Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!lib!thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu
From: mitchell@thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu (Philip Mitchel)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Further Evolving Eyebrows
Summary: lost hair not obvious
Message-ID: <4278@lib.tmc.edu>
Date: 3 Nov 90 23:18:54 GMT
References: <1371@cluster.cs.su.oz.au> <2431@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu>
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In article <2431@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> barger@ils.nwu.edu (Jorn Barger) writes:
>Why did humans lose their fur?  This seems surely due to sexual selection, 
>not natural selection.  But why this baldness became sexually attractive I 
>have no clue. 

I'm curious... why is it that fur loss is surely due to sexual, not natural
selection?  How much of a body's resources would it take to keep that
much hair growing?  If that much can be saved by wearing the furs of
other animals (or altering other behaviors to maintain the core
temperature without the use of natural fur), mightn't that give the
hairless an advantage over the hairy?  I'm not proposing this as The
Answer to the question, it has just seemed a possible explanation.  It
would (to my mind) also explain why we keep hair on our heads (the gain
in heat conservation outweighing the metabolic loss, since the brain is
such a greedy consumer of everything).  What say the learned among us?


-- 
Phil Mitchell                                 mitchell@thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu

  "No one is to be blamed for any damned fool thing I say, either."