A Cerebral Cortex Makes Animals Programmable

As we ascend the scale of cerebral development the possibility of teaching increases. It becomes possible to domesticate and train these higher-brain animals in just the measure that their brains are developed. You can teach very little to a fish or a reptile, but directly you come to the higher cerebral mammals you are confronted by the new possibility of establishing an artificial, taught, motive system to control, supplement or altogether replace natural instinct. You must catch them young...

 Mark Twain's Description of Evolution

Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church. They take that speck and breed from it: first a flea; then a fly, then a bug, then cross these and get a fish, then a raft of fishes, all kinds, then cross the whole lot and get a reptile, then work...

 Plesiosaurs Sucked

There were no real sea serpents in the Mesozoic Era, but the plesiosaurs were the next thing to it. The plesiosaurs were reptiles who had gone back to the water because it seemed like a good idea at the time. As they knew little or nothing about swimming, they rowed themselves around in the water with their four paddles, instead of using their tails for propulsion like the brighter marine animals. (Such as the ichthyosaurs, who used their paddles for balancing and steering. The plesiosaurs di...

 Amniotic Sac as Space Suit

The most fundamental innovation is the evolution of another fluid-filled sac, the amnion. in which the embryo floats. Amniotic fluid has roughly the same composition as seawater, so that in a very real sense, the amnion is the continuation of the original fish or amphibian eggs together with its microenvironment, just as a space suit contains an astronaut and a fluid that mimics the earth's atmosphere. All of the rest of the amniote egg is add-on technology that is also required for life in a...