No you've not paid attention to the literature. A larger brain is helpful up to the point where it stops helping with basic survival. This happens quite a bit smaller than ours. In fact at the size of homo habilis, after that, until the advent of true tool making and real cooperation beyond a hunt it's just dead weight. The brain is ghastly expensive in energy resources for the human body and incremental changes in size from that point don't add to capabilities enough to make up for the costs. The development of a larger than needed brain was not pure chance, it was incremental, but with no practical survival value.
graywolf wrote: > No, you are missing a point there, Peter. Non-survival traits do away with a > line. Survival traits give it a boost. But traits that do not affect survival > are a dice roll, which is the point you are missing. Pure chance, in other > words. > > -- All dogs have four legs; my cat has four legs. Therefore, my cat is a dog. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
