Did Snakes Help Build the Primate Brain? 202
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."
what about badgers and mushrooms? (Score:5, Funny)
They are at least as important as snaaaaakes.
Whaddya know (Score:4, Funny)
(Yes, I was aiming for '+5 funny'... how did you know?)
Re:Whaddya know (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Picking up shape from randomized patterns (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Feline brains too (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re: Not sure why this would be controversial. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
What about Lawyers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not sure why this would be controversial. (Score:5, Funny)
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.