3/9/2006: Quadruped humans (and international science)

[david]

Personally, I find this story fascinating. I am a dance instructor at a prestigious American university. Because I am also a rock climber, I became interested in how moving with all four "legs" might be helpful to our general strength and coordination. Initial results suggest that for normal, non-mentally handicapped individuals, spending time quadrupedally seems to really improve overall movement ability because it requires that all the limbs work in a mutually coordinated, sequential pattern, connected by the torsos core musculature. Also, we know that in early childhood development, crawling is crucial to development of higher intellect. It is not clear to me that what is good for the child ceases to be beneficial for adults (and by my estimations, most adults are not all that well coordinated). In other words, perhaps we could all benefit from choosing to move this way now and then, whether on the ground, on rocks, or just a good old fashioned tree climb!

I think it is interesting that people are focussing on the retardation as somehow being related, and maybe it is in this case. But the unfortunate thing about that is that people will think that it is regressive or retarded to even think about moving as a four-legged being.

In this threaded discussion, I find it most fascinating that people just seem to want or need to ridicule these folks on a number of fronts. As a dance instructor, I am used to people being easily provoked by unusual movement. It seems to not take much deviation from a pretty narrow, standard movement range to make people uncomfortable, even angry. (if you don't believe me, try it sometime in public--experiment with the line between normal and abnormal and see what kind of response you get!)
It is like an instinctive repulsion response to need to vilify someone who moves unusually. Could be left over animal responses--in a heard scenario, most blend in not wanting to draw special attention, like a kind of anonymity camaflouge. If one animal in the heard is wounded, it will have different movement patterns that will single it out visually to a predator as the most likely target. Maybe we have this built in instinct to distance ourselves from the odd one as a self-protective measure.
Also, in most of the discussion, It doesn't seem to occur to anyone that for the rest of us, who do have the gene for bipedalism, and aren't also mentally retarded, that the choice to move either bipedally or quadrupedally is even better than bipedalism alone. Not to mention that it might be good for our upright postural coordination to spend some time on all four.