Re: Last but not least

Robert Bannister <robban@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Seems rather human-centric to me. I think it would make a great deal
more sense to have the brain, or preferably brains, more central in
the body, rather than on an appendage at the top joined by a neck,
which is easily severed, and "protected" by a bony skull which has a
soft spot in a crucial place. More than one heart and liver would be
useful too.

I suspect that there's a big advantage, when you're becoming
intelligent, to shortening the neural pathway between the
long-distance sensors and the main processing units. The proximal
sensors (the various senses we lump together as "touch") pretty much
have to be distributed and can have subsidiary processing units
elsewhere (as we have our reflex control in the spinal cord), but for
senses like sight, smell, and hearing, you'd really suffer if the
processing weren't nearby, which pretty much implies a head with a
brain in it.

More than one such head could be useful redundancy, but then you'd
have the problem of making sure that the different brains coordinated
useful behavior.

As for bipedal: I don't see an advantage in form of locomotion which
is basically a controlled fall. With six limbs, we could still hold
our heads high like a horse or even a giraffe and still have arms and
hands.

I don't think there's anything especially special about bipedalism.
It's more a consequence of having been quadripedal before freeing up
one pair for grasping. Four limbs for locomotion would probably be
better, and four arms for grasping would probably be an improvement as
well.

And is binocular vision all that great? What about all-round vision?
A complete circle of eyes?

There are so many things wrong with the mammalian eye that it's not
worth holding it up as any sort of ideal. Even beside fixing the
internal design idiocy (see cephalopods), there are lots of other
improvements you could make, from adding eyes facing in different
directions to not having opaque eyelids for blinking to having more
than two eyes facing in each direction, to perhaps having eyes on
controllable stalks to having eyes near hands to ...

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
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1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |fortune cookies. That's astounding.
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |Belief in the precognitive powers
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kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx |wackier than belief in ESP,
(650)857-7572 |subluxation, or astrology, but you
|just don't hear anyone preaching
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ |Scientific Cookie-ism.
| Penn and Teller


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