spandrel

Excess height as a spandrel that comes with improved nutrition?

As such the spandrel will decay or be repurposed in some adaptive fashion.

Perhaps the spandrel is piggybacking on the ego.

Thank you for the enlightenment, whether or not absolute pitch is indeed a spandrel.

Noam Chomsky also argued [0] that the "language faculty" evolved as a spandrel.

I cannot see how spandrels would be particularly controversial, though you need to have the right perspective of such.

Thus any mutations that effect the spandrel but not the parent feature will have no selective advantage or disadvantage.

You explain why but not how. Is it a spandrel from some other evolutionary trait that eventually became something important?

N-GP wrote: > From an evolutionary perspective, what could possibly be the reason for this?and my point is “there need not be one at all, perhaps absolute pitch is a spandrel.”

I believe a spandrel in theory to be the potential minus the solution at hand; in certain problem spaces a spandrel may be present in the optimal solution.

Also, utilitarianism never claims something is "wrong" or "right" -- that's a spandrel from deontology.

Others see natural selection as just one of many evolutionary forces, and so gravitate towards a spandrel-based explanation.

Boredom might be a spandrel, a decorative side-effect, of intelligence, which is probably the chief evolutionary advantage of human beings.

> any gene specifically addressing alcohol could not possibly have evolved in the brief time the new world native communities were genetically disconnected from europe/asia/africaIt could have been a spandrel.

Once you dive into the weirdness of biology and the madness of evo-devo, one of the first things that strikes you is how weird biology is and how many strange compromises bodies make as a consequence of selective pressures, and how many "spandrels" or side-effects there are.