Slashdot Mirror
Did Snakes Help Build the Primate Brain?
sciencehabit writes "A new study of the monkey brain suggests that primates are uniquely adapted to recognize the features of snakes and react in a flash. What's more, by selecting for traits that helped animals avoid them, the reptiles ultimately endowed us with forward-facing eyes, for example, and enlarged visual centers deep in our brains that are specialized for picking out specific features in the world around us, such as the general shape of a snake's body camouflaged among leaves.The results lend support to a controversial hypothesis: that primates as we know them would never have evolved without snakes."
They are at least as important as snaaaaakes.
The bible was right after all... it was the snakes fault after all
(Yes, I was aiming for '+5 funny'... how did you know?)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
yep, but unlike "angels" or "face of Jesus" [sic] that you quote, get it wrong with a snake, and you're naturally selected.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Giant noisy sucking arms spewing out nearly a hundred decibels of unnatural noise, including in the frequencies that we can't hear but cats are very sensitive to, which starts up suddenly, chases them around the house when they hide, which their "alpha" owner tries to wrest control over but which ends up tugging them around the house chasing after the cat, and which if they get too near tries to swallow their tail.
Yeah. Must be evolution about a snake-fear... And they're scared of your car starting up while they're inside the engine because cats evolved from animals that got swallowed by bellowing mammoths with whirling stomach parts...
Idiot.
It's controversial, because the evidence is extremely questionable. If primates evolved to recognize snakes, then how do you explain the entire politics esction of slashdot???
You darwinists are just nuts. Eve couldn't recognize a snake before, and she has enough trouble recognizing one now. Oh, and Adam still tags along for the ride.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If this is true, it it might explain the evolution of lawyers. Under this hypothesis, lawyers would have evolved from snakes that preyed on monkeys. As the monkeys got smarter, the snakes evolved into monkey mimics that still had primates as their primary food source. Finally, it all makes sense.
Why is Snark Required?
I'd like to see the methodology behind this study
There's only one way to do it right, so they must have done it like this:
1. Take one set of universes, call it A, all with snakes.
2. Duplicate those universes into B.
3. Now, remove snakes from the universes in A.
4. Apply small irrelevant distortions to the universes in A and B.
5. Wait a gazillion years.
6. See if humans developed similarly in A and B.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.