Horses and Humans, Chimps and Muscles

Thomas Eakins' 'A May Morning in the Park' or 'The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand.' (1879-1880) Gallery 118, Philadelphia Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.
“A May Morning in the Park” or “The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand” by Thomas Eakins (1879-1880)

I’d been planning on writing about chimps, strength, muscles, and assumptions this week.

Then, a few hours later, I noticed that I’d been talking about horses, digestion, etymology, cephalic index and other assumptions. Which, for me, is about par for the course.

Eventually, I got back to what we’ve been learning about chimps and muscles.


Horses Aren’t Human

Currier and Ives' 'Washington's entry into New York: on the evacuation of the city by the British, Nov. 25th. 1783.' (ca. 1857))Humans and horses have lived and worked together for millennia. We have quite a bit in common, but we’re not quite the same.

Horses eat grass and other plant materials. So do we, sort of.

Although we have fairly specific nutrition needs, we can get by on either an all-plant or all-animal diet. And we can eat grass.

But it won’t do us much good. We can’t digest cellulose.

Horses can, since they’re hindgut fermenters. Their extra-long intestines — by human standards — are home to symbiotic mini-critters that turn cellulose into usable nutrients.

Oddly enough, scientists don’t classify us as hindgut fermenters — even though we also have symbiotic gut microbiota doing intestinal fermentation. Maybe because our mini-critters don’t help us digest cellulose.

A fair fraction of resources acknowledge that we’re omnivores, animals that can eat either plant or animal matter.

But I’ve yet to see humans listed as opportunistic omnivores, along with bears, raccoons and rats.

Not in scholarly writing, at any rate. I do rarely run into an author identifying humans as opportunistic omnivores in non-mainstream articles. Very rarely, and only once in the last decade or so.1

“…The heavily forested areas to which our ancestors were adapted gave way to an increasingly open landscape, and it was then—about 2.6 million years ago—that we began a brilliant career as the toolwielding opportunistic omnivore. We grew a huge hungry brain and a shorter gut designed for quickly digesting rich fatty foods.
“We don’t know exactly how much meat our hominid ancestors were getting their hands on….”
(“A Plea for Human Food,” Charles Comey, The Point Magazine (December 14, 2012))


Scientists, Science, and Assumptions: Old and New

Illustration from the H. Strickland Constable's 'Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View.' (1899) From H. Strickland Constable, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.
(From H. S. Constable’s “Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View” (1899))

I’m not sure why seeing humans as omnivores seems like an embarrassing topic. Or why identifying ourselves as opportunistic omnivores is almost entirely off the radar.

Maybe it’s due to a contemporary fastidiousness regarding eating meat.

Or at least a strong disinclination to offend the folks with “MEAT IS MURDER” posters in their cubicles.

That’s not the oddest notion that’s been taken seriously.

Before moving along, I’d better clarify something.

Detail, Joseph F. Keppler's 'Uncle Sam's lodging-house:' an anti-Irish cartoon. Puck centerfold. (June 7, 1882)My ancestors, as far back as our records go, came from northwestern Europe. But I am very much not “Anglo-Teutonic.”

As one of my ancestors said about a thoroughly unsuitable young man who’d been sniffing around a decent American family’s daughter, “he doesn’t have family. He’s Irish.”

The kids got married anyway, and a couple generations later I happened.

Anyway, back to odd and occasionally regrettable notions that were taken seriously.

Phrenology and the Superiority of ‘Folks Like Me’

Cover of 'American Phrenological Journal' (March 1848, volume 10, number 3) published by Fowlers and Wells, New YorkTake serious thinkers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, for example.

Folks like Johann Gaspar Spurzheim and Franz Joseph Gall developed methods for evaluating a person’s character by studying his or her skull.

Phrenology was seen as a significant subject for natural philosophers in my non-Irish ancestral homelands back then.

Possibly because phrenologists said that northwestern Europeans were highly superior persons. It was “scientific,” since the width-to-length ratio can be measured.

Northwestern Europeans often had long, narrow skulls.

And since ‘everybody knew’ that northwestern Europeans were better than anyone else, it was obvious that long, narrow skulls indicate superiority.

Well, actually, it was long-headed northwestern European men who were superior.

Age of Enlightenment phrenologists granted that a few women were as smart as a man.

But most women weren’t, they said, since their skulls were — according to at them — the wrong shape. I am not making that up.

The phrenology house of cards was coming down by the mid-19th century. Largely, I gather, because too many scientists had started looking at the data. And phrenology’s underlying assumptions.2

Scientific Scientists: An Etymological Excursion

ArchonMagnus' 'The Scientific Method as an Ongoing Process' diagram of the scientific method, an adaptation of a diagram by Whatiguana. (2015) From Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.
Scientific method: an ongoing process.

Hubble Space Telescope's image of in the Carina Nebula region. From NASA, ESA, Z. Levay (STScI); via Wikimedia Commons; used w/o permission. (2007)The word “scientific” was first used in English around the 1580s. Who used it and where, that I don’t know.

Something was “scientific” if it involved getting accurate and systematic knowledge, using observation and deduction.

The English word “scientific” came from from Latin scientia, knowledge; by way of Medieval Latin scientificus “pertaining to science” and French scientifique.

William Whewell called natural philosophers who do scientific studies “scientists” in 1833.

The first time “scientists” appeared in print was in 1834. That’s when the Quarterly Review printed Whewell’s anonymous review of of Mary Somerville’s “On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences.”

With 20-20 hindsight, we see origins of the scientific method going back to folks like Moze and Thales of Miletus. Which also happens to be about as far back as our records go.

The observe → think → test → re-think process we call scientific method had been used by Al-Biruni, Ibn al-Haytham, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon.

Dominican doctor taking a pulse. From LJS 24, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, Penn Libraries. (1225-1275)And by more-or-less anonymous medieval monks who had access to ancient texts, and were running local and regional hospitals.

The monks had been comparing old assumptions with clinical data, removing useless information, and adding results from their own practical experience and experiments. They’d even reorganize the ancient texts, adding tables of contents.

Then Renaissance philosophers “re-discovered” Aristotle and other ancient authorities, assumed they were “the men who know,” and I’ve talked about that before.3

Now, back to selections from scientific method’s blooper reel.

Cephalic Index: Numbers, Notions and Aryan Angst

Popular Science Monthly's 1896 cephalic index map. (1896) Interesting, maybe not all that generally useful. From Popular Science Monthly, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.Physiognomy, studying relationships between a person’s face and personality, looked like a reasonable idea.

Until it didn’t.

Meanwhile, cephalic index was catching on in some circles. Cephalic index is the ratio between a skull’s width and length. It wasn’t called phrenology, so folks with narrow skulls could say that their comparatively low cephalic index proved their superiority.

For a while it looked like cephalic index and ethnicity were closely linked. Then scientists compared the cephalic index of immigrants and their children.

Unknown photographer: measuring the head of a non-Aryan. Racial Biological Research Center of the Reich Health Office, Germany (April 1938) from German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.Turns out, cephalic index changes from one generation to another. When a family has moved from one part of the world to another, at any rate.

That didn’t help keep cephalic index in physical anthropology’s best-practices lists.

Neither did Nazi Germany’s at-best-dubious uses of cephalic index and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s take on German Idealism.4

Small wonder anthropologists got a trifle skittish over ethnic distinctions.

Which may explain why one of my anthropology professors said that there was no such thing as “race.”

Assumptions, Attitudes and an Opportunistic Omnivore

Unknown artist's 'The Lion of the Season' cartoon published in Punch issue 1036 (Th 'Alarmed flunky': 'MR. G G-G-O-O-O-RILLA!' (May 18, 1861)As he discussed it, the idea made sense. Almost.

The darkest-haired European, for example, has hair that is at least as dark as the lightest-haired African.

The same is true for other characteristics, like straight or curly hair; light or dark eyes.

And even, if you’re (very) careful about your selections, skin tone.

I’m pretty sure he meant that Homo sapiens is a single species. Not two or more: like, say Simia troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla and Gorilla beringei beringei.

If that’s what he meant, I agree.

But I wish he’d picked an argument that didn’t sound quite so silly. Maybe he figured his students didn’t know about distribution curves.5

In any case, that happened in the early 1970s, when silliness was in season.

So what, if anything, does this have to do with today’s apparent diffidence regarding the “opportunistic omnivore” label?

With my background — I’m back to labeling humans now — I suspected that the apparent reluctance to identify humans as opportunistic omnivores was rooted in contemporary notions of “tolerance.”

Then again, maybe not.

As one of my daughters pointed out last Tuesday: “Maybe it’s off the radar because it puts us in the same camp as raccoons and rats.”

She may very well be right. However —

More Assumptions and Attitudes

Graham, Joseph, Newman, William, Stacy/U.S. Geological Survey's 'The geologic time spiral—A path to the past (ver. 1.1)' (2008)I don’t have a problem with being associated with raccoons and rats.

As I see it, we have similar dietary preferences; so our pantries and garbage dumps look like smorgasbords to them.

That makes raccoons and rats particularly pernicious vermin.

Rats, because they’re small, smart, and very good at rapid population growth.

Raccoons, because they’re smart and — something they managed to conceal from us until recently — social. Although that’s probably giving them too much credit for brains.

On the other hand, about a century back one researcher learned that raccoons could open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries. And weren’t fazed when faced with a previously-opened lock that’d been reoriented.

“Complex” is a comparative term. These locks involved a button, a vertical gate hook, a bolt, a T-latch, a lift-latch, a plug, a horizontal hook, a bear-down lever and a push-bar.6

I figure that a competent human locksmith would out-perform the raccoons.

But I’m not sure about randomly-selected humans, particularly if they weren’t told what the test was about.

That said, I don’t think rats and raccoons are people.

Using Our Brains, Seeking (and Accepting) Truth

'Man is but a Worm' cartoon, caricaturing Darwin's theory, from the Punch almanac for 1882. (1981)But I do think that humans are animals, rational animals.

Optionally rational, at any rate. We have free will, so using our brains is a choice, not a hardwired response. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1730, 1778, 1804, 1951, 2339)

That shouldn’t be a surprise.

Neither should learning that we’re part of the visible creation. We’ve known for millennia that God made us from the stuff of this world.

“then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
(Genesis 2:7)

All that’s changed during the last few generations is how much we know about the “dust of the ground” we’re made from.

As for science and religion, faith and reason: I’m a Catholic, so I think faith and reason get along fine. (Catechism, 159)

When we’re being honest, at any rate.

But, again, each of us has free will.

I could give either “scientific” or “faith-based” arguments for a made-up reality that matches my whims. Allegedly “scientific,” that is. But no matter how much twisted reason or warped faith I used, my ersatz reality wouldn’t be true.

And truth matters, both in science and in faith. (Catechism, 31, 159)

“…if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God. … we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed.…”
(“Gaudium et Spes,” Pope St. Paul VI (December 7, 1965) [emphasis mine])

“…God, the Creator and Ruler of all things, is also the Author of the Scriptures — and that therefore nothing can be proved either by physical science or archaeology which can really contradict the Scriptures. … Even if the difficulty is after all not cleared up and the discrepancy seems to remain, the contest must not be abandoned; truth cannot contradict truth….”
(“Providentissimus Deus,” Pope Leo XIII (November 18, 1893) [emphasis mine])

“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air…. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look; we’re beautiful.’…
“…So in this way they arrived at a knowledge of the god who made things, through the things which he made.”
(Sermon 241, St. Augustine of Hippo (ca. 411))

Now, about “faith.”

Making Sense and Other Options

Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur: The Church of Danae vs. logic and the laws of physics. (August 24, 2016) used w/o permission.Again, I’m a Catholic, so my faith is a willing and conscious decision to embrace God’s truth. All of God’s truth, including what we can see in this universe. Studying God’s work is a good idea, since I think God creates everything. (Genesis 1:131; Catechism, 142-155, 325)

So — should I reject science because Age of Enlightenment gentlemen made unwarranted assumptions, or 20th-century philosophers and leaders distorted facts to suit their preferences?

No. I can both recognize science as a systematic search for truth, and realize that scientists are human beings: who occasionally make really daft decisions.

Now, what about religion? Should I reject religion because some loudly-religious folks don’t like what we’re learning about this wonder-packed universe?

Also no. I’m a Christian and a Catholic, so like I said: truth matters.

Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: ‘On to God!’
(“Religion and Natural Science,” Translated and published in “Max Planck: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers” (1968); via Wikiquote [emphasis mine])

And now, finally, simian strength and scientific fact-checking.


Chimpanzee Sort-of-Super Strength: It’s the Muscles

AFP's photo: three chimps. (June 26, 2017) from AFP via BBC News, used w/o permission
Looks like chimps are stronger than us: but not by all that much.

You’ll notice that the BBC News article is from 2017. Stuff that seemed more urgent or important at the time kept it on my to-do list until this week.

There’s nothing really new to report: but I figured now was as good a time as any to look at Chimpanzee “super strength.” Which isn’t all that super, after all.

Chimps’ strength secrets explained
Paul Rincon, BBC News (June 26, 2017)

“The greater strength of chimpanzees, relative to humans, may have been explained by American scientists.

“A study suggests the difference is mostly due to a higher proportion in chimps of a muscle fibre type involved in powerful, rapid movements.

“The findings do not support previous work suggesting mechanical aspects of chimp muscles are responsible.

“But the difference in chimp-human muscle performance is more modest than sometimes depicted in popular culture.

“In the 1920s, anecdotal evidence along with investigations by the biologist John Bauman, helped feed a perception that chimps were between four and eight times stronger than an adult human….”

By the time the perception of chimpanzee strength got to me, it had them being 10 times as strong as we are. I suspect something like the telephone game is in play here, or the way fishermen’s tales grow in the telling.

Chimps aren’t human, but they’re not all that different, either. They can even stand up, which makes height and weight comparisons easier.

An average chimp stands about 150 centimeters, four feet 11 inches, tall. Adult males weigh 40 to 70 kilograms, 88 to 154 pounds. Female adult chimps weigh between 27 and 50 kilograms, 60 and 110 pounds.

On average, an adult human male is 171 centimeters tall while an adult female human is around 159 centimeters, five feet three inches. The average human male weighs 77 kilograms, 170 pounds; female weight averages 59 kilograms, 130 pounds.

Basically, we’re a tad taller and heavier, with shorter arms and longer legs.

We’ve got about as much hair as chimps, but most of ours is so short and wispy that it’s almost invisible.

Those numbers are averages. I’m almost exactly as tall as your average male human. I was, at any rate. I’ve shrunk a few inches, thanks to age and replacement hip joints. But I didn’t feel “average,” because I grew up among Scandinavian- and German-Americans.

My Norwegian ancestors were comparatively short, black-haired folks, not those blond giants, and that’s another topic.

Or maybe not so much. The obvious, to us, differences between Scandinavians and Japanese, Ethiopians and Irish, are reflected in measurable genetic differences.

But as a species, humans have remarkable uniform genetics.7

I suspect that’s because we travel, a lot; and that many of us are as concerned about genetic purity as some of my ancestors.

And, probably, as disturbed by their in-laws as others.

Reviewing the Evidence

Matthew C. O'Neill et al. - Fig. 3. Muscle model simulations. Single-burst maximal accelerations of an inertial load (first column) and controlled cyclical contractions (second and third columns) were simulated with our chimpanzee muscle and human muscle models. The design of each simulation apparatus is shown at the column top in schematic form with a muscle model affixed in situ. Dashed line is optimal fiber length (Lo). The chimpanzee muscle model generated higher maximum dynamic force and power outputs than the human muscle model under matched simulation conditions.Let’s see, where was I?

Horses aren’t human. Neither are chimps.

Faith isn’t reason, and science isn’t religion: or shouldn’t be. But faith and reason get along fine, and both science and religion search for truth.

That’s how it should be, at any rate.

Right. Another point about chimps not being human.

Although chimps and humans are about the same size and shape, we’ve got these whacking great brains.

That brings me back to comparing chimp and human strength.

Matthew C. O’Neill and other researchers found that chimps can jump and pull roughly one and a half times as forcefully as we can.

And that two earlier explanations for chimp “super strength” weren’t backed by evidence.

One explanation had been that chimps have, mechanically, more efficient bone-and-muscle arrangements. That, Matthew C. O’Neill et al. said, could be, but they hadn’t been able to prove or disprove it. I’m boiling down what they said a lot.

Another idea was that chimps are wired for using all their strength in one shot, while humans aren’t. That makes sense to me, since we’ve got a whole lot more neurological wiring and it might include limiters. But —

“…It has also been hypothesized that humans have greater cortical and/or spinal inhibition of maximal muscle recruitment than chimpanzees, thereby limiting their muscular performance capabilities in comparison. If true, this would further increase the chimpanzee—human differential; however, we are unaware of any data that directly support this ‘inhibition hypothesis.’ Instead, experimental studies indicate that humans are capable of complete (or near complete) voluntary activation of their musculature when assigned a maximal performance task. Thus, the expectation that both species are capable of optimizing their neuromuscular control strategies in response to the mechanical demands of a given task appears to be more consistent with available data….”
(“Chimpanzee super strength and human skeletal muscle evolution,” Matthew C. O’Neill et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (July 2017)

You can see why I summarize, paraphrase and generally boil down what I find when I’m researching these things.

I’d be doing that this week, but dove down a few too many rabbit holes. The good news is that I’ve got enough material for at least one more Desultory Digression about humans, hiking, horses and why chimps would make poor baseball pitchers.

Twitchy Chimps

Robert Kretschmer's drawing of primates: 1, 2, 5 and 6 female chimpanzees, 3 gibbon, 4 and 7 orangutans. (1927)So how come chimps have sort-of-super strength compared to us? Apparently, it’s because they’re twitchier.

Here’s what I mean by twitchier.

Muscle tissue varies with function.

Skeletal muscles, for example, have a mix of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers.

The fast-twitch fibers let muscles move fast and pull hard. The down side is that fast-twitch fibers run through energy fast.

Slow-twitch fibers follow a ‘slow and steady wins the race’ principle.

Chimps have about 1.3 times the concentration of fast-twitch fibers that we do. So do almost all primates and most mammals, from mice to horses.8

The only other primate with a human-like fast-twitch fiber count is the slow loris.

And Finally, Malu Malu: the Slow Loris

Encyclographia's drawing of a slow loris. Slow lorises are called malu malu (shy one) in Indonesia, because they freeze and cover their faces when spotted.The slow loris is a sluggish, even by human standards, primate living in southeast Asia.

Slow lorises are nocturnal, so they’ve got big eyes: which, together with their round heads and overall fuzziness, makes them almost ridiculously cute.

That’s made them popular pets, which I think is generally a bad idea.

Humans are diurnal, slow lorises are nocturnal: which is okay for humans and cats; since cats are, well, they’re cats.

Slow lorises need a diet of fruit, sap and insects: which isn’t, as far as I know, available in most pet supply outlets. On top of that, they get sick easily: which may help explain why they’ve been classified variously as Vulnerable and Endangered.

But, like I said, slow lorises are cute. And in Indonesia they’re called malu malu, shy one, because when they’re spotted they freeze and cover their faces.9

That’s all I’ve got for this week. Apart from the usual links:


1 Horses, hindgusts and hominids:

2 An era and phrenology:

3 Natural philosophy and science:

4 Ideas and a little background:

5 Primates and pigments:

6 Raccoons and rats:

7 Being human:

8 Muscles, mostly:

9 “Shy ones,” slow lorises:

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About Brian H. Gill

I was born in 1951. I'm a husband, father and grandfather. One of the kids graduated from college in December, 2008, and is helping her husband run businesses and raise my granddaughter; another is a cartoonist and artist; #3 daughter is a writer; my son is developing a digital game with #3 and #1 daughters. I'm also a writer and artist.
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2 Responses to Horses and Humans, Chimps and Muscles

  1. The human-chimpanzee strength difference thing reminds me of power and skill descriptions. As in raw power, sharpened skill, that sort of stuff. Not sure if I’m reading what you discussed here right, though, especially since hard science is not my forte. X”D

    • Good point. Having raw strength is one thing. Knowing how to apply it is another.

      I’d have to look at “Chimpanzee super strength and human skeletal muscle evolution” again – and more carefully – to see how well the researchers took skill into account.

      I think they tested chimp muscle tissue that had been taken from chimps, and stimulated the muscle tissue in a lab. I don’t remember if they did the same with human muscle tissue.

      I’d have responded earlier, but this weekend – I suspect Benedict XVI’s death distracted me.

Thanks for taking time to comment!