In sci.life-extension Ian Goddard <igoddard at erols.mom> wrote:
:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992547
: Human brain "paid off" by long life
: A theory portraying children as start-up companies and middle-aged
: adults as their investors has been proposed to explain why humans have
: such big brains and long life spans.
: Evolutionary biologists have puzzled for decades over why humans live
: twice as long as chimpanzees and gorillas and have brains three to
: four times larger than their closest living relatives.
: "We're thinking of the brain as an investment," says economist Arthur
: Robson, at the University of Western Ontario. Robson and
: anthropologist Hillard Kaplan, at the University of New Mexico,
: believe this investment is so substantial that it requires a longer
: human life span to give it the time to pay off.
An obvious alternative theory is that long lifespans are a consequence of
neoteny.
Noeteny delays development. It may well have many causes - making
young brains have a longer development period (thus allowing the
newborn brain to be more plastic) is one of them.
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|im |yler http://timtyler.org/tim at tt1.org
