The exciting version of this theory is that this population bottleneck is what led to "behaviorally modern" humanity The human body was a failed experiment, including the big, heavy useless human brain, until the brain relatively suddenly bootstrapped new software
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Everything actually successful about us comes from that big fat brain, and the kludges that allow our otherwise pretty shitty bodies to run that unlicensed jailbroken software
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To sloppily assign telos to evolution - humans are a failed experiment in making chimps too big and tall The "licensed software" we ran on for millions of years was for specific functions to take advantage of being bigger and taller - rock throwing, hitting things with sticks
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Overall, this experiment wasn't worth it Throwing things doesn't help that much The better vision and hardwired math engine and whatnot is incredibly costly to run, we eat too much, we take to long to grow up Too many chips on a motherboard that can't support it, a mistake
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I mean lots and lots of our hominid ancestors died because they're less efficient than chimps We almost died We eventually made it because of that random bootstrapping - the brain developing a true complete natural language, and with it abstraction
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Replying to @arthur_affect
arguably the key feature of humanity isn't abstract thought in some exalted sense, but the ability to cooperate, and especially /to do what you're told/
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
most other species, each new animal has to start learning the world from scratch, each time the thing about humans is, someone else can figure out how to do X, and then tell you, and you don't have to figure it out yourself or even really understand it you just do X now
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
which is to say, we can build up a body of socially-transmitted knowledge in ways that most other animals can't (yes, there are exceptions) what this translates to: we can build on the past faster than the rate of genetic evolution that other animals are locked to
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Replying to @perdricof
It all starts with language Like I think the hot take in ARRIVAL is correct, linguistics is the most foundational field of study, not physics Without language you literally can't know anything else
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
Like the CS metaphor for what happened to humans is "I figured out how to build the instruction set this ape manufacturer put in the apes for hunting and gathering into a Turing-complete language"
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(This isn't just a hot take but an old cold conservative take This is essentially what they meant by the "trivium" - grammar, logic and rhetoric, i.e. a mastery of language, precedes learning about any specific subject)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
Anyway to go with the cheesy metaphor about computers, yeah, it's not just that we had a big CPU, but we're networked The one random feature we had was that primitive ability to call out to each other as pack hunters, that went down an evolutionary garden path
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
The larynx and tongue getting more and more dextrous and humans developing the tic of vocalizing their emotions and reactions nearly all the time Wasteful, pathological, from the point of view of other animals Why are you always on the phone instead of doing your work Becky
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