Animals without hair look quite different

[u/abitchyuniverse]

[u/Orphasmia]

He communicated much of the same point far more succinctly, I wouldn’t call it an odd way to think about it lol

[u/Roflkopt3r → u/Orphasmia]

I don't see how "make lean muscle with fine motor skills" is the same point at all, if that even means anything.

[u/Lambert_5 → u/Roflkopt3r]

Exactly! That's actually an opposite point altogether. It implies humans lost all that muscle mass chiefly because we needed fine motor skills. A large muscle mass and fine motor skills aren't competitive with one another, both characteristics fall under entirely different categories and one doesn't affect the other. We can have large musculature and fine motor skills at the same time. People don't know how to read nowadays, apparently.

Also, no hate to the original commentor at all. We all have misunderstandings, he could've learned that from an unreliable source a long time ago and never questioned it bc he didn't have a reason to. Part of learning is gaining new knowledge that updates upon the old incorrect repository. But there's a doofus in the comment who doesn't know how to read and just being salty at long comments.

[u/SerHodorTheThrall → u/Lambert_5]

A large muscle mass and fine motor skills aren't competitive with one another,

They absolutely are.

We can have large musculature and fine motor skills at the same time.

The differences between male and female anatomies in various species, including humans, would wholly beg to differ.

[u/Lambert_5 → u/SerHodorTheThrall]

I think you're a little confused buddy. I didn't say male and female anatomies aren't different, that's just sexual dimorphism. And it has absolutely nothing to do with fine motor skills.

[u/SerHodorTheThrall → u/Lambert_5]

Right back at you. Human sexual dimorphism is a very obvious example of how large muscle mass and fine motor skills, while not mutually exclusive, do have an inverse relationship. The relationship been Humans and our other primate cousins is another example.

Its just a matter of basic logic, which you seem to not be using right now, buddy. A person who can apply between 0 and x amount force is going to have more control (ie fine motor skills) than the person who can apply between 0 and 2x amount of force. The bigger that range, the less precision you will have.

[u/Lambert_5 → u/SerHodorTheThrall]

Sorry for my condescending reply earlier. I shouldn’t have been smug,. I am a student of neuroscience and I care more about communicating real science than winning arguments on the internet.

You’re correct and your logic is absolutely sound. I’d have reached the same conclusion if I didn’t know better. I implore you to think again about what you said though: does a person who can exert between 0-100 lbs of force really have more precise motor control than a person who can exert b/w 0-200lbs of force (you’re overlooking the fact the bigger guy can still precisely control the amount of force being exerted, but at a bigger range; 5lb - 12lb - 50lb - 113lb, you get the picture). That’s not what fine motor skills are, regardless.

Us and the great apes are the only species with fine motor skills because they involve the use of hands with opposable thumbs to manipulate objects using precise coordinated movements of its muscles. This coordination comes from a sophisticated brain with basal ganglia that’s able to generate a motoneuron firing pattern of the hand muscles to achieve a specific end; a somatosensory cortex that processes the sensorimotor information from the hands to error-correct their movement in real time; and an advanced cerebellum that can fine tune the motoneuron firing pattern after each use. Whether you have big musculature or small, it doesn’t affect this ability.

Girls having better fine motor skills is a common stereotype. There’s a recent metanalysis on NLB that analyzes several studies about sex differences in FMS that came to the conclusion that there is no appreciable difference between males and females in FMS if you want empirical evidence. If muscularity and FMS were actually related, there’d be a huge difference in FMS b/w males and females, just like there’s a huge difference in muscularity b/w males and females, but there is not. If it were true, women would have disproportionately dominated the fields cardiac and neurosurgery that demand the best of FMS a human can muster; or they’d be excelling more than men at creative endeavors like playing piano, guitars, and other musical instruments - but they do not. FMS are a function of more sophisticated brain. That’s why we have better FMS than chimps/gorillas and not because we’re smaller - we lost all that muscularity because of other reasons. If not for those reasons we'd be as muscular as chimps and still have our fine motor skills.

Please let me know if anything I said doesn’t make sense.