Re: would a gorilla be stronger than a world strongest man of the same weight

Would a gorilla be stronger than a strong man of the same weight?

Comparison questions like this are fun to think about, but they are 
impossible to answer in any absolute sense. There are too many variables 
to consider. Here are a few:

A typical adult male gorilla weighs about 350 lbs (175 kgs). Although some 
people have certainly obtained this weight, they were never the trained 
athletes you would want to have compete against the gorilla. One the other 
hand, if you used a underweight gorilla that is down to the weight of 
human athletes, you would either have a juvenile gorilla or one that was 
quite sickly. Any way you want to put this contest together based upon 
body weight, either the human or the gorilla would not be fair example of 
their species.

Another problem is what do you mean by strong? Most human strength 
activities, such as weight lifting, involve a degree of skill as well as 
strength (that is why they are still considered to be athletic contests). 
It wouldn’t surprise me if a human could bench press more weight than a 
gorilla (if you could even get a gorilla to try it), but that very same 
gorilla would probably be able to tear the arms off that very same human. 

A general principle in biology is that the basic unit of muscle activity 
(the sarcomere) is pretty much the same in all animals. That means that 
the muscle of any animal is just as powerful as the muscle of any other 
animal. What differs between animals is how the sarcomeres are arranged, 
and how many of them are dedicated to a particular action. This is a 
difference of biomechanics. By way of comparison, you could put a 500 
horsepower engine in a race car and in a tractor. The engine in both 
vehicles is equally powerful. However, the tractor uses that power to pull 
heavy objects but not to go fast, while the race car uses that power to go 
fast but it cannot pull much weight. So, the two vehicles are just as 
powerful, even though there is no way to compare their performance. Your 
human and gorilla comparison would produce a similar result. The two 
creatures may be equally powerful, but they are completely unequal in 
their abilities.