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.
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
Definitely not my area of expertise though, purely a fun speculation.
LeonB•13h 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•7h 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•5h ago
kylebenzle•4h ago
pyrale•5h ago
bregma•5h ago
Anna: How does he smell?
Alex: Terrible.