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Record W2899605178 · doi:10.4033/iee.2018.11.6.n

The sexual selection of hominin bipedalism

2018· article· en· W2899605178 on OpenAlex
Michael Dale

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueIdeas in Ecology and Evolution · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicPrimate Behavior and Ecology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBipedalismExtant taxonHuman evolutionEvolutionary biologyBiologyAdaptation (eye)Sexual selectionHominidaeSelection (genetic algorithm)PaleoanthropologyPrimateQuadrupedalismNatural selectionBiological evolutionEcologyNeurosciencePaleontologyArtificial intelligenceComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin of hominin bipedalism and show how most, if not all, fail in the face of the need for an unusually strong selection pressure. For example, some hypotheses maintain that hominins became bipedal so they could use their hands for carrying infants, food, or other valuable objects. But extant apes are able to carry objects in one of their front limbs (while walking with the other three), and thus it does not seem plausible that our hominin ancestors went through the troublesome transition to bipedalism just so they could carry objects a little more efficiently. After I show that past hypotheses are wanting in the face of this challenge, I argue that there is only one selection pressure powerful enough to instigate a strange and problematic evolutionary adaptation like bipedalism, and that is sexual selection. Specifically, from the fact that bipedal locomotion is an important strategy for intimidating others and ascending the dominance hierarchy in extant apes, I argue that for no particular selective reason bipedal locomotion became a signal for high fitness (much as a large and intricate tail became a signal for high fitness for peahens), and this led to the trait being continuously reinforced in spite of all its deleterious fitness consequences.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.028
Threshold uncertainty score0.399

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.318
Teacher spread0.301 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it