首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
考研
As a species, humans are incredibly smart. Our intelligence comes with a curious caveat: our babies are among the dumbest—or, ra
As a species, humans are incredibly smart. Our intelligence comes with a curious caveat: our babies are among the dumbest—or, ra
admin
2023-02-22
59
问题
As a species, humans are incredibly smart. Our intelligence comes with a curious caveat: our babies are among the dumbest—or, rather, the most helpless—that exist. A baby giraffe can stand within an hour of birth, and can even potentially flee predators on its first day of life. A monkey can grasp its mother and hang on for protection and nourishment. A human infant can’t even hold up its own head.
However, as Kidd and Piantadosi argue in their new paper, published in a June issue of PNAS, hu-mans become so intelligent because human infants are so incredibly helpless; the one necessitates the other. The theory is startling, but it isn’t entirely new. Researchers have been pondering the peculiarities of our birth and its evolutionary significance for quite some time. Humans belong to the subset of mammals, called viviparous mammals, that give live birth to their young. This means that infants must grow to a mature enough state inside the body to be born, but they can’t be so big that they are unable to come out.【B11】_____________The brain, therefore, must keep maturing, and the head must continue growing, long after birth. The more intelligent an animal will eventually be, the more relatively immature its brain is at birth.
Researchers have long known about this trade-off, and about the connection between brain size and neural density and intelligence.【B12】_________________
Kidd and Piantadosi’s new idea is that increased helplessness in newborns mandates increased intelligence in parents—and that a runaway selection dynamic can account for both. Natural selection favors humans with large brains, because those humans tend to be smarter.【B13】__________
During their investigation, Kidd and Piantadosi realized something important that strengthened their theory. It turns out that another variable has an even higher correlation with intelligence than brain size—time to maturity, or weaning time.【B14】___________________Orangutans have smarter babies than baboons and they wean them longer. Baboon babies, in turn, are weaned longer, and are smarter, than lemur babies.
Putting these facts together helped Kidd and Piantadosi develop their hypothesis. The connection be-tween head size and intelligence does create incentives for babies to arrive earlier. But it’s the connection between weaning time and intelligence that may really be driving the cycle.【B15】__________________And so the cycle continues.
[A] As we grew smarter, we were better able to take care of our infants, so they could be born more helpless and allow us to grow even smarter. This is why the cycle happens to humans and not to lemurs.
[B] You need to be smarter to care for more helpless creatures, which means you need a larger brain— which means that babies have to enter the world at an even more helpless stage of development, since there is a finite size to their brain at birth, mandated by the physiology of live birth.
[C] In other words, the time it takes to shepherd newborns through absolute helplessness to a point of relative self-sufficiency predicts primate intelligence more strongly than the best measure that has previously been proposed, namely, head circumference.
[D] For instance, Robin Dunbar found that the ratio of neocortical volume to brain size can predict the social-group size in a number of species, including bats, cetaceans, and primates, while Simon Read-er has demonstrated links in tool use and innovation to brain size in primates.
[E] This may create evolutionary incentives for babies that are born at an even earlier developmental stage, which require more intelligence to raise. This creates the dynamic: over time, helpless babies make parents more intelligent, which makes babies more helpless, which makes their parents more intelligent, and so on.
[F] This leads to a trade-off: the more intelligent an animal is, the larger its head generally is, but the birth canal imposes an upper limit on just how large that head can be before it gets stuck.
[G] This is a contradiction. Humans are born quite helpless, far more so than any other primate, but, fairly early on, we start becoming quite smart, again far more so than any other primate.
【B13】
选项
答案
E
解析
空格前讲基德和皮安塔多西两位科学家的新观点:新生儿越不能自立,父母的智力水平就越高,并提到选择动态机制可以用来解释这一点。由此推测下文应该会对这个机制进行介绍。E就是对该机制的相关介绍;其开头的This指代空格前提到的自然选择偏爱脑容量大的人类这个现象,也正是这个现象产生了空格处谈到的进化上的鼓励(自然选择与进化密切相关)。故本题答案为E。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/OZMD777K
0
考研英语一
相关试题推荐
Writeanessaybasedonthefollowingchart.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethechart,and2)giveyourcomments.Yous
Firstitwaspets,thenfish.Nowit’spoultryandpigs.The【C1】________ofanimalsallowedtofeedoninsectsisgrowing.Anew
Firstitwaspets,thenfish.Nowit’spoultryandpigs.The【C1】________ofanimalsallowedtofeedoninsectsisgrowing.Anew
EmerginginthelateSixtiesandreachingapeakintheSeventies,LandArtwasoneofarangeofnewforms,includingBodyArt,
[A]MBAprogramboominSouthAfrica[B]CurrentassessmentofMBAprograms[C]ViewsontherankingsofMBAprograms
WhydopeoplereadnegativeInternetcommentsanddootherthingsthatwillobviouslybepainful?Becausehumanshaveaninheren
Scientistshavediscoveredapowerfulantibioticinthebloodstreamofgiantpandasthatcandestroybacteria.TheChineserese
Scientistshavediscoveredapowerfulantibioticinthebloodstreamofgiantpandasthatcandestroybacteria.TheChineserese
Theworldisonthetopofastaggeringriseinthenumberofoldpeople,andtheywilllivelongerthaneverbefore.【C1】_______
随机试题
男,25岁,左肩胛下区多年存在局限性湿啰音。提示该处可能存在的病变是
女性,近半年月经不规则,现停经60天,阴道流血12天,量时多时少。妇科检查:宫颈光滑,子宫稍大,质中等硬,双侧附件无异常,为明确诊断最恰当的检查方法是
对于计算土地增值额的扣除项目不包括()。
yOz坐标面上的曲线绕Oz轴旋转一周所生成的旋转曲面方程是()。
按照保险对象的不同可将保险分为()。
破坏性压力可以造成()。
(2017年真题)为了改变学生从课本中找“标准答案”的习惯,刘老师经常在课堂上设计一些开放性问题,引导学生自由讨论、探索答案。同事马老师对刘老师说:“你这样会使学生思维太发散,也浪费时间,将来考试肯定会吃亏的,我从不这样做!”下列选项中正确的是(
打开考生文件夹下的演示文稿yswg.pptx,按照下列要求完成对此文稿的修饰并保存。对第一张幻灯片,主标题文字输入“郑和下西洋”,其字体为“楷体”,字号为63磅,加粗,红色(请用自定义标签的红色250、绿色0、蓝色0)。副标题输入“开辟人类大航海时代
JeffPetersandAndyTuckercouldneverbetrusted.Oneday,thetwomendecidedtoopenamarriagebusinesstomakesomequick
HowtoSucceedinYourLiteratureClassCollegeliteratureclassmayseemdifficulttobeginners,especiallywiththeirlan
最新回复
(
0
)