Evolution of laughter. Is this a joke?
Opinion
Evolution of laughter? Ha ha ha
Is this an evolutionary joke?
By Peter Parvell : June 8, 2009
Two men walk into a coffee shop and one says to the
waiter, “I'll have a flat white coffee with raw
sugar.”
His friend says, “I'll have a flat white with raw sugar too. And make sure it's served in a clean cup.”
When the waiter returns with the two coffees, he says to the men, “Which one of you wanted the clean cup?”
Most people will see some humor in this joke, but different people laugh at different things. Some don't understand or care about jokes, but they may laugh like crazy if someone tickles their ribs or feet.
And this brings up an interesting study that the news media reported this week.
Researchers tickled 22 young apes and 3 young humans and found that apes and humans had “some” characteristcs in common. Somehow this odd research led the researchers to conclude that laughter originated with a “common ancestor” of apes and humans about 10 to 16 million years ago.
Now you don't have to be a genius to realize this is a serious leap in logic. Tickle some apes and tickle some humans. They all laugh. Great. So this means laughter originated 10 million years ago in an alleged common ancestor of apes and humans? Sorry, I'm obviously walking down a different road.
As someone who finds the whole evolutionary concept unconvincing that you and I and the young Pongo pygmaeus in the photo above have evolved from the same unknown and unfound animal that was neither human nor ape, perhaps I'm looking for too much evidence in this laughter theory.
But it seems to me that finding a few common reactions in tickled apes and tickled humans is no more evidence that laughter originated 10 million years ago in a “common ancestor” than is suggesting that slow people and slow clocks evolved from a common ancestor of people and clocks 10 million years ago (assuming that the clock was able to keep time for that long).
I don't expect a stream of criticism of this theory will come from evolutionists who, like me, will see more holes in this idea than in a room full of sieves. They did see the problems and speak out against the darwinius fossil, but this strange laughter theory will probably muster no more than a quiet grin.
Do you know the funniest part of this theory (that laughter evolved from the “common ancestor” of humans and apes)? It's this: Evolutionists don't even know what that common ancestor was. They've never found it! And I believe they never will because it never existed.
Now, did you hear the one about the two common ancestors that walk into a restaurant and order organic soup in a clean bowl …
See also: Which ape evolved into which human?
Refs: LiveScience and BBC news.
Orangutan photo by Malene Thyssen. This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the photo under the condition that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one. Official license.
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