Techno, that is an interesting read. Below is an excerpt from Carter's article.
Quote:
An Existing Hypothesis
An existing hypothesis describing the origins of human intelligence and the development of tool using goes like this:
Humans did not come down from the trees. Our monkey ancestors ended up on the ground when the trees they were living in fell down during a hot spell in their native Africa. As soon as they were on the ground, those monkeys who could stand on their hind legs offered a much reduced profile to the sun and kept much cooler. This was useful because they had to cover a lot of ground in the arid conditions to find food without becoming food.
This produced strong advantages for the standing monkeys, and soon all the monkeys were descended from standers. Now the standing monkeys have their heads three or four feet above the ground (they were short little chaps), and in the breeze that is available above the drag of ground features. Those monkeys with good blood flow to the head had a significant cooling advantage, and quickly all the monkeys were descended from monkeys with good blood supply to the head. Unusually for simians, and seemingly counter-survival, but in keeping with some dinosaurs thought to have had cooling problems, humans are well endowed with blood vessels outside the skull, even passing through it, supporting this hypothesis.
Now the monkey is standing, with good blood flow to the head for cooling, and a good visual feed. The processing advantage in increasing the size of the visual cortex can make use of the visual data, and since blood is already being pumped to the head anyway, the optimal brain size got bigger.
Then a miracle happened, consciousness somehow evolved in the swollen brain, and the monkeys started to put their front paws to good use typing in computer programs. This is as far as the existing hypothesis goes.
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The miracle of conciousness in the last paragraph is the big mystery that puzzles me. The author goes on to explain a stochastic cooling, evolutionary path to consciousness but I am not able to completely follow his logic yet.