I stared at words for a while and then wondered what would happen if we gave a pen to a bee
I was writing some notes and stopped to have a break. As I supped my coffee I stared at the words that I had written. As we all know, if you stare at a word for long enough it can mutate back and forth between a ‘meaningful word’ and an ‘alien series of meaningless shapes’.
I wondered how much of our reading skills are learned and how much of them are innate within human-kind.
Recently, I have been hearing a lot about the idea that ‘the ability to cook’, another human trait, was a key prerequisite to the evolution of the human brain that we have today. The theory goes, roughly, like this:
One day our ancestors decided to break down some of the molecules of their food in the pot over a fire instead of breaking all of the molecules down with their stomachs. Therefore, their bodies saved energy by outsourcing a large portion of this process to the fire. This ’saved energy’ could, then, be diverted from the stomach and be used for other cool things like powering a larger brain.
So, I wonder what other human-traits are in fact pre-human traits. With regards to writing, for example, can animals write?
It is said that bees write in the air by doing their figure-of-eight dances to communicate the whereabouts of some juicy flowers. If we could design a Biro that was small enough for a bee to hold I wonder what tomes they could produce. They are certainly hard workers.
I’d bet a swarm of bees with Biros could produce the complete works of Shakespeare faster than a room full of monkeys with typewriters.
Just a thought.
