To all of you who are considering taking various chemical substances to boost your intelligence—consider the nature of the evolutionary algorithm.
Evolution, as an algorithm, is more suited to optimisation than it is to innovation. The general theme of evolution is of nicely optimised versions of designs with significant flaws in them.
Simple changes, like placing various substances into your bloodstream which affect your neurochemistry, are going to be interacting with chemical systems which already exist, and which evolution can already tune. Why has this optimisation process come up with a different answer to the one that you are proposing by ingesting these substances?
We don’t know, and that’s the point. There must be a reason, though. If it were that easy to increase your brainpower that way, and there were no other drawbacks, this modification would already have been selected for.
If you take them, perhaps you will discover later why this potential evolutionary change was not beneficial, and not selected.
Being able to synthesize vitamin C would have been a huge evolutionary advantage, given how many people died of scurvy throughout history, but evolution never managed it. Other chemicals have the same problem: evolution is severely limited in how many things it can try, which sorts of chemicals it can try, and how large the selection effect has to be for it to take off.
I’m not sure whether it applies to ascorbic acid specifically but for many essential vitamins (and amino acids) humans actually lost the ability to synthesise them where some of our ancestors could. Evolution had higher priorities and didn’t bother maintaining those adaptations when the environment provided a sufficient supply.
As others have said, vitamin C synthesis is something most mammals could do. Apes lost it because there’s not much use for the ability when your diet contains so much fruit. Adaptations with no use get dropped by evolution pretty quickly deterministic way. Once it’s gone, it’s hard to get it back.
Evolution has no problem with small selection effects—even tiny ones work quite nicely once a mutation gets past the early small numbers stage (which admittedly makes mutations less likely to stick.)
Evolution in humans would historically have been quite slow because humans historically had all the wrong traits—long lifetime, slow breeding, small numbers. And the most difficult of traits to evolve is novel chemistry—the bugs that do this best have short lifetimes, fast breeding and enormous numbers—and all that makes a big difference.
There are easy things to evolve. One is to take an existing gene, copy it, and insert it back in roughly the same area. This kind of duplication can easily lead to larger quantities of a chemical being made. This could lead to more of a chemical being made, or more of a chemical receptor. Or it could lead to the chemical being received or created in a new area. It can also be the first step in a process where the second copy becomes slightly different, and then gets used in slightly different places. It can rebalance all sorts of things.
It is the case that you can try chemicals which evolution never would. But so what? They can only influence your brain by plugging into receptors which evolution created to receive something which it can make. A receptor in the brain which your body can’t trigger would most definitely not be something that evolution would keep. I don’t think you can do much that couldn’t equally be done by evolution’s duplicate and modify technique. Most of the things you’re trying have probably already been tried, as duplications are easy mutations to have.
Overall, adding chemicals is operating at the wrong scale. It’s similar to the idea of pouring liquid nitrogen into your PC to make it go faster. You may succeed. But compared to Intel’s contribution it’s not really a breakthrough. The big answers lie elsewhere. And it’s not without its risks.
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
“If God wanted us to fly he would have given us wings!”
We don’t know, and that’s the point. There must be a reason, though. If it were that easy to increase your brainpower that way, and there were no other drawbacks, this modification would already have been selected for.
All else being equal we can expect our evolutionary heritage to be reasonably well optimised. But all else isn’t equal. I don’t have the same goals that the selection for my allelles in the ancestral environment implicitly optimised for. Evolution couldn’t optimise for my specific needs at specific times which is one of the reasons we evolved general intelligence to handle that sort of thing.
Interventions, chemical or otherwise that we would consider using are not selected by random. They are created (often) by intelligent design and then selected for via a process of cultural evolution and empirical study.
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
No, it doesn’t. Cancer and antibiotics are about creating new chemicals to combat an organism that’s evolving against you. I’m talking about evolution that merely changes the quantities of chemicals your body already knows how to make.
Your brain uses chemical signallers—this requires producing a chemical which fits into a receptor somewhere. You’re suggesting either making more of these chemicals, or something that can perhaps jam a receptor. Or something that looks like one of these chemicals. Either of these effects can evolve pretty easily—merely making more or less receptors or chemicals than you already do. I’m not suggesting a hard piece of evolution like evolving the capability to produce a new chemical with a novel effect.
Novel artificial chemicals will either affect receptors you already have, and which already fit chemicals your body can make, or won’t have a cognitive effect at all.
Look at any other part of the body. The parts are pretty well balanced. Your muscles are present in roughly the right quantities to drive limbs of a sensible size. Evolution is very good at balancing the relative quantities of things to make a good overall solution.
Evolving novel structures is hard for evolution. Balancing existing ones is easy. Your chemicals aren’t making novel structures, they’re affecting the balance. Personally I suspect evolution did a good job with that already.
(Didn’t downvote and was rather surprised to see others did.)
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
I concede the weakness of both those analogies.
Evolving novel structures is hard for evolution. Balancing existing ones is easy. Your chemicals aren’t making novel structures, they’re affecting the balance.
My evolutionary heritage does not share my goals and did not occur in western civilisation in the year 2010.
Look at any other part of the body. The parts are pretty well balanced. Your muscles are present in roughly the right quantities to drive limbs of a sensible size.
And this is a good analogy to where the point of contention lays. We need exercise. Optimal physical and mental performance requires large amounts of artificially induced exercise in things like gymnasiums. Evolution didn’t share my goals and didn’t optimise for my environment.
Personally I suspect evolution did a good job with that already.
Science says you are wrong. These are testable phenomena that have been tested.
I agree with your sentence here—“Evolution didn’t share my goals, and didn’t optimise for my environment.” We are going to be seriously suboptimal at living in cities.
Here’s the problem. Most of these mutations are actually pretty easy mutations. They will occur naturally. The systems the mutations act on are also venerable—we share these systems with mice for the most part even though we haven’t had a common ancestor in absolutely ages. The inescapable conclusion is that evolution has tried most if not all of these mutations already, and threw them out. Why would that happen when intelligence has such an advantage? We don’t know—however I think we can consider it almost statistically inevitable that it must have happened on quite a few occasions.
All I’m saying is this—we don’t know why evolution threw these things out. There must be a reason, and that reason may imply that it’s not advisable for you or I to mimic the effect.
There is a flip side—maybe evolution really hasn’t optimised this correctly—selectively speaking we’re largely cavemen with a bit of farmer thrown in. Civilisation really hasn’t been around long enough to make much difference.
So in summary—I think there is evidence to suggest that you’ll be able to change your brain function to enhance measured intelligence by taking certain substances. I also think that nearly all of these changes will correspond to changes that evolution has tried and has rejected—for reasons as yet unknown. Your call.
There must be a reason, though. If it were that easy to increase your brainpower that way, and there were no other drawbacks, this modification would already have been selected for.
If you take them, perhaps you will discover later why this potential evolutionary change was not beneficial, and not selected.
Maybe the ability to synthesize a particular chemical could not (or merely has not yet in humans) be reached by a single change, or a path of individually selected-for single changes. In other words, your argument only works if the reachability of the improvement is high enough, and our species has existed for enough time in an environment where it would be rewarded.
You’re right—my argument is intended for easily reachable improvements.
Your brain is full of neurons that are sending chemical messages to one another. For this to work, the brain has to be able to receive all the messages sent, and to send all the messages received. Your extra chemicals have to change this process somehow, and they can only do this by interfering with the signalling process. But your body already knows how to make these signals.
You’re not creating hard-to-reach improvements by adding chemicals. You can only alter the balance of the chemical network that already exists, and evolution has already balanced that network pretty well.
If you could do something more radical, like adding a different kind of signalling, or fundamentally speeding the thing up, then I’d be interested. But chemicals can do neither of those things.
Thanks. Good thinking about the possible mechanisms for a drug.
I only know of a few general mechanisms for drugs:
1) activate a receptor directly (as you say, this seems like something that evolution could possibly tweak). However, if there are other receptors elsewhere, then it’s possible that the chemical messenger reached by evolution will hit them all, whereas a synthetic compound could be more selective (e.g. SkQ1 is more targeted than anything we naturally produce and seems helpful).
2) block a receptor by partially occupying its jigsaw gaps (metaphorically)
3) act as a specific toxin, or react with another compound, consuming or destroying the target (e.g. chemotherapy—it seems like they’re going to be able to biopsy, sequence the particular cancer gene signature, and create a toxin just for that)
4) change something about the coarse chemical environment (acidity, osmality, etc.) to slow/increase a particular reaction
5) act as a virus, modifying DNA of all or specific cells (someday, maybe)
That’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there are tons more. “receptor” is a pretty abstract concept.
Intelligence isn’t actually all that useful for evolutionary purposes, so there’s no pressing reason for our intelligence to have been optimised.
Comparing humans to all other life forms we know about, I think there’s good evidence that we ARE optimized for intelligence, at least as far as random mutation has so far brought us.
Gah, I had a longish reply written that got eaten when I tried to see my own comment for more context :(
Anyway, the gist of what I was going to say is that tens of thousands of years ago we hit an optimal balance between intelligence and other factors like being able to run for a long time and not having all that much protein in our diet, and it’s only recently (in evolutionary terms) that we’ve stopped needing those other factors. So now there’s a lot more space for optimisation of intelligence.
If the metaphor of “more space” refers to the balance of intelligence and more directly physically useful attributes, and that balance is shifting towards the former, doesn’t that imply that as we get smarter we’ll get less physically fit, or at least no fitter?
If we’re actually selecting for intelligence, then probably yes. But I don’t see a lot of evidence of that happening since guys who are really sporty aren’t exactly selected against in the dating pool.
Actually, now that I think about it it’s probably too flippant to say it’s a direct trade off between running marathons and being smart. It might be something else that gets traded off. Alternatively, the next step might just be for our bodies to adapt to our nigh-unlimited energy intake and start consuming more of it, without anything getting traded. Niche construction theory implies that since we’ve made conditions better for ourselves it’s only a matter of time until we physically adapt to fit the niche more effectively.
the next step might just be for our bodies to adapt to our nigh-unlimited energy intake and start consuming more of it
That’s actually an interesting point. I’m in a biological anthropology class at the moment, and a point that’s been made a few times about human brain evolution is that it uses up a LOT of energy, which definitely was a tradeoff at a time when food input was scarce. (Why this was worth it for us is one of the questions of the field.) It would be neat if first-world humans adapted to the ready supply of food by growing their brains further to use the extra energy. This would, in fact, correspond to an increase in physical fitness, as well as intelligence, because it would help maintain an energy balance.
It’s a flight of fancy, of course, but a fun one.
On a side note, apparently koalas adapted the other way—when they began eating eucalyptus, enabling them to stay in one tree all day instead of roving around searching for food, they needed the brain less and the successful koalas in each generation expended less energy on it. Result: dumber koalas. Still awfully cute though. (I don’t have an academic link about this handy, but this page alludes to their small brains, and the History page mentions that the animal predates the tree. I can probably get a real cite from my anthro teacher if it’s called for. Google image search will serve to cite the cuteness.)
Heh, I’m Australian and so have seen the cuteness many times, and up close :)
I didn’t know they’d gone in that direction though! I learnt that marsupials have basically no brains compared to their placental mammal counterparts but I always assumed that the causation went something like:
Very little food in Australian bush → animals which already had low energy requirements (by being dumb) thrived → no pressure to change because the environment was boring
Let me know if you think you have an answer to the bigger brains question! I recently read a linguistics book about the origins of language, and there was a lot of historical background on our savannah ancestry and how we might have come to need language in the first place. But the author handwaved the brains part completely, just noting that in his scenario where we were scavenging dead mammoths and whatnot, the increased protein and fat would have let us grow bigger brains—nothing about why.
and so have seen the cuteness many times, and up close
I’m jealous. I’m still totally a five-year-old at heart when it comes to fuzzy little mammals.
no pressure to change because the environment was boring
Haha. Well, according to the page I just linked (which I just noticed cites its source as The Koala. Natural History, Conservation & Management. Martin & Handasyde. UNSW Press. 1999. P53), koalas have small brains even among marsupials.
Let me know if you think you have an answer to the bigger brains question!
Don’t hold your breath—I’m not in an anthro program, it just happens to be the science I’m taking (because it’s closer to my area of interest than bio or chem is). However, I can tell you that if you put a ferocious-looking mechanical leopard in chimpanzee territory, upon being “attacked” by the leopard, the chimps will pick up sticks and rocks to throw at it. Way to go, li’l cousins.
To all of you who are considering taking various chemical substances to boost your intelligence—consider the nature of the evolutionary algorithm.
Evolution, as an algorithm, is more suited to optimisation than it is to innovation. The general theme of evolution is of nicely optimised versions of designs with significant flaws in them.
Simple changes, like placing various substances into your bloodstream which affect your neurochemistry, are going to be interacting with chemical systems which already exist, and which evolution can already tune. Why has this optimisation process come up with a different answer to the one that you are proposing by ingesting these substances?
We don’t know, and that’s the point. There must be a reason, though. If it were that easy to increase your brainpower that way, and there were no other drawbacks, this modification would already have been selected for.
If you take them, perhaps you will discover later why this potential evolutionary change was not beneficial, and not selected.
Being able to synthesize vitamin C would have been a huge evolutionary advantage, given how many people died of scurvy throughout history, but evolution never managed it. Other chemicals have the same problem: evolution is severely limited in how many things it can try, which sorts of chemicals it can try, and how large the selection effect has to be for it to take off.
I’m not sure whether it applies to ascorbic acid specifically but for many essential vitamins (and amino acids) humans actually lost the ability to synthesise them where some of our ancestors could. Evolution had higher priorities and didn’t bother maintaining those adaptations when the environment provided a sufficient supply.
It does apply to C: all mammals but primates, bats, and guinea pigs synthesize it.
As others have said, vitamin C synthesis is something most mammals could do. Apes lost it because there’s not much use for the ability when your diet contains so much fruit. Adaptations with no use get dropped by evolution pretty quickly deterministic way. Once it’s gone, it’s hard to get it back.
Evolution has no problem with small selection effects—even tiny ones work quite nicely once a mutation gets past the early small numbers stage (which admittedly makes mutations less likely to stick.)
Evolution in humans would historically have been quite slow because humans historically had all the wrong traits—long lifetime, slow breeding, small numbers. And the most difficult of traits to evolve is novel chemistry—the bugs that do this best have short lifetimes, fast breeding and enormous numbers—and all that makes a big difference.
There are easy things to evolve. One is to take an existing gene, copy it, and insert it back in roughly the same area. This kind of duplication can easily lead to larger quantities of a chemical being made. This could lead to more of a chemical being made, or more of a chemical receptor. Or it could lead to the chemical being received or created in a new area. It can also be the first step in a process where the second copy becomes slightly different, and then gets used in slightly different places. It can rebalance all sorts of things.
It is the case that you can try chemicals which evolution never would. But so what? They can only influence your brain by plugging into receptors which evolution created to receive something which it can make. A receptor in the brain which your body can’t trigger would most definitely not be something that evolution would keep. I don’t think you can do much that couldn’t equally be done by evolution’s duplicate and modify technique. Most of the things you’re trying have probably already been tried, as duplications are easy mutations to have.
Overall, adding chemicals is operating at the wrong scale. It’s similar to the idea of pouring liquid nitrogen into your PC to make it go faster. You may succeed. But compared to Intel’s contribution it’s not really a breakthrough. The big answers lie elsewhere. And it’s not without its risks.
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
“If God wanted us to fly he would have given us wings!”
All else being equal we can expect our evolutionary heritage to be reasonably well optimised. But all else isn’t equal. I don’t have the same goals that the selection for my allelles in the ancestral environment implicitly optimised for. Evolution couldn’t optimise for my specific needs at specific times which is one of the reasons we evolved general intelligence to handle that sort of thing.
Interventions, chemical or otherwise that we would consider using are not selected by random. They are created (often) by intelligent design and then selected for via a process of cultural evolution and empirical study.
Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?
No, it doesn’t. Cancer and antibiotics are about creating new chemicals to combat an organism that’s evolving against you. I’m talking about evolution that merely changes the quantities of chemicals your body already knows how to make.
Your brain uses chemical signallers—this requires producing a chemical which fits into a receptor somewhere. You’re suggesting either making more of these chemicals, or something that can perhaps jam a receptor. Or something that looks like one of these chemicals. Either of these effects can evolve pretty easily—merely making more or less receptors or chemicals than you already do. I’m not suggesting a hard piece of evolution like evolving the capability to produce a new chemical with a novel effect.
Novel artificial chemicals will either affect receptors you already have, and which already fit chemicals your body can make, or won’t have a cognitive effect at all.
Look at any other part of the body. The parts are pretty well balanced. Your muscles are present in roughly the right quantities to drive limbs of a sensible size. Evolution is very good at balancing the relative quantities of things to make a good overall solution.
Evolving novel structures is hard for evolution. Balancing existing ones is easy. Your chemicals aren’t making novel structures, they’re affecting the balance. Personally I suspect evolution did a good job with that already.
(Didn’t downvote and was rather surprised to see others did.)
I concede the weakness of both those analogies.
My evolutionary heritage does not share my goals and did not occur in western civilisation in the year 2010.
And this is a good analogy to where the point of contention lays. We need exercise. Optimal physical and mental performance requires large amounts of artificially induced exercise in things like gymnasiums. Evolution didn’t share my goals and didn’t optimise for my environment.
Science says you are wrong. These are testable phenomena that have been tested.
I agree with your sentence here—“Evolution didn’t share my goals, and didn’t optimise for my environment.” We are going to be seriously suboptimal at living in cities.
There’s also no shortage of articles about improved intelligence. For example.… http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/smart_mice.php
Here’s the problem. Most of these mutations are actually pretty easy mutations. They will occur naturally. The systems the mutations act on are also venerable—we share these systems with mice for the most part even though we haven’t had a common ancestor in absolutely ages. The inescapable conclusion is that evolution has tried most if not all of these mutations already, and threw them out. Why would that happen when intelligence has such an advantage? We don’t know—however I think we can consider it almost statistically inevitable that it must have happened on quite a few occasions.
All I’m saying is this—we don’t know why evolution threw these things out. There must be a reason, and that reason may imply that it’s not advisable for you or I to mimic the effect.
There is a flip side—maybe evolution really hasn’t optimised this correctly—selectively speaking we’re largely cavemen with a bit of farmer thrown in. Civilisation really hasn’t been around long enough to make much difference.
So in summary—I think there is evidence to suggest that you’ll be able to change your brain function to enhance measured intelligence by taking certain substances. I also think that nearly all of these changes will correspond to changes that evolution has tried and has rejected—for reasons as yet unknown. Your call.
Maybe the ability to synthesize a particular chemical could not (or merely has not yet in humans) be reached by a single change, or a path of individually selected-for single changes. In other words, your argument only works if the reachability of the improvement is high enough, and our species has existed for enough time in an environment where it would be rewarded.
I think you’re saying what I mean, but I’m not quite sure, so here’s how I came at it:
Evolution relies on mutation, and mutation is random. If a certain feature is currently observed, that doesn’t mean the mutation has already occurred and been selected against; it might just not have occurred, or not widely enough to catch on. For example—just because skinks lay eggs doesn’t mean live birth isn’t a good mutation for some of them.
In general, I don’t know that it’s ever accurate to talk about evolution in the past tense when referring to a living species.
You’re right—my argument is intended for easily reachable improvements.
Your brain is full of neurons that are sending chemical messages to one another. For this to work, the brain has to be able to receive all the messages sent, and to send all the messages received. Your extra chemicals have to change this process somehow, and they can only do this by interfering with the signalling process. But your body already knows how to make these signals.
You’re not creating hard-to-reach improvements by adding chemicals. You can only alter the balance of the chemical network that already exists, and evolution has already balanced that network pretty well.
If you could do something more radical, like adding a different kind of signalling, or fundamentally speeding the thing up, then I’d be interested. But chemicals can do neither of those things.
I think you’re assuming that all brains are in pretty good shape, but there are people who benefit tremendously from psych drugs.
It doesn’t seem implausible that there are people who’d benefit from less drastic tweakage.
Thanks. Good thinking about the possible mechanisms for a drug.
I only know of a few general mechanisms for drugs:
1) activate a receptor directly (as you say, this seems like something that evolution could possibly tweak). However, if there are other receptors elsewhere, then it’s possible that the chemical messenger reached by evolution will hit them all, whereas a synthetic compound could be more selective (e.g. SkQ1 is more targeted than anything we naturally produce and seems helpful).
2) block a receptor by partially occupying its jigsaw gaps (metaphorically)
3) act as a specific toxin, or react with another compound, consuming or destroying the target (e.g. chemotherapy—it seems like they’re going to be able to biopsy, sequence the particular cancer gene signature, and create a toxin just for that)
4) change something about the coarse chemical environment (acidity, osmality, etc.) to slow/increase a particular reaction
5) act as a virus, modifying DNA of all or specific cells (someday, maybe)
That’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there are tons more. “receptor” is a pretty abstract concept.
Intelligence isn’t actually all that useful for evolutionary purposes, so there’s no pressing reason for our intelligence to have been optimised.
There’s also a large difference between synthesising useful chemicals yourself and taking them in concentrated forms that don’t occur naturally.
Comparing humans to all other life forms we know about, I think there’s good evidence that we ARE optimized for intelligence, at least as far as random mutation has so far brought us.
Gah, I had a longish reply written that got eaten when I tried to see my own comment for more context :(
Anyway, the gist of what I was going to say is that tens of thousands of years ago we hit an optimal balance between intelligence and other factors like being able to run for a long time and not having all that much protein in our diet, and it’s only recently (in evolutionary terms) that we’ve stopped needing those other factors. So now there’s a lot more space for optimisation of intelligence.
If the metaphor of “more space” refers to the balance of intelligence and more directly physically useful attributes, and that balance is shifting towards the former, doesn’t that imply that as we get smarter we’ll get less physically fit, or at least no fitter?
If we’re actually selecting for intelligence, then probably yes. But I don’t see a lot of evidence of that happening since guys who are really sporty aren’t exactly selected against in the dating pool.
Actually, now that I think about it it’s probably too flippant to say it’s a direct trade off between running marathons and being smart. It might be something else that gets traded off. Alternatively, the next step might just be for our bodies to adapt to our nigh-unlimited energy intake and start consuming more of it, without anything getting traded. Niche construction theory implies that since we’ve made conditions better for ourselves it’s only a matter of time until we physically adapt to fit the niche more effectively.
That’s actually an interesting point. I’m in a biological anthropology class at the moment, and a point that’s been made a few times about human brain evolution is that it uses up a LOT of energy, which definitely was a tradeoff at a time when food input was scarce. (Why this was worth it for us is one of the questions of the field.) It would be neat if first-world humans adapted to the ready supply of food by growing their brains further to use the extra energy. This would, in fact, correspond to an increase in physical fitness, as well as intelligence, because it would help maintain an energy balance.
It’s a flight of fancy, of course, but a fun one.
On a side note, apparently koalas adapted the other way—when they began eating eucalyptus, enabling them to stay in one tree all day instead of roving around searching for food, they needed the brain less and the successful koalas in each generation expended less energy on it. Result: dumber koalas. Still awfully cute though. (I don’t have an academic link about this handy, but this page alludes to their small brains, and the History page mentions that the animal predates the tree. I can probably get a real cite from my anthro teacher if it’s called for. Google image search will serve to cite the cuteness.)
Heh, I’m Australian and so have seen the cuteness many times, and up close :)
I didn’t know they’d gone in that direction though! I learnt that marsupials have basically no brains compared to their placental mammal counterparts but I always assumed that the causation went something like:
Very little food in Australian bush → animals which already had low energy requirements (by being dumb) thrived → no pressure to change because the environment was boring
Let me know if you think you have an answer to the bigger brains question! I recently read a linguistics book about the origins of language, and there was a lot of historical background on our savannah ancestry and how we might have come to need language in the first place. But the author handwaved the brains part completely, just noting that in his scenario where we were scavenging dead mammoths and whatnot, the increased protein and fat would have let us grow bigger brains—nothing about why.
I’m jealous. I’m still totally a five-year-old at heart when it comes to fuzzy little mammals.
Haha. Well, according to the page I just linked (which I just noticed cites its source as The Koala. Natural History, Conservation & Management. Martin & Handasyde. UNSW Press. 1999. P53), koalas have small brains even among marsupials.
Don’t hold your breath—I’m not in an anthro program, it just happens to be the science I’m taking (because it’s closer to my area of interest than bio or chem is). However, I can tell you that if you put a ferocious-looking mechanical leopard in chimpanzee territory, upon being “attacked” by the leopard, the chimps will pick up sticks and rocks to throw at it. Way to go, li’l cousins.
Just mammals? I’ve petted an owl. It was softer than a chinchilla.
Good point! A set of fuzzy animals which has a large intersection with mammals.
Wow.
Good point! A set of fuzzy animals which has a large intersection with mammals.