1: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/014...
"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.
No, but the brain can replace brain tissue for one task with brain tissue for another task. It's called neuroplasticity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity#Treatment_of_b...
I agree with the GP, if there's one characterization that applies to the brain, it's "versatile".
Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.
There's absolutely a part of the brain that specializes processing visual information, just as there are organs throughout the rest of your body that specialize with other different tasks.
(2) There is a goal: species survival.
(3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).
Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.
This is not very far fetched. Much of our DNA is used for a short time during development and then effectively turns off for the rest of our life. Taking that DNA away might go unnoticed.
like, you didn't intend to type anything, it was just a series random processes that resulted in some text, but by convention, it's nice to say that you meant to write something.
Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?
They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned.
It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.
Imho that isn't related to swimming. That's them trying to keep their heads above water by standing up, hopefully in relatively shallow water. Even with drowning adults, they don't so much try to swim as try to grasp onto something.
Compare dogs. They have a swimming instinct dedicated to movement. Dogs don't tread. They move forwards. We flail around trying to climb out of the water. They are trying to get to shore. That has to be some sort of evolutionary relic speaking to very different ancestral environments.
Polar bears instincts accommodate both treading water and swimming within moments:
You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck".
Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.
Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.
I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that even the best of us can only swim about as well as the average dog. So pity us on the day we find a creature actually designed for reading.