My post is about an article in the Star Tribune about barefoot running. The article discusses the effect of shoes on running habits and running related injuries. Although the article states the facts and assumptions of the article accurately, my biologist issue with it is the way evolution is referred to. The article describes it as a thing people do almost willingly, and also describes our straying from past evolutionary trends as bad when it isn't necessarily so. These interpretations of evolution add fuel to the fire that is creationism, and allows people to actively deny evolution as natural and place supernatural causes for it.
Draft of Post:
In an article recently published in your paper, "Study on evolution of running finds going barefoot good for the sole, better for the heels," there seems to be an issue with the way evolution is described. While it is true that ancient man would have run barefoot, and that natural selection would have favored faster runners for hunting and outrunning prey, this was not a conscious act by humans. This seems to be the case when a scientist was quoted saying "We did not evolve to run barefoot... in the winter..." Humans (and animals) do not evolve to meet their own demands, nature forced conditions upon us that caused natural selection to occur. It is also inaccurate to state that shoes have had a negative impact on our evolution. While they may create negative habits for runners, running is no longer important to our survival and reproduction. Whether or not we run quickly no longer matters evolutionarily, and so our ability to run in future generations will likely remain somewhat constant. It is important to remember that natural selection occurs and then populations evolve, and that evolution can cause traits, such as running ability, to shift both forward and back depending on what nature demands of us.
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I totally agree with you. Evolution is something that we do not choose, it chooses us. Even though with the invention of shoes, our evolution in the running department may have stopped. It really doesn't matter now because like you said, we don't have to hunt and escape enemies anymore. I think that this is a good argument with sound evidence.
ReplyDeleteI think the article you chose is a very interesting one. You brought up some very valid points about the way the term evolution is used, yet you definitely explained the discrepancy in a way that anyone could understand.
ReplyDeleteI think you make a good point, but I think you could find it useful to note that, while we evolved to run barefoot on harder surfaces, me may be "devolving" into running on softer surfaces, i.e. the soles of our shoes, and that the article may not be entirely unfounded, and you've just overstepped the goals of the author.
ReplyDeleteAlso running may still have some part on our reproduction as a good physique, possibly from running, is more favorable to an average, random person than a bad physique, in all fairness, so you may wish to omit that last part.
NICE thread! Lewontin weighs in here: he says organisms (us) CHANGE their environments (which then act back to change us-and so on and so on).
ReplyDeleteSo no, we didn't evolve to run 10K's. But wearing shoes DOES change us (and allows us to act on the environment). We aren't separate from our tools, nor from our environments. Nor have we stopped evolving (Wall-E is relevant here). What's at issue here is our theories of evolution.