Excellent find!

Umm...

Okay, so lets take this apart.

Premise: Evo-Devo can't explain early human brain growth.
I'll leave this be, there are a number of theories, which while none is clearly true, make an effort, but he doesn't mention any of them so lets look at his.

1) mushrooms add visual acuity in small doses +survival
2) mushrooms make males horny in small doses +reproduce
3) mushrooms make you catatonic in large doses ---survival and creative/intelligent +?

This seems at best a wash for mushrooms->survival, and still does not address brain growth.

If mushrooms give us extra creativity, then why would we build extra brain matter that does the same thing? I don't see how this, in any way, addresses the issue of brain growth in humans, as he claims to at the outset, whereas "language", "throwing stuff" and "complex social groups" all constitute gradual advantages provided by brain growth that provide evolutionary advantage in a planes environment.

What is he wearing? A velvet plush sweater?

Groovy.

Seems like a LeMarkian view of evolution. I dig the idea but I don't think it has much scientific validity

Yeah, its a neat idea but I have a hard time believing the beginning of language was an ape tripping on mushrooms.

As much as I love listening to Terence wax poetic on the tributes of heroic doses of psilocybin, I agree that there is not much of a scientific basis behind his stoned ape theory.

A better understanding of the origins of language are to be found in Adam's Tongue.

>> ^acidSpine:

Seems like a LeMarkian view of evolution. I dig the idea but I don't think it has much scientific validity

Seems to me that all animals have language to some degree. There may be more or less complexity but it is a matter of degrees not a clear line. I would suspect that as we evolved so did the complexity of our language.

-karl