From: Jim Legg (income@ihug.co.nz)
Date: Tue Jan 28 1997 - 02:44:30 MST
Bipedalism:
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I recall an article from probably the National Geographic or perhaps the
Scientific American in the early eighties concerning a formula that
predicted a 175% chance of intelligent life per galaxy. The man's name I
can only recall as a Da...??*. This formula had about 12 factors and
possibly factor 6 was bipedalism. I recall bipedalism was suggested as
being due to sexual attraction caused by the face-to-face sex position, the
purpose of which was selection, longevity and the need for future planning.
Does anyone recall the man's name?
Baldness:
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In 1991, I saw the movie "The Lawnmowerman" and a TV program about a
gorilla named Coco (?) who had been taught sufficient language for it to be
suggested that her consent was required for a surgical procedure. These
shows prompted me to wondered about baldness and about the following
admittedly far-fetched evolutionary intervention scenario:-
1) Take a new-born, intelligent and domesticated hairy animal with an
enormous sense, say smell, and disable 90% of these sensory pathways.
2) Assume that its brain's plasticity might reuse that spare 90%, plus
other hirsuitly deprived brain areas, if given intense language training.
a) Incubate the new born in a hairy cybersuit fitted with natural plus VR
ports and let it suckle a pseudo-mother in quasi-virtual reality where the
'parents' are mostly cyber puppets.
b) These "ego-self-identified-pseudo-parents" attempt to teach the new
born a 'language' and upon puberty large numbers of such animals are
virtually and actually mated to produce offspring which are handled in like
fashion.
3) Assume the cyber-parenting takes hold with each new generation gaining
more 'word' power from more natural and less puppet parenting with each
generation never leaving the quasi-virtual reality.
4) Assume the parasitic language meme successfully competes for brain space
or that the natural parents remember to perform the 'circumcision' of the
new-born's sensory pathways.
5) Assume that at a remarkable generation gap pairs of laboratory animals
escape their cybersuits.
6) Assume the controlling civilization, say due to power exhaustion, did
not have time to impart enough knowledge for the animals to rebuild the
laboratory, which might have been its purpose.
Q. Might these animals find themselves naked and hairless in the wild?
Q. Cut off and in the wild would these 'worded' animal families stick
together?
Q. With a 'word' rather than sentence based logic, how long might it take
for this new animal species to rebuild the laboratory?
Any comments?
Jim Legg http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~income
Man * Soul / Computer = 12 ^ (I think therefore I surf)
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