Notes
- p.xv
Collingwood: history "is concerned not with events but with processes"
- p.18-19
Baldwin effect - faster phenotype evolution, but (??) slower genotype
- p.20
imp. of imitative learning & reflection on situation
- p.24
John Hughlings-Jackson "We speak no only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think"
- p.24
Joseph - deaf & no sign language "could not hold abstract ideas in mind"
- p.25
brainstorming - boom & bust in evolution - generate then evaluate. Calvin compares to subconsciousness, just like Dennett's multiple drafts
- p.29
implications of foresight and why it evolved: social needs or other
- p.30
Fermi: if alien life so probable "then were are they"; Szilard: "Perhaps they are already here. BUt recall them Hungarians."
- p.37
Darwin (re organs) "the probability of conversion form one function to another"
- p.48
"everything in Biology has multiple causes"
- p.48
Kenneth Boulding "nothing fails like success" "because you do not learn form it"
- p.49
toolmaking & 2001
- p.52
language & consciousness as accident of serial order processing for spear throwing
- p.63/64
island communities and 'demes' - rapid evolution compared to mainland 'buffered' populations
- p.64
eugenics - v.slow … but not so for animal breeding - evolution slow because of lots of 'noise'; artificial selection more precise & faster
- p.80
early sexual maturity arrests physical development (c.f. eternal child)
- p.87
projectile throwing essentially human
- p.130-140
r-K spectrum (p.138) development quantity (many offspring) vs quality (few)
- p.143
impact of technology - spears allow *big game* hunting, cooking, food preservation (e.g. pottery) & eventually agriculture
- p.146
body fat & age of menstruation - why younger now than 100 years ago
- p.154
quote from Leonard Sayers - pre-industrial life stressful because elements out of control - also in 20th/21st century urbanisation
- p.162
- big brains and good hips for breeding
- p.164/165
camp fires and Prometheus
- p.177
toolmaking constant for 1.5 million years of *homo erectus* but rapid brain size increase
- p.181-186
hand axe lobbed into middle of waterhole animals
- p.189
throwing synchronisation "borrowing" widespread neurones across the brain (me) synchronisation … often associated with consciousness?
- p.191
African lake beds become hand-axe oil-fields
- p.206
- sequencing as general mechanism
- p.210
consciousness as chorus (cf. Dennett)
- p.229
Kierkegaard "Life must move forward, but it can only be understood backward"
- p.232
Huxley "That men do not learn form the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history"
