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TIL: males have 25% more neurons in the visual cortex than females
(medicalxpress.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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ok so, here's my theory. The obvious answer here is that this is obviously "for hunting" or something. But evolution doesn't really work that way.
So my take on this is that this is actually an evolutionary adaptation to the different structure of the male body, as well as it's general abilities, and how they have been used throughout humanity. If men are generally stronger, taller, and faster runners, wouldn't it make sense that the visual processing would be adapted to be more responsive to these use cases?
this seems like the only realistic answer to me. Something about men must be different enough, or at the very least, have been used differently enough at some point in time for a long enough period of time, that it has to have been an evolutionary adaptation.
Not sure what your mean by it doesn't work that way
If men were predominantly doing the hunting, women would be more likely to choose a more successful hunter (more likely to pass on their genes if they have a better mate)
Also in general the ones who were better at hunting and their mates would be more likely to survive long enough to have children
it's essentially an excessive over simplification of something that's not perfectly accurate, that's the problem.
While it would apply to hunting, when you're talking about something like visual acuity, it's super broad in the applications that it's useful in. Even things such as not falling over would be beneficially influenced by better visual acuity. You could argue that men just stopped falling over and dying as frequently, leading to evolutionary selection over time, but that's probably not super accurate lol.
I would argue there that there's a limit to how much better eyesight would affect things like that though, falling over and dying
Using that example if someone's vision is like an old CRT they might not see a root or something, trip over and die. If they have 1920x1080 they might see it if they have 4k they definitely see it.
Hunting however can benefit limitlessly, the further away you can see the better you can track
that specific example was a little bit hyperbolic, but i think there is likely a general improvement with the ability to sight vision and small discrepancies in things.
Also you're talking about visual clarity, this is specifically about being able to detect motion better.
as for why this matters for shit like not falling over and dying? Well cool little story, sometimes humans like to move around. Things around us move in relation to ourselves, so it could be expected to see some benefit in that regard as well.
I'm not arguing good vision is not important for general survival, but I think hunting has a higher ceiling of usefulness for good vision than anything else humans did in that period
that's certainly a possibility. It's likely to be a significant part of it, that's for sure.
I was thinking it was more to do with dancing, possibly even music. It could even be something really weird.
Usually the way to identify if its about hunting/war or not is to find the exceptions and links: do hunters that perform really, really well have 3x the visual cortex neurons? Is it a socialization thing where doing certain tasks results in higher brain differentiation?
There's a lot of questions
You're thinking of Homo Groovensis, the famous hunter dancerers.
hell yeah those guys fucking ripped shit up
hmm, that's definitely interesting.
yeah, this is why i think it's more of a secondary adaptation, as opposed to something directly evolving from the needs of hunting for example. Something like this is generally broad, and generally applied, usually. So i would think the cause would as well.
One thing that i thought of was a nightwatch position, the heightened visual acuity would be highly valuable in a low visibility environment. So maybe it's something like co-evolution? Where females developed more accurate color perception, while males developed more accurate movement perception.
we're probably thinking too hard about it, and it's probably just evolution trolling us and giving us the best of both worlds because we are in fact a socialized species. So this could stem from our social aspect, not directly, but the benefit of it in a social aspect is vastly more impactful, leading to more socialization, and further development of this adaptation.
Women do prefer men who show attention to detail. It's why men's attire meant to look good, often contains buckles, buttons and pins that give it a slight touch of detail.
Oh so that's where I fuck up.