Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 2-3 Quotes

Chapter 2 - Crafty as a Coyote: The Brain

There is simply no socially acceptable way to ask the following questions: Are the smallest humans less brilliant than the biggest? And are those with average skulls condemned to be ordinary? Only scholars of humans get anxious over such questions. Scientists who study crows and chimps don't experience such angst. It's not at all rude to investigate whether the biggest-brained bird is the smartest. But among Homo sapiens, burdened with a tradition of dividing and conquering one another, it's a wince-inducing issue.
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It's a fact that the species with sneaky lifestyles have evolved the biggest brains. If your legacy relies on tricking your peers out of food or stealing a peer's partner for a quick mating, you'll need a lot of brain cells to keep track of who's who, who's where, and whom you can't trust.
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The Brain, with its unequaled complexity, not to mention its impulse to examine itself, must be the component that sets humans farthest apart from all other species.

Chapter 3 - Blind as a Bat: Perception

I was surprised when I learned that my eyes and ears collaborate so closely, completing each other. But I also discovered that when the two senses disagree, all hell breaks loose. . . . To torment your own brain, Google "McGurk effect."
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We always start our exploration with the hands, of course. These are dense with touch receptors, especially at the ends of the fingers. But some animals, or parts of animals, are so soft that you can't even feel them with the fingers. Among larger animals, the flare of a horse's nose is in this category. In that case, if the animal is amenable, a soft-seeking human will apply a cheek. Here the receptors yield finer resolution. Here you can wallow in the velvet of that warm nose. A chipmunk, too, will register on the cheek when the fingers are too blunt. (Applying cheek to chipmunk can be a challenge. It takes days and many pounds of sunflower seeds. But it's worth it.) And then there are some furs so fine we must turn the cheek and apply the lips. The human lips are jam-packed with sensors, and they are the only organ that can do justice to a flying squirrel. That creature simply disappears in human hands, too silken to leave any impression beyond warmth.
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It's popular to complain that the human animal did not evolve to sit before a computer for hours at a time, and that this causes all of our problems. But the fact is that in computer-free cultures females also spend hours sitting and working with their hands. And as their bodies accumulate the years, they, too, gather torn muscles and knots of pain. As do the bodies of lionesses who tackle zebras for a living, and moose bulls who butt heads over breeding rights, and squirrels who fall out of trees (it happens more often than you'd think). Pain happens.
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The average male brain can more easily perform "mental rotation" of an object. That factoid seems a bit arcane. But perhaps it relates to the different ways in which male and female humans throughout prehistory exploited the resources within their territory. Judging from modern hunter-gatherers, females typically circulate among patches of stationary food: a fruit tree here, a patch of tubers there, a nut tree over the hill. Males certainly forage, but they specialize in hunting. And prey animals, in contrast to nut trees and tubers, run around. One result is that females may travel just a couple of miles a day, and males may travel ten times as far. Some researchers speculate that the space-savvy male brain evolved because all the hunters with bad spatial skills got lost and died childless. Modern males are believed to navigate by building a mental map of where they've been and which direction they're headed now. And the female brain, according to recent experiments, prefers to navigate by landmarks: Take a right at the light, left on Main, left again at the tuber patch. Since hunting flighty animals while carrying a fussing infant was a fool's errand, those females who could recall the location of plant foods evolved a brain that shines in the task of "object location." To this day, the typical female can easily locate a jar of mayonnaise in a crowded refrigerator and guide her mate to this object--even from her office twenty miles away.