News of Other Religions

It occurs to your editor that in matters religious we quite often refer to Christianity, and somewhat frequently to Islam, the Religion of Peace, received by the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), which spread itself by dint of logic and moral suasion across previously barbarous or unpopulated provinces of the Roman Empire in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, and thence to the gates of Vienna, whose denizens declined to listen to its subtle and sublime preaching.

So to vary our fare we have sought out news of other faith traditions, and turn today to Evolutionism. The ever-skeptical press reports:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Chimpanzees scampering on a treadmill have provided support for the notion that ancient human ancestors began walking on two legs because it used less energy than quadrupedal knuckle-walking, scientists said.

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Writing on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said people walking on a treadmill used just a quarter of the energy relative to their size compared to chimpanzees knuckle-walking on four legs.

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Bipedalism is a defining characteristic of the human lineage and marked an important divergence from other apes.

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Some scientists for decades have advanced the hypothesis that millions of years ago, human ancestors began walking upright because it used less energy than quadrupedal walking, gaining advantages in things like food foraging.

But there has been scant data on this notion, aside from a 1973 study looking at locomotion energy in juvenile chimps.

"This paper provides strong support for the fact that energy savings played a role in the evolution of bipedalism," one of the scientists, University of Arizona anthropologist David Raichlen, said in a telephone interview.

We confess that we had not previously been aware that bipedalism was a major survival characteristic of homo quasisapiens. This is an advantage one must keep in mind when next confronted by a hunting party of leopards who have armed themselves with rocks, sharp sticks, slings, nets, and semiautomatic pistols. Perhaps we mistake the nature of the argument, however. It could be that the evolutionary advantage conferred superiority only on those chimps able to walk on motorized treadmills, which have, through a process of random mutation and competition, consuming many eons, assembled themselves from earlier, more-primitive machines, thought by some biologists to have included the windmill and the gramophone. But I digress.

This news goes far to explain the disappearance of quadrupedal apes, such as chimps, bonobos and gorillas, losers in the savage competition with their superior bipedal cousins for food, territory, affordable housing and the opportunity to mate with Lindsay Lohan. And it puts an end to the vain hope of some Evolutionism deniers of finding a successful four-legged animal, as all such species have been tossed into the dustbin of Evolutionary history, swept aside by the onrush of bipedalism.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled coverage of Muslim community service.