From: The Low Willow (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 23 1997 - 12:55:35 MST
On Jan 22, 9:19pm, John K Clark wrote:
} not very good at it. Baseball pitchers get paid millions of dollars because
} they have more natural ability at throwing things than 99.9% of the
Do they practice all their life? Really _all_ their life? And actually
a friend has told me of some tribe, I think Asian islanders, who
defended themselves well against musket bearing Europeans for a while by
throwing rocks at them. Not just throwing lots of rocks around, but
hitting and wounding or killing. I'll have to ask him if he can provide
a reference, although I suspect not.
} is not of much use for anything, ask any old retired baseball pitcher, an old
} man of about 35.
Ah, what's the usual lifespan of chimps in the wild? I don't see a
conflict here.
} bipedalism. Lucy was as bipedal as you or me but it would be a million years
} later before anybody on earth had a hand ax or a tool of any sort.
So maybe she threw rocks. Wham. What's the density of evidence from
that time, anyway?
} an elaborate throwing reflex, not intelligence. Then again, Evolution never
} does things the easy sensible way, so maybe.
You know, going by Hofstadter and others (Edelman?), most of our thought
might be evolutionary in nature. In fact the whole basis of our success
could be that we are evolution uploaded -- we have ideas at random and
select them, instead of children. (Those too so far, but we haven't
been evolving by them much, probably.) Which makes sense -- the only
known simple methods of space searching are Darwinism and brute force
exhaustion.
Merry part,
-xx- Damien R. Sullivan X-) <*> http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix
Piety, n: Reverence for the Supreme Being, based on His supposed
resemblance to man.
-- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:03 MST