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."

Comments

what about badgers and mushrooms?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are at least as important as snaaaaakes.

Whaddya know

[goose-incarnated]

The bible was right after all... it was the snakes fault after all

(Yes, I was aiming for '+5 funny'... how did you know?)

Re:Whaddya know

[Anonymous Coward]

The bible was right after all... it was the snakes fault after all

Actually the bible was only partially right. According to the bible, it was the snake's fault, while according to this research it was the snakes' fault.

What about Lawyers?

[Required Snark]

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.

Re:Not sure why this would be controversial.

[StripedCow]

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.