Some MLP, 'cause I need to restart my computer, so I can't leave these tabs open any longer:


Straight Dope quote:
"It's not apples and oranges, but no one paying attention could compare these apples without noticing (a) one is 12 times bigger and (b) both of them are rutabagas."
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070907.html

Two SciAm.com articles on human evolution:
Schizophrenia: a team of geneticists looked at the 78 gene variants most closely associated with Schizophrenic disorders. After examining the frequencies and distributions of these genes in various human and ape populations, they came to the conclusion that at least 26 of these have been under positive selective pressure for a significant amount of time in human evolution, continuing up to the present.

That is, the genes that cause schizophrenia are conveying adaptive benefits to the people who carry them

Social Intelligence: a team of German researchers gave a set of tasks to both human toddlers between two and three years old and the same tasks to adult chimpanzee and orangutans of various ages. They found that at an age when the general problem solving skills (involving space, quantity, and causality) of the toddlers was comparable to the apes, the toddlers were already twice as successful at tasks involving social skills than the apes.

This is interesting because it is support for the theory (which I hold to) that the increases in human intelligence that have evolved since our split with living relatives have been driven significantly by specific need for social processing skills, and rather than a drive toward general intelligence.

There are other possible explanations of these data, but they do support the theory.

ETA: comments disabled on this post because it has been particularly attracting spam.