, 25 May 2009 02:00:21 +0000

Antiquarian aqui-equines defy neigh-sayers!