Why Are You So Smart? Thank Your Mom & Your Difficult Birth – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus

This is the kind of impasse that encourages innovations that might be considered “creative,” or at least as creative as an evolutionary process without explicit goals, without a guiding intelligence, can be. Evolution found some important mechanical tricks to get around this constraint: Babies’ skulls are made of pieces that shift during birth, women’s pelvises temporarily separate during delivery, and the space for the brain increases dramatically in infancy. But another key adaptation was in how the brain itself worked. Evolution made human beings learn what they need about the world, rather than having it inborn.

via Why Are You So Smart? Thank Your Mom & Your Difficult Birth – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus.