From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Holden Numbering
Date: 23 Aug 92 14:51:31 GMT
Organization: HTE

In article <BtC0np.6u0@world.std.com>, twalters@world.std.com (Tim Walters) writes:
> In article <2868@fedfil.UUCP> news@fedfil.UUCP (news) writes:
> >In article <Bt8816.HLs@world.std.com>, twalters@world.std.com (Tim Walters) writes:
> >> Ted, let's imagine that another of your bursts of radiation bathes the
> >> Earth and a bunch of new mutants are created.
 
> >> Is it possible that one of these mutants could get more weight off the
> >> ground than Kaz?

> >In my opinion, no.  By all published accounts, muscle tissue is nearly 
> >identical from any vertibrate to any other, so that mouse, human, and
> >elephant muscle tissue is hard to tell apart under the microscope.  I
> >don't easily see what any further mutation could add to that picture.
 
> Well, I wasn't thinking about muscle tissue, but that's a very
> interesting idea. Unless you've looked at sauropod muscle tissue under
> the microscope, how can you say that it wasn't different and stronger?

You'd have to propose a new chemical basis for muscle tissue and then
explain how all modern creatures got here without being in any way
descended from sauropods or any creatures in the sauropods' ancestral
history...  there'd be no way for modern creatures to be descended
from ancient, the entire chemical basis of life being different for the
two.  

You'd have to become a creationist.


> But I was thinking of simpler changes. Some kind of Incredible Hulk
> with really gigantic legs, twice as big as Kaz. With completely
> different knee joints with better leverage. A real mutant. Why
> couldn't he break Kaz's record?

As I've noted, leverage and every measure of efficiency invariably mitigate
against the larger creatures.

This gets back to the case which Throop first makes and then claims never
to have made.  If the world were such, then Kaz would be capable of an iron
cross on the rings.  He isn't.

If the world were such, then the scaled lifts for Kaz would be slightly higher
than those of the 220 lb athletes.  They're slightly lower.

And then there's another factor which Throop, Friesen et. al. leave out of
their calculations entirely.

Kaz lives on the very top of the food chain;  sauropods lived on the very 
bottom.

If you look at a picture of Kaz, you'll see that about half of the man's 
weight is leg and back muscles, muscles most directly involved with squats,
dead lifts, i.e. with your total-body lifts.  Kaz never had the so-called
"lifter's belly" or any of the extra weight you see on Alexeev and some of
your other top super-heavyweight lifters.

The sauropod is a different story.  Most of his weight had to be involved
in the distillation of nourishment from leaves and other low-content fibre,
i.e. most of the weight is belly and alimentary system.

I can't give an exact percentage, but from pictures it appears as if no more
than a small fraction of a sauropod's weight could be legs.

Ask Dr. Throop what that does to his calculations.

Again, I would tend to view the ratio of lift for Kaz as an <extreme> upper
limit for creatures his size or larger.  The near equality of the number
for the largest known elephant just standing with this max ratio for Kaz
tends to bear me out.  Logic says that our largest creatures would tend
to grow to some point near the absolute limit, but no more, and that is
what we observe.  Nothing grows past that point any more or has within
recorded history.



-- 
Ted Holden
HTE

Newsgroups: talk.origins,soc.culture.african.american,alt.rap