werner@aecom.UUCP (Craig Werner) (07/07/85)
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that Natural Selection has to have a rational basis. Well, it just ain't so. Given the fact that enough brain mass clearly has enough selection to make it big enough to enable the development of intelligence, there is no selection against it not enlarging further to provide what appears on first observation to be excess capacity. The only limitation against an even greater brain size appears to be the size of the child's head that can fit through the birth canal, plus constraints on bone maturation, etc. A good discussion of this topic (or closely related ones) takes place in Steven Jay Gould's "Ever Since Darwin" -- Craig Werner !philabs!aecom!werner "The world is just a straight man for you sometimes"