Re: "human brains are like peacock tails."

Steve Nordquist (signa@tfs.net)
Tue, 21 Jul 1998 02:21:18 -0500


It occurs to me that the bigger-than-a-gorilla penis thing should be
chalked up immediately to a riverene society's needs; I'm thinking
fish here, not bug zappers and little aluminized showering tents.

The huge noggin and late ascention of cortical material, on the other
hand, would be used to manage the otherwise unreliable activity
of the new hindbrain features (i.e. inhibition) as inspired by the
size of cortex up to then, and minimizing the window of damage
pre-birth. As for after...messing with one's head was necessary?
Also (viz. M/F equality bringing similarity) changes in the sacrum
were necessary to get the baby's head through...any notes on that?

Dr. Ernest N. Prabhakar wrote:

> Sure, one could argue -functional- skills are useful. I suppose the
> trickiest part is language.

AFAIK Occipital gyri popped in a little after Lucy's day, so yes.OTOH it's
been implemented largely as FIR used to be used
in speech research, as postprocessing and input windowing;
probably needed to knock all the fancy monkeys with >>40k gates
and glia into some semblance of the order the endocrine system had
offered.
Hence common monosyllables common to all languages for:
Fishbait.
Everyone's asleep, genius.
I'm going to make a huge breakfast tomorrow and then trip you out
before you know what's going on.
I thought you already had your thesis defense.
It's noon already.
No.
I just communicated with a client and want something.
Scripting language with many strong scalability features.

> Perhaps language is the most important
> evolutionary aspect of being human. And perhaps one could argue that the
> existence of language naturally leads to self-awareness, and hence
> psychological complexity. Still, it seems like there'd be an easier way
> to accomplish that without having to create Camus and Freud.

Or Alladin (various authors) or Belsairvs.