"the sons raise meat... the sun’s rays meet... the sons raise meat..."

Source images: Robert Patterson's Weblog; CatholicMom.com

“[…] early pre-humans moved from a fruit-based diet – like most of today’s great apes – to meat. The new diet required novel social arrangements and a new type of co‑operative strategy (it’s hard to hunt big game alone). This in turn seems to have entailed new forms of co‑operative thought more generally: social arrangements arose to guarantee hunters an equal share of the bounty, and to ensure that women and children who were less able to participate also got a share.
     According to the US comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello, by the time the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis had emerged sometime around 300,000 years ago, ancestral humans had already developed a sophisticated type of co‑operative intelligence. This much is evident from the archaeological record, which demonstrates the complex social living and interactional arrangements among ancestral humans. They probably had symbol use – which prefigures language – and the ability to engage in recursive thought (a consequence, on some accounts, of the slow emergence of an increasingly sophisticated symbolic grammar). Their new ecological situation would have led, inexorably, to changes in human behaviour. Tool-use would have been required, and co‑operative hunting, as well as new social arrangements – such as agreements to safeguard monogamous breeding privileges while males were away on hunts.
     These new social pressures would have precipitated changes in brain organisation. In time, we would see a capacity for language. Language is, after all, the paradigmatic example of co‑operative behaviour: it requires conventions – norms that are agreed within a community – and it can be deployed to co‑ordinate all the additional complex behaviours that the new niche demanded.”
— Vyvyan Evans, aeon

Read more…
“As we began to shy away from eating primarily fruit, leaves and nuts and began eating meat, our brains grew. We developed the capacity to use tools, so our need for large, sharp teeth and big grinders waned.
     At the same time our gut shrank by 60%. A Chimp spends 6 hours a day chewing and digesting. We eat quickly leaving lots of time to invent new things and ways. […]
     Only meat has this quality and concentration of protein. It is indeed ‘Brain Food.’
     Meat made us human. It is not some rare thing at the top of the food pyramid but it is the base of the pyramid.”
— Robert Patterson’s Weblog
Read more…

parrots are always right

From: Reanimation Library

"People rate statements that have been repeated just once as more valid or true than things they've heard for the first time. They even rate statements as truer when the person saying them has been repeatedly lying.
     And when we think something is more true, we also tend to be more persuaded by it. Several studies have shown that people are more swayed when they hear statements of opinion and persuasive messages more than once.
     Easy to understand = true
     This is what psychologists call the illusion of truth effect and it arises at least partly because familiarity breeds liking. As we are exposed to a message again and again, it becomes more familiar. Because of the way our minds work, what is familiar is also true. Familiar things require less effort to process and that feeling of ease unconsciously signals truth (this is called cognitive fluency).
     As every politician knows, there's not much difference between actual truth and the illusion of truth. Since illusions are often easier to produce, why bother with the truth?
The exact opposite is also true. If something is hard to think about then people tend to believe it less. Naturally this is very bad news for people trying to persuade others of complicated ideas in what is a very complicated world. [...]
     It's a depressing enough finding about the human ability to process rational arguments but recent research has shown an even more worrying effect. We can effectively persuade ourselves through repetition. A study has shown that when an idea is retrieved from memory, this has just as powerful a persuasive effect on us as if it had been repeated twice.
     The aspiring sceptic, therefore, should be especially alert to thoughts that come quickly and easily to mind—we can easily persuade ourselves with a single recall of a half-remembered thought."
— PSYBLOG
Read more...

"Targeted interruption: This is an amazing ability to know exactly when to interrupt the other party so they will not effectively get their points across. After years of watching this, I finally saw someone confronted on this behavior. But Noam Chomsky, a famous intellectual and linguist no less, was effectively undermined at the hands of an expert interrupter, William F. Buckley. Buckley was so talented, he almost made apartheid sound like it was a boon to civilization."
— Robert A. Yourell, BrainBlogger
Read more...