Human Evolution; Is the Hobbit's brain unfeasibly small?

ScienceDaily ^ | 1/28/2010 | EnderWiggins

[EnderWiggins]

Homo floresiensis, a pygmy-sized small-brained hominin popularly known as 'the Hobbit' was discovered five years ago, but controversy continues over whether the small brain is actually due to a pathological condition. How can its tiny brain size be explained?

The commonly held assumption that as primates evolved, their brains always tended to get bigger has been challenged by a team of scientists at Cambridge and Durham. Their work helps solve the mystery of whether Homo floresiensis -- dubbed the Hobbit due to its diminutive stature -- was a separate human species or a diseased individual.

The team combined previously published datasets of brain and body mass with measurements from fossil remains. They then used three different mathematical methods to reconstruct patterns of brain evolution across the primate family tree from these 37 existing and 23 extinct primate species.

The results show that while brains evolved to be larger in both relative and absolute terms along most branches of the primate family tree, the opposite happened along several lineages. For example brain size shrank during the evolution of Mouse Lemurs, Marmosets and Mangabeys.

[ApplegateRanch]

Most of the time it just goes sideways.

Geeze, I thought it went in a spiral.

[GSP.FAN]

No shit.Maybe this will cheer him up?

[Condor51]

Human Evolution; Is the Hobbit's brain unfeasibly small?

[EnderWiggins]

"But evolution(ism) requires infinite series of probabilistic miracles and zero-probability events. That basically stands everything we know about modern mathematics and probability theory on its head.:

It has been my most common experience across the years to find that when a creationist makes the claim that "evolution is mathematically impossible," they are generally just repeating what somebody else has told them and would have no idea how to actually go about performing that calculation. In the rare instance where they actually try to propose one, they have every single time built a model that had nothing to do with evolution.

I'd love to see you try and defend your assertion here with an actual calculation. Because I am happy to show you your error and demonstrate that evolution is actually a statistical certainty.

[SunkenCiv]

*That’s* what I’m talkin’ about...