From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue May 06 2003 - 19:02:04 MDT
A few months ago it occurred to me in the middle of
the night out of a deep sleep that the world-wide
increase in intelligence might simply reflect the
increased survival of infants with larger heads - due
to the worldwide popularity of safe cesarean
sections. In prior eras, a bigger head meant a lower
chance of a safe birth, both for infant and mother.
Of course, a dead mother provides no milk, etc., so
that even if a large-headed infant survived the birth,
the chances of survival to adulthood were lowered by
the likelihood of the mother dying.
Thu May 01 2003 - 12:29:46 MDT, Wei Dai
(weidai@weidai.com) wrote I'll take this opportunity
to point out that Algernon's Law should be
changed to "Any simple major enhancement to human
intelligence *was* a net
evolutionary disadvantage." Now that we can have birth
by cesarean
section, there is a significantly lower evolutionary
cost to having a
bigger brain. There may also be simple major
intelligence enhancements
that require the intake of nutrients that are easy to
produce today but
were not available in the past.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue May 06 2003 - 19:13:40 MDT