Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Spector, the song and the recording were one thing, and they existed in his brain. When he went into the studio, it came out of him, like Minerva coming out of Jupiter's head. Every instrument had its role to play, and it was all prefigured." - Jerry Wexler, Atlantic Records producer who worked with Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, among others, on Spector's greatness as a producer (Rolling Stone, April...
That's not to say that the shape of the brain tells you nothing about the characteristics of social species, particularly when the species in question are primates. Studies from the 1990s that have stood up over time showed that among social apes like gorillas and chimps, brain and behavior evolve in ways peculiar to an individual's sex. Males have more bulk in the region of the brain connected with aggression and competition and less in the region that tempers those tendencies - which better equips them for the socially competitive world into which they're born. Females have more...
...wildly popular television series - Meerkat Manor - don't weigh in with a whole lot of gray matter relative to their body size. The same holds true for hyenas and mongooses - albeit without the TV following. Bears, small cats and weasels, on the other hand, pack a lot of brain into their heads yet prefer to go it alone. (See pictures of animals in love...
...overemphasis on dogs and its use of living species alone. Canines have co-evolved with humans, growing more social as we selected for those traits. That essentially skewed the results, and the absence of fossil ancestors from the data meant there was no information about whether the brains of the earliest dogs grew or shrank or did both over time. Finarelli and Flynn acknowledge that the modern canine brain has grown along with its sociability, but they do not know which is the cause and which is the effect - or if the two things are linked in any meaningful...
...none of this suggests that within a species - Homo sapiens, say - brain size tells you a lick about intellect. Across the centuries, eugenicists and practitioners of other junk sciences argued that cranial volume could reveal important things about the intelligence or other traits of one race compared with another. That was rubbish. The new carnivore studies, by contrast, offer a tantalizing window into the things that help an entire species evolve the way it does - or, more important, the things that...