I had always thought the latter to be a New Zealand fruit that is the source of the name "kiwi".
No, kiwifruit is Chinese. The more you know.
The history of agriculture in New Zealand is very interesting - for such a small country, they sure figured out how to do it well and quite often in very innovative ways.
It's also the country that pretty much 'invented' farm raised venison.
Netherlands, South Africa, New Zealand, Tasmania and Victoria in Australia, and at least some US states that are famous for agriculture: California, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa.
Weight-conscious NZ human farmers have the advantage there.
A kiwi is a New Zealander. In fact while they're both named after the bird, the bird is more often called a kiwi bird than just a kiwi.
A male Red Kangaroo can weigh upwards of 92kg and stand around the 1.8m (6 feet) mark. Some are over two metres tall. I’ve seen a couple giants, well over two metres and biceps as big as my thigh. Anyways, kangaroo sucklings typically way less than one gram.
Although they are special case of mammal.
Kangaroos are also comically dumb.
The article mentions an emerging view it is about "precocity" - larger and better developed babies, and extra yolk being able to provide nutrition to the baby for longer.
Unrelated, I’m starting a new co called “Super-Kiwi” — time-to-market is ~200-300 million years.
Considering that humans evolved out of what were effectively mice at the end of the Cretaceous (~62M years ago), 200M seems wildly out of proportion. Of course you’d still need the right evolutionary pressure and tweak your definition of humanoid.
Yes, and neither did I!
I simply asked o3 (after learning about kiwis), if, given that our common ancestor was ~300m years old, would it be possible in the same time frame (assuming it would be).
o3 vehemently disagreed:
> Not impossible, <bold>just very, very unlikely.</bold>
I then learned about Dollo’s law of irreversibility[0], and onto stick bugs regrowing wings, etc.
Eventually we got to computational estimates for simulation of evolution, which it then got very defensive about:
>“<bold>Utterly out of reach</bold> today.. ”
My takeaway is that LLMs are a lot more human (thinking in the present), than one might assume an AGI to be.
The two main parts of the country are the 12th and 14th largest islands on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_by_area
There's four.
One is icy AF, and another contains 95% of the world's deadly organisms.
Definitely not my area of expertise though, purely a fun speculation.
No, the opposite is the case. You can just scale an animal up. But it won't work well; the larger size requires different support structures than the normal size does. Hence, giant humans tend to be in poor health, with circulatory and other problems.
The reason island populations show size changes is that the tiny environment leaves environmental niches open, and animals of the wrong size can radiate into those empty niches without facing competition from animals that are already filling them more effectively. Island dwarfism is common, and so is island gigantism.
Note that New Zealand obviously is small enough for island dwarfism, since it was small enough for island gigantism. The size seems less relevant than the fact that it was isolated by deep ocean.
Though that occurs in other contexts as well: Antarctica (hardly small) with penguins, Africa (dittos) and ostriches, Australia (again) with emus, and South America (again) with the rhea.
There are also flightless island birds, such as the Guam Rail, Henderson crake, Inaccessible Island rail, and across multiple islands, the cassowary.
Perhaps the larger egg ensures a reduced exposure time between birth and 1kg for young Kiwis, which has helped those with larger eggs propagate more successfully?
LeonB•9mo ago
The causes and consequences of this are worth investigating.
A lot of animals have an architecture where they can’t carry a large brain, so a slightly larger brain is more of a hindrance than a help.
Bipedal animals can balance a heavier brain on their upright frame. But flying animals can’t afford too much extra weight.
I’m not sure what they do with the extra brain cells, but I suspect that their specially evolved nostrils would benefit from a powerful processing unit.
(Pigs for example have a large brain both in comparison to their body and in comparison to all other animals. I think the extra processing there is largely to support their incredible proboscis. Eg their legendary truffle hunting skills.)
I think our early human ancestor’s big brain was particularly useful for visual processing to assist with bipedal running/hunting.
globular-toast•9mo ago
So, no, I don't think the large brain is to do with smell. I think it's more to do with them being quite similar to us which is apparent if you ever encountered a pig. What people do to them is horrible and they don't deserve it.
sdiupIGPWEfh•9mo ago
kylebenzle•9mo ago
mystified5016•9mo ago
Smithalicious•9mo ago
thaumasiotes•9mo ago
That is a terrible "counterexample" to the idea that it's easier to balance a large brain on top of a spinal column than to support it as it sticks out in front of the animal. Whales are aquatic; every part of their body is supported by the water.
pyrale•9mo ago
dredmorbius•9mo ago
(I'm only vaguely aware of the field, but nothing I've heard has suggested that credibly.)
pyrale•9mo ago
My comment was mostly based off DNA left by interbreeding between Neanderthal and Sapiens. Modern humans do carry a small but significant share of DNA inherited from our Neanderthal ancestors [1]. My point was that Genes left by these ancestors were heavily filtered by natural selection for brain-related regions.
That being said, loking it up again now, it seems that more recent publications draw more nuanced conclusions [2]. So maybe my knowledge is out of date, and it's time to pick up the books again :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics [2]: https://www.johnhawks.net/p/many-people-have-a-little-neande...
bregma•9mo ago
Anna: How does he smell?
Alex: Terrible.