[ExI] ai is the easy road

[spike at rainier66.com]

....> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] ai is the easy road

On Sunday, 18 October 2026 at 13:23, spike at rainier66.com
<spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

> On 17/10/2026 22:35, John K Clark wrote:
> >> Yes but I don't see why Bipedal walking would be better at endurance 
> > than quadratic walking, if anything the reverse would seem more likely
to me.
...
> 
> I knew a girl who was born without locking knees... spike

  She could walk but 
> only short distances and it was exhausting for her because the large 
> thigh muscles were always working.


>...Aha, yes, locking knee. Good one. That, plus leg anatomy, plus...

>...It's probably a combination of factors, then. Biomechanical ones plus
heat loss. And possibly psychological ones too.

_______________________________________________


Stephen Jay Gould wrote a lot about punctuated equilibrium in evolution.  A
critical insight in PE is that a single mutation can confer a slight
advantage which then results in evolutionary pressure on another anatomical
feature, so evolution progresses like a row of dominoes, creating a string
of anatomical adaptations in a short span of time, which explains why we
seldom find missing links: it isn't that they don't exist, it is that there
aren't very many of them.

Once an ape had the locking knee, he could intimidate the other males,
attract females and few generations later most of the group had locking
knees.  This freed up the forelimbs, which then began to evolve to do other
things such as carrying water in a hollowed-out gourd for instance, or
manipulating rocks to effectively cut meat off of a bone, break the bone to
get access to bone marrow, build more elaborate shelters, and very
importantly (here's where I am not sure at all) carry a burning branch to
drive the lions and hyenas away from their fresh kill.

spike