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Here is a modest mystery for you-all. We all know that human
babies scream a lot. Meanwhile, the equivalently-young of all
other species are super-quiet. Making noise attracts predators!
So, if human babies scream, while being MORE physically
helpless
than any other infant animal on Earth,
where is the evolutionary
advantage to that?
Well, consider the "play pen". How long have such cages
existed? What if....
Just to make this a proper Halfbakery Idea, let's start with a
tesseract (see link). That 4-dimensional object can be viewed
from various 3D perspectives, one of which features an inner
cube
and an outer
cube. Let us consider both cubes to be "cage-like" in their
construction.
The human adults that built the cage now put the world's first
(surviving) screaming baby into the inner cage, and hide.
A predator arrives, attracted by the noise. It cannot reach the
baby because of the distance between the two cages. But now
the
adults can surprise-attack and kill the predator, with
overwhelming force/numbers. The baby was
bait for a
trap! For each predator that tries to take the bait and gets
killed, that makes the countryside a little bit safer for human
hunters. Humans prosper, and the world's first surviving
screaming baby gets to
grow up and pass on the genes responsible for screaming babies.
A million years later, practically all human babies scream.
Tesseract
http://www.daviddar...mages/tesseract.jpg As mentioned in the main text. This is of course only a 3D representation of a 4D object, but it is still useful! [Vernon, Jun 18 2015]
Cube cage
http://mimg.ugo.com...bandits_480x270.jpg Well, this example is not a perfect cube, but so what? Oh, and this picture shows another way to keep a baby in a cage (a less-fancy cage than the one described in the main text) out of reach of predators. [Vernon, Jun 18 2015, last modified Jun 19 2015]
Modern baby trap
http://www.amazon.c...-Peck/dp/0523009038 FYI, for those who don't know. [Vernon, Jun 18 2015]
Some data about baby abilities
http://www.nytimes....ess-and-chubby.html FYI. Several species are mentioned. [Vernon, Jun 19 2015]
A man, a cage, and predators
http://i.ytimg.com/...0/maxresdefault.jpg FYI [Vernon, Jun 27 2015]
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wow! You've left them speechless. really a shark proof cage for land animals isn't it? |
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Imaginary babies work best for this. |
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Could the babies subsequently be compressed to extract commercial quantities of baby oil ? |
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