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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: Computers--Next stage in evolution? Hmmmmmm.....
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References: <3hgj4q$di7@news.u.washington.edu> <D3vEJ5.72s@indirect.com> <3hl4sj$d02@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 1995 23:49:36 GMT
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In article <3hl4sj$d02@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <D3vEJ5.72s@indirect.com> spaceboy@indirect.com (s p a c e b o y) writes:
>
>>I do agree with you upon this point.  Humans have definitely not evolved 
>>well physically.  One interesting point of research has been upon 
>>birthing of young in many species.  When humans began to walk more and 
>>more upright throughout history, this had the effect of changing the 
>>geometry of the pelvis, causing the birth canal to become much more 
>>narrow.  Over the eons this caused human young to be born more and more 
>>premature since the babies' head develops very rapidly and would not pass 
>>through the pelvis unless birth occured more early.
>
>Quite evidently, this is wrong.  In normal circumstances, babies
>are not born premature.  They may be very immature, but that is
>a different matter.

This seems like a quibble.  It may be that, as babies developed bigger
heads and the birth canal shifted to pass through the pelvic bone, mutations
that induced premature birth came to have a higher relative survival rate.
As prematurity becomes more common, other mutatations that increase the
survivability of premature babies become incorporated into the genome,
until prematurity is the "norm".  "premature" is just a label we put on it.
All that "really" matters is that some traits have higher survivability than
others.

>By implication, you are suggesting that the immaturity of the human
>infant is an evolutionary mistake.

That's a mistaken interpretation flowing from a teleological POV.  The correct
implication is that immaturity was forced upon the genome as a matter of
physics.  This changes the survivability of a whole host of other traits,
resulting in our current condition.

>I am inclined to think you are
>quite wrong in this.

It's moot, since that's not what he said.

>One cannot properly apply teleological terms
>such as "strategy" to evolution, but if one could I would suggest
>that the immaturity of birth were a matter of strategy.

One can't and one shouldn't.

>This
>evolutionary "mistake" allows a significantly larger part of the
>infant's development to occur in a far richer environment than would
>be possible in utero.  Without this "mistake" we should probably be
>rather more like apes than like humans.

I'm not too sure of the value of this sort of second guessing.  Had it been
possible for human brains to continue to grow in size during gestation, babies
might have been born after 18 months with a much richer but equally malleable
cortex, with at least as rich a post-natal development phase.  Your
implication that the helplessness of the human infant may play a significant
role in its development of "higher faculties" has some merit, but to the
degree that it applies it simply means that the fact that babies with big
heads happened to die led to the speed up of the development of those
faculties as a "happy" circumstance.  Strategy has nothing to do with it.

It is hard to know what nature might have developed given different
contingencies.  The fact is that the results of multi-million-year
evolutionary processes are startling, and we can only even pretend to grasp it
via hindsight.  That's why, without a significant exposure to the huge corpus
of facts about evolution, there is a strong tendency to doubt its ability to
produce what it does, to say it's "just a theory", and to fall back on
teleology.
-- 
<J Q B>

