<div dir="ltr">Indeed. Looked at on a geological timescale, the size of the hominid braincase at birth basically inflated like a balloon, incredibly quickly, right up to the point where it started to cause non-trivial infant mortality increases.<div><br></div><div>It has all the hallmarks of the same kind of "arms-race" sexual-selection-based positive feedback loops that created other ridiculously outsized anatomical features in other species, just like peacock tails.</div><div><br></div><div>If you didn't have to squeeze a baby head through a female pelvis, it'd still be happening.</div><div><br></div><div>Inducing a positive feedback loop in the general computing capability of a species seems like a ridiculously transformative thing to do to a universe, though if a Sysop wanted to "create" sentient life whilst maintaining plausible deniability, that'd be an extremely clever way to do it.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 11:01 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(58,58,58);font-family:Merriweather,serif;font-size:15px">Indeed, in his seminal </span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(58,58,58);font-family:Merriweather,serif;font-size:15px"><a href="https://www.primalpoly.com/the-mating-mind" style="border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;background-color:transparent;text-decoration-line:none;color:rgb(8,112,147);box-sizing:border-box" target="_blank">The Mating Mind</a></span><span lang="EN-NZ" style="border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(58,58,58);font-family:Merriweather,serif;font-size:15px"> (2000), Miller argues that the human brain itself is primarily a product of sexual rather than natural selection: “an entertainment system” designed principally to stimulate and attract other brains; in other words, the idea that our incredible cognitive abilities have evolved, “like the peacock’s tail, for courtship and mating”.</span><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(58,58,58);font-family:Merriweather,serif;font-size:15px"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(58,58,58);font-family:Merriweather,serif;font-size:15px">bill w</span></div></div>
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