[ExI] comments?

[John Clark]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 2:25 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> *### I am persuaded that the decisive cognitive innovation that triggered
> the explosion in human intelligence was the evolution of the ability to
> learn from other humans. Subsequent increases in brain size were a
> downstream effect, with some sexual selection accelerating the change. *
>

I'm sure sexual selection was a factor but it's a factor in all
species, however
there must be something special about humans because only they have
developed the sort of intelligence needed to have a technological
civilization, and I think that special thing is bipedalism. It's not
entirely clear what Evolutionary forces caused humans to walk upright, but
whatever it was the paleontological evidence is clear that it happened
before the explosive growth of brain size of our Hominid ancestors.
Intelligence is expensive, about 20% of the bodies energy is use just to
operate the brain and I think there is a limit on how much increased
survival value you get from intelligence if you don't have arms and hands
they can manipulate things, A zebra couldn't make or throw a spear even if
it was as smart as Einstein, but 3 million years ago Lucy could walk
upright almost as well as you were I can, but her brain was no larger than
that of a chimpanzee. And it was at that point evolution went into high
gear and the brain size of her species started to grow very very swiftly.

John K Clark


>
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