Cognitive Thrift 4 – Motor Ability
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/09
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There’s an aspect to do with motor ability. The degree to which an organism travels. How regular and localized is its general itinerary in addition its kin?
And human beings having a very large brain in proportion to their body size and in general, in addition to a deep interconnectivity amongst its parts, more than any other animal travel the farthest, I think, on average as a general principle.
You can, for instance, make a counterargument via birds migrating, but, as a rule, I think the bigger the brain the farther the travel.
Rick Rosner: Yea, but birds go from on type of environment to another type of environment. Their environments are nearly as varied as humans, and expanded to cover, or at least can survive in, 70-80% of the world’s land areas.
When you look at the pressures on humans or the things that allowed humans to develop big brains, you have size. Animals the size of a lemur cannot support a human size brain, but larger primates can support larger brains.
Standing upright, which frees the hands, which means you need more brain power to work your fingers to manipulate things with any kind of dexterity, you need expanded powers of visualization to go along with that ability to manipulate things with your fingers.
None of that explains genetically why you’re able to develop big brains, but it gives bonus drives and pressures to develop big brains, and along with dextrous hands you’ve got the ability to develop tools, which allow you to survive a greater variety of environments.
Also, we need resources. As predatory mammals, we’re physically untalented. We’re not fast. We’re not particularly strong. So, when you hunt as a hunter-gatherer, we need to communicate to hunt effectively.
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