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Hobbits' Brains Shrank Due To Remote Home
Hugh Pickens writes "The 'hobbits,' dubbed homo floresiensis, caused a worldwide sensation when they were discovered five years ago, when some scientists claimed that the 18,000-year-old human-like fossils found on the Indonesian island of Flores represented an entirely new species. Now researchers at the Natural History Museum in London believe that the creatures' small brains could have developed to reduce the creatures' energy needs, crucial for surviving in an isolated area with limited resources. 'It could be that H. floresiensis' skull is that of a Homo erectus that has become dwarfed from living on an island, rather than being an abnormal individual or separately-evolved species, as has been suggested,' says palaeontologist Eleanor Weston. 'Looking at pygmy hippos in Madagascar, which possess exceptionally small brains for their size, suggests that the same could be true for H. floresiensis, and the result of being isolated on the island.' Although the phenomenon of dwarfism on islands is well recognized in large mammals, an accompanying reduction in brain size has never been clearly demonstrated before."
Does that explain Sarah Palin?
I have found this phenomenon localized in my community. It's called Wal-Mart.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
Have you watched episodes of Big Brother or Survivor? Brains shrink in close quarters. I think it's not bunk.
I'm not sure that inviting the public to come see Homos in 'Erectus Park' would get you the visitors you are looking for. ..
They don't mean that evolution was looking forward. They are talking to laymen and then getting it reported by a news report so by the end it will get simplified. What they mean is that selective pressure due to critical energy needs favored successively smaller brained individuals who were more able to effectively survive and have fertile offspring. Over the course of many generations, this led to small brains. Everyone understood what they meant when they said that. There's no good reason to nitpick about an attempt to give a short explanation to laypeople.
I strongly object to the term "retards".
By treating the term retard as offensive, you are only feeding into its offensiveness. Retard means slow. If retard has any negative connotation at all, it is because being mentally slow is something that is inherently undesirable, and no matter what window dressing you do to it, the window dressing will always become an insult.
If you had any depth to you, you would be more focused on trying to emphasize to as many people as possible that being a retard is not something worthy of being hated or abused. The word retard is not harmful at all, and it never will be. It is how people react to people who are retarded. When you focus on something as shallow as a word, you are hurting retards worldwide by misdirecting public attention from their cause.
The 'Hobbits' are retards. And so are you for getting butthurt over the word retard.