Muscle form and function in the Understanding of Man

The Form and Function of a Muscle in the Understanding of Man:

Each animal species has a unique shape or form to its body so that it can act or move within a niche in its supporting environment. Mammals have adapted a vast array of differing muscular forms to take advantage of niches in their supporting environments. The form and function of bats, elephants and whales are an example of this ability to vary the mammalian body form and function. Their muscles and tissue make up the exterior form of these three mammals. Their bones modify to hold these muscles and tissues in place. The total muscle form of each of these mammals is specifically designed to live or function in either a combination of environments such as water, land or air, or in the case of the whale, a specific environment, water only.

Three Life Forces on Muscles

We understand that life comes from life. No matter what name man gives to a life form, it did not come into its present state from isolation. It carries information for its survival and body form in its genes.

Morgan’s Muscle theory theory begins with the hypothesis that three major environmental forces form the muscular form of mammals. The first environmental force on the mammal’s form is its supporting environment: air, water or land.

The second environmental force on the mammalian form is the food source or niche from which each animal will receive its life-giving energy. These food niches are made up of energy sources existing in the water, air or on or under the land.

If the food in the energy niche lives under the land, such as ants do, then any mammal that needs to eat from that food niche will find that its body comes under natural forces that will re-form its muscles and tissue into a new form. As it will take many ants to feed a mammal, this force will continue to adapt the mammal’s form to the eating of ants until it reaches a point where this form is in balance with its peak energy form. There it will stop evolving its muscle form. An ant-eating mammal reaches its peak muscle form when the energy that it uses to exist and produce offspring is less than the energy that it burns from finding and eating ants. When that energy balance is reached, scientists call that mammalian muscle form a Myrmecophaga tridactyla, or giant anteater.

If the food source for a mammal will be a woolly mammoth, then the muscles and tissues of that mammal will adapt for the hunting and eating of mammoths. Scientists have called that body form that eats woolly mammoths a saber-toothed cat. Again, what they are naming is not an animal but a muscle form that a mammal has adopted so that it can eat a specific food. If a food niche is no longer available, the body form of a mammal will change to eat from a new source of energy. That mammal’s body form may no longer be called an anteater or saber-toothed cat, for that species may have to change its muscular form so drastically that it is not recognized in that form. Its new muscular form will change it into a totally different muscle form so it can eat from a new energy source. If it does not change, it will become extinct as most muscle forms do.

We see the form of mammals changed by this force in fossil records. The ancestors of the great whales once walked the land as another muscle form of a mammal that scientists call a Mesonychid. The Mesonychid looked like a house cat with a long face. They changed their form over time to seek the food niche of the sea. If today a whale form tries to come back to land and is beached, it will die. Its muscle form can no longer support it as the land mammal it used to be.

The third major force on an animal’s muscular form and the functions of their muscles is the animal’s position in the food chain. The reality of “Eat and be eaten” is part of most mammals’ daily experience. Animals that prey on the mammal force that mammal to adapt to an evasive or other defensive form in order to survive. The horns of the Cape buffalo, the spray of the skunk or the razor sharp teeth of the hippopotamus all defend their muscle forms from being eaten.

Zebras, rabbits and horses evade predators by fleeing. The next time you see a horse, look at each part of the horse. Each part contributes to the survival of the horse as an individual and as a species. When you are looking at a horse, you are seeing a mammal that was formed by where it lives and what it eats and by what preys on its muscle form. Because the horse is hunted, there is no other reason for the horse’s body shape or its size, speed, strength and on-edge senses than to protect it from being eaten. What you see when you look at a horse is an muscle form that, for the most part, was created solely to evade and flee a big cat.

When an animal is eaten by a predator, it is not because it is an individual and is being singled out on the menu of life. It is because it is a member of a species that is the energy niche or life source for another species. If the predator becomes faster than the prey, then the prey must adapt either to become faster or find another way to counter the speed of the predator. Mammals, including man, must adapt and have adapted their forms to protect themselves as a species from predators. To adapt, the species may get faster, grow larger, climb higher, and add camouflage or produce more offspring than can be taken by the predator so that they can survive as a species. They can also adapt their defensive strategies as to how they are perceived by the predators.

It could be said that all herd animals are not individuals, but are cells in the body of a larger form. A herd of zebras use stripes to lessen their chances of being killed. Stripes do not help a lone zebra survive. Stripes only work as a strategy when many zebras are running together. They confuse the predator as she tries to keep her eye on one particular animal, only to see a moving wall of black-and-white stripes. We can safely state that without the lion, the zebra would not have stripes, and because the zebra needs the big cats to see its stripes and the big cats see only in black and white, the zebra’s stripes are black and white. Furthermore, without the big cats, there would be no zebra, as we know them in that muscle form.

Predators also are forced to adapt. When large prehistoric mammal’s populations declined, so did the numbers of saber-toothed cats. The saber-toothed cat had formed muscles specifically designed to hunt only these large mammals, like the giant bison and mammoth. During this decline of the large mammals, the many subspecies of this big cat could not adapt their muscle form or their function fast enough to hunt other prey. They could not compete with other meat-eaters who were already well adapted for killing food in their own niche. The saber-toothed cats died off because they lacked the adaptability to change their form rapidly and to find a food source that was unclaimed by other predators.

The Kill

Many animals that are carnivores have the ability to sense weak or hurt prey from long distances. The mako shark can sense a distressed animal miles away through its ability to perceive the electrical impulses of its prey’s muscle contractions. It could be that the reason behind unpredictable shark attacks on humans is linked to the muscle conditions of those people who are attacked.

It is thought that some extinct big cats had and that the African lion of today has the ability to receive and read energy waves sent out from the herd animals she hunts that tells her the physical health and condition of those animals. Using this sense on the darkest of nights, the big cat can locate a few animals in a herd of hundreds that are suffering sore, torn, tired or weakened muscles from an astounding 100 feet away.

These muscle-sensing big cats hunt mostly at night. Night hunting is dangerous for the big cat. While these big cats have excellent night vision, their night vision is limited. They cannot see the strength or read the body language of their prey at night. An unseen kick from an aggressive bull or protective mother can break a tooth or a jaw or crack a cat’s skull. Any injury can lead to the big cat’s death. When hunting, lions use this special muscle sensing to select the weakest, most easily killed animals from among the stronger and life-threatening animals in the herd. In the pitch-blackness of the night, this ability to sense weakness protects her from the risk of injury and death before she makes her attack. She can sense the weakness in men, too

We can see that most animals have an obvious defense against predators. It may be running, flying, chemical spray or it may be fangs, claws, hoof or horn. Less obvious to the eye is the defenses that predators use against their prey. Even the great white shark, the killing machines of the seas, closes its eyes just before it bites. Then it runs off and lets the prey bleed and weaken before returning to eat. It knows the risk it takes by attacking its food source. Reading weaken muscle signals is the lion’s defense against its prey’s defense, because there is no safe, large prey that can be taken without risk to the lion, in fact, it is known that cape buffalo bulls will stalk and hunt for lions at night, hoping to kill them with their horns and hooves.

Humans have no obvious defensive strategy against the lion. Even though we think we can run fast (5 miles and hour), a two-ton elephant (25 miles an hour) can outrun any man. Humans do not use fangs or claws to defend themselves. It would appear that humans could not survive the attack of any large animal that sought to kill us, yet we do survive. That is because we have two hidden defenses, one is our upper brain and the other is deep within our lower brain. While other animals also use the instincts of the lower brain to survive, our prehistoric ancestors used the upper brain to learn to hunt by watching animals that hunt and learned to fish from animals that fish, and learned to survive by watching other animals survive. We have no obvious defense against the lion because we learned one defense and evolved the other deep within the lower brain.

Today, we humans seldom think about the influences of our primal lower brain. We live and think as if we only have an upper, well-educated, rational brain and that it alone is responsible for our great success. We perceive ourselves only in terms of the modern self made man. Therefore, most people believe that ancient history ended the day before their grandparents were born. There is little thought given, as each of us looks into the mirror, that what stands naked before us is a human life form that was adapted by what he ate and what ate him.

To understand man, we need to realize that we live in a life form adapted to survive in the prehistoric environment of 75,000 years ago. Our body and mind has not changed since that time. Even though both the upper brain and the body that we live in today stopped evolving and peaked in its form and function long ago, not a thought of this fact passes through the average person’s mind. Most of us view every event in life based on how it affects our modern lifestyle and not what effect each of life’s changing events has on our 75,000-year-old brain and its muscles. For down deep in our lower brain is the seed of man’s destruction. That seed in the past protected us from the lion but now it puts us at great risk. What is it?

Understanding Man

Each species has a survival niche that it prospers in. This blog is about man’s niche. It is about how he got where he is and how he stays there.  It is raw nature and brutal in its life forces.  No matter how sweet a baby is, man is an animal and acts like one.  Here is his story for all that wish to understand, Man.

Man is not a plant, he is mobile and moves through his environment by the use of muscles that are controlled by a three part  brain.  This is basic, so this is where we will start  in our path to  understanding man.

Morgan’s Muscle theory explains  the ability of  the brain to structure a friendly or unfriendly relationship with the muscles of the body and if need be, renew a broken partnership between it and the structural muscles of the human body at will.  It is my belief that the three part brain, with its supporting inputs and organs, perceives and works within the human body’s muscle system through a  survival of the species based hierarchy. This  is a muscle hierarchy list, defined in Morgan’s Muscle theory,  as a muscle priority system, where one muscle is more or less favored or developed than other muscles.

For a tribe of humans to prosper there is a need for diversity in individuals, such as height, weight and face shape and a diversity in an individuals muscles within the survival group or tribe.  Different body types being necessary for the survival of the whole.  And a diversified muscle hierarchy for individuals to individually prosper or succumb.

This hierarchy of the muscles is easily observed during the transformation of babies into toddlers. As a baby grows, we can see where his muscles develop in a systemic maturation pattern, permitting the baby to first stand, then to walk. In normal human development, the brain and the chemistry of the body assigns muscles to take on different physical forms throughout a person’s lifetime. This steady muscle transformation can be witnessed as the child matures in both the female and male bodies. As the body grows and matures, different muscles in each sex are developed for a required function and may be limited in their strength, endurance and motion, while other muscles in the maturing body are allowed to be well formed and become stronger or more flexible.

Muscle hierarchy is evident in maturing adults that, over a lifetime, the muscle hierarchy of an individual entitles certain chosen muscles in her body to prosper and sentences others to decline and become painful, or worse, to be abandoned by the body. The brain stops using these abandoned muscles. This total abandonment by the brain can be observed in some elderly people whose low priority listed muscles cause their shoulders to slump and their feet to shuffle as they walk.

Over time, most people experience muscles that are limited in their duties and motion. To date, science has not discovered the overall reasons for the body’s muscle hierarchy and why some muscles are limited or abandoned by the brain. They do find evidence of a human organ hierarchy. In the human body, there is an organ that has been abandoned; that organ is the appendix. There is no known use for the appendix and many researchers believe the human appendix will, over time, not exist in the bodies of future humans. There are some that theorize that the entire bone and muscles of the fifth toe (little toe) on the human foot will be absorbed into the fourth toe in later generations of humans. There are signs of muscle abandonment in humans. The palmaris longus muscle in the arm is missing in 11% of humans. The psoas minor muscle that is used by four legged-animals, like cats and dogs, can only be found in 40% of humans. Why this is, is not known. It may be that muscle and organ abandonment is essential to the final, and yet unknown, evolving form of human beings.

While many researchers believe that micro-evolution is the reason behind muscle and organ abandonment, there is disagreement as to the cause of muscle decline in an individual over his or her lifetime. I believe it is not a future evolutionary plan for the human body but day-to-day survival that is behind muscle abandonment. I believe that our body’s muscle decline and the pain that accompanies it are part of the human survival strategy. In Morgan’s Muscle theory, we interpret the health of a muscle according to its position on the brain’s Muscle Hierarchy List. This list determines what muscles will be strengthened or decline in each individual for the benefit of the tribe/species.

I believe that in normal healthy human development, beginning as an infant and progressing to maturity, the brain assigns muscles to take on different and needed physical forms. In this process, healthy muscles are strengthened or normalized in an ongoing maturation process following the brain’s perceived survival needs. Every muscle is inventoried by the brain so that a individual human may survive. Muscles are assigned an importance by the brain based on this need. An internal “muscle hierarchy list” ranks each muscle of the body. This leads me to believe that when a muscle is not healthy, long after an injury to it has healed, or if pain comes on suddenly with no found cause, that muscle may have lost its position on the hierarchical list by mistake or purposely.

Modern science does not know the history of the appendix, nor does it know the history of the toes, as there are no fossil records showing a missing link. Nevertheless, what we can assume is that the brain knows why it chooses certain organs and certain muscles to perform a function and why it chooses to abandon those muscles and organs at a later time.  For this reason, I will present my theory on muscle hierarchy and why some muscles lose their position on the brain’s list.