User talk:Eighty5cacao/misc/Eloi physiology (fanon)

Caste offs
In User talk:Eighty5cacao/Eloi physiology, I suggested diagnosing the Eloi appearing in The Time Machine with inattentive ADHD. That raises another question: are there Eloi elsewhere that aren't so inattentive? Might the community depicted in the novel be where mainstream society casts off its 'tards to the Morlocks? --Tepples 15:52, 28 February 2011 (MST)
 * I wouldn't agree with that exactly. I have considered the possibility that somewhere far from the Time Traveller's native London area, there exists another species which self-identifies as "Eloi" but lives in a habitat free (or nearly free) of Morlocks. Perhaps no Morlocks live there due to an absence of the drugged plants with which the Morlocks usually feed the Eloi.
 * These "Virgin Eloi" would differ from the canonical "Common Eloi" in being slightly more intelligent and less progenetic, i.e. later sexual maturity. (This terminology is not attested in-universe.) In this hypothesis, the Common Eloi are a separate species rather than merely the "'tards" of the Virgin Eloi. There would not be sufficient variation in intelligence within either Eloi species for mental retardation to be statistically well-defined. This page will focus on the Common Eloi for now, though the differences wouldn't be large enough to merit more than a brief "Comparison" section.
 * Migration between communities would be voluntary and of limited distance. I'm thinking that an alternative to walking might involve swimming in rivers along the direction of the current, which is why I included a section on swimming ability.
 * Admittedly, it's difficult to determine which traits are due to heredity and which are influenced by the drugs/other environmental factors. Eighty5cacao 16:48, 28 February 2011 (MST) (last edit 20:18, 2 June 2015 (UTC))
 * To answer a potential question: "So Weena is a Virgin Eloi who migrated from another community?" Nope. I neglected to mention that the Virgin Eloi might also have slightly darker skin. The Traveller would have been able to see this, but he didn't mention anything, so we can assume Weena is of the same Common Eloi species as others in the vicinity. I suspect that the Virgin Eloi diet would make greater use of fish as needed to support higher levels of physical and mental activity, hence contributing more vitamin D. (Possibly also iodine from other seafood, depending on habitat) Eighty5cacao 14:08, 30 May 2011 (MST)
 * Further to the above, the Virgin Eloi would have more ragged clothing made of different materials (less-processed plant or animal fibers) because they have no Morlocks to manufacture their clothes.
 * In general, the Eloi of the 2002 film look more similar to the Virgin Eloi than to the Common Eloi, as described here. Eighty5cacao 15:15, 25 August 2011 (MST)
 * While researching the Goodenough Draw-A-Person test, I happened upon a real world parallel to the common/virgin split: the Yaqui of Mexico. A study of Yaqui children exposed to pesticides[ref]Elizabeth A. Guillette et al. "An Anthropological Approach to the Evaluation of Preschool Children Exposed to Pesticides in Mexico". Environmental Health Perspectives, V.106, N.6, 1998-06. Accessed 2015-06-01.[/ref] shows marked difference in "person" drawings, stamina, and play patterns between children raised in the valley compared to an unexposed control group in the foothills. It makes me blame Morlock pesticides even more. --Tepples (talk) 02:24, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Acknowledged. I previously mentioned endocrine disruptors at User:Eighty5cacao/Eloi physiology, but that discussion is more about the Eloi in general vs. the Morlocks. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 04:53, 2 June 2015 (UTC) (+ 20:43, 6 June 2015 (UTC))

The first rule of Morlocks
Compare the taboo deformations of various Indo-European languages' words for "bear": Latin and Greek developed their words from a form that might be rendered as *harkthos, while Germanic euphemized it as "the brown one" and Slavic went with "the honey eater" (medved and the like). --Tepples 06:23, 9 April 2011 (MST)
 * Ok, I'll keep that in mind, though this page is about linguistics only to the extent that vocal tract physiology is relevant. I brought up the Fight Club line merely because I thought many people would be familiar with it. Eighty5cacao 10:19, 9 April 2011 (MST) (last edit 15:41, 10 April 2011 (MST))
 * Discussion has moved to User talk:Eighty5cacao/misc/Eloi physiology (fanon)/Weena. Eighty5cacao 15:49, 26 October 2011 (MST)

Inevitability
And even if they could recognize pre-drowning agitation or the drowning reflex, that doesn't necessarily mean they would know how to make a safe rescue. They might just have it a cultural given that at some point, drowning is inevitable. Compare the scene from the 1993 film Once Upon a Forest where the wrens couldn't figure out how to save Bosworth. --Tepples 12:02, 16 May 2011 (MST)
 * Ok. I guess some major rewording might be necessary to work this all in in a logically consistent manner, although the WMG is meant to be some fundamental difference in respiratory physiology that makes (completed, fatal) drowning less likely in the first place, meaning less practice handling drowning situations. (I won't give too much away here.) Eighty5cacao 14:49, 16 May 2011 (MST)

Eating their young
Are any Morlock children seen in The Time Machine? Wikipedia has an article about Pak Protector, and it's not about the plastic dust covers that came with Super NES cartridges during the system's early years. --Tepples 08:29, 11 July 2011 (MST)
 * I don't believe so, but I have been wondering for quite a while how the Morlocks dispose of dead individuals of their own species. Related to this is the question of infant mortality rates. More general WMG about TTM might belong better in another article, though. Eighty5cacao 09:03, 11 July 2011 (MST)
 * In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, the child and adult forms of early hominans (Homo habilis) are what Pokémon would call the first two evolutionary stages of the Pak species, the third being the Pak Protector. A trigger virus that grows in Tree-of-Life yams is needed to trigger the metamorphosis of a Breeder (adult H. habilis) into a Protector, just as a Thunderstone is needed to turn a Pikachu into a Raichu. But because of the thallium-poor soil of Earth, the virus failed to thrive, so instead, the Pak evolved (in the biological sense) to become more intelligent at the Breeder stage, through H. erectus to H. sapiens, with the side effect of incomplete expression of other Protector traits among the elderly.
 * Now how does Known Space relate to The Time Machine? It again comes back to yams. Perhaps the Eloi are the not-fully-metamorphosed form of Morlocks. What brought me back to this topic was something I recently read about the people of the Kiriwina Islands (formerly Trobriand Islands), who traditionally ate contraceptive yams (possibly Dioscorea villosa?) as a staple food. This caused their culture to lose the connection between sex and pregnancy. (Isaac Mook. "The 6 Craziest Beliefs Entire Cultures Have Held About Sex". Cracked, 2012-12-31. Accessed 2013-01-03.) So if a staple food can suppress the pregnancy reaction, why not have a food either trigger or suppress puberty? --Tepples (talk) 23:57, 2 January 2013 (CST)
 * This is all fine from the perspective of "pure" biology, but it's rather inconvenient for the fanon structure I have in my head, not to mention astronomically far from canon. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 10:02, 3 January 2013 (CST) (last edit 12:49, 22 January 2013 (CST))
 * What exactly rules out the possibility that those Eloi who don't get eaten "evolve" into Morlocks? Compare the tadpole story in a recent Cracked article. Show me how it's ruled out by canon and I'll drop this topic. --Tepples (talk) 10:07, 3 January 2013 (CST) (fixed 12:40, 4 January 2013 (CST))
 * Uh... sorry for the sloppiness again. Nothing specifically rules that out, nor is it jossed to the best of my knowledge. It's just that the fanfic that I'd like to write assumes the (commonly accepted) canonical separation between the Eloi and Morlock species. But to point to some previous discussion about the difficulties:
 * This makes it harder to explain baby schema behavior differences between the Eloi and Morlocks – but admittedly not that much harder. For a couple of reasons this might matter, see the second paragraph of this section (my reply to this section's OP, beginning with "I don't believe so, but I have been wondering").
 * "[S]uppose that the the [sic] raw [plant] materials in a community are decimated by a climatic disturbance[, ] overharvesting[, and/or disease]. The Morlocks might not know enough science to fix the problem, as their knowledge is more practical than theoretical."
 * The Morlocks may or may not have the physical fitness to walk to another community to seek more crops, especially if they are already malnourished. In particular, they may be optimized for anaerobic exercise, with muscles containing mostly fast-twitch fibers, so they may not have good endurance. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 10:20, 3 January 2013 (CST) (last edit 05:05, 24 April 2013 (UTC))

On the other hand, paragraph 12 of chapter 4 describes one edible plant as "a floury thing in a three-sided husk." Could this be the yam-like plant you had in mind? (also added a bit to the above quote) --Eighty5cacao (talk) 22:38, 3 January 2013 (CST)
 * I'm not sure. But the Cracked article I was thinking of earlier is #5 of "5 Animals Who Live Through a Horror Movie Every Day": becoming the big frog in the little pond. Remember that the Time Traveller is only in the future for a couple weeks at most and doesn't attempt to learn Morlock customs. --Tepples (talk) 12:40, 4 January 2013 (CST)
 * Just for fun; this may not be the best venue: An IMDb commenter said, "What's stopping the Eloi people from trying to eat any of the Morlocks?" More detailed explanation to come later, if at all --Eighty5cacao (talk) 17:33, 15 February 2013 (CST)
 * Today on Cracked: Mogwai becomes Gremlin. At that point I felt I could take this conjecture to you know where. --Tepples (talk) 22:41, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Acknowledged. I still don't think your hypotheses are necessarily better than the conventional scholarship, for at least two three reasons. But then again, that's how WMG works... (Administrivia: I don't read Flashbacks as regularly as Cracked ' s current content.) --Eighty5cacao (talk) 05:26, 11 April 2013 (UTC) (last edit 07:12, 23 April 2013 (UTC))

You expanded your comment to mention lack of endurance. Analogy to cheetahs perhaps? --Tepples (talk) 14:32, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * No objection. (Did said expansion violate some rule of wikiquette?)  links will follow later, as I'm a bit busy now. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 16:49, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * No critical wikiquette violation, just wanted to get in cheetahs as a real-life example of the concept that you introduced in your edit and to explain why I didn't bring up cheetahs earlier. --Tepples (talk) 17:05, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Pandas are cute, the babies not so much.(ref)E. Reid Ross. "7 Adorable Animals That Spawn Terrifying Babies". Cracked, 2014-02-01. Accessed 2014-02-01.(/ref) If our baby schema can desync that much with that of a mama panda, that makes it all the more plausible for the Eloi and Morlock baby schemas to desync. --Tepples (talk) 21:20, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I saw that; no complaints about that specific article, but I still think the other two objections could be decisive. (I should have picked a better Cracked article to post about today - and this after I made an exception to my usual "no reading the top row" rule.) --Eighty5cacao (talk) 21:52, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ...and I'd also like to object that one writer's experience [//blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/01/02/yeinu-your-experience-is-not-universal/ is not universal] (admittedly stretching the term a bit), as can be seen from the comments on the Cracked article in question. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 06:19, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm aware that Discover Magazine has just published an article on this very topic, mentioning tadpoles as well as TTM, but I don't believe there is much to add to this discussion. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 22:10, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

TODO: Immune system
This is on the fanon page only because the canonical text mentions nothing.

Some readers have raised concern that the Time Traveller may have carried diseases which would ultimately have decimated local Eloi and/or Morlock communities due to lack of immunity. (See for example the Fridge subpage of the TVT/AtT article). I personally do not believe that this is a significant issue, because the innate immune system of human descendants may have improved due to artificial and/or natural selection at some time when advanced technology was still available.

Could an infectious disease have contributed to Weena's collapse? (Probably not likely, in light of the above) Eighty5cacao 15:21, 25 August 2011 (MST)
 * An Anglo bringing disease to the Eloi isn't so far-fetched, as Anglos had brought infections to the Native Americans. --Tepples 12:10, 31 December 2011 (MST)
 * I didn't mean to rule out that possibility. All I meant was that an infectious disease is less likely than a cardiovascular and/or metabolic cause for Weena's incapacitation. If Weena had been showing symptoms such as fever, runny nose, or rashes, the Traveller should have made that clear to an extent greater than the unreliability of the narration. Admittedly, he said his own health was in question, but that could also refer to general fatigue. Eighty5cacao 16:51, 31 December 2011 (MST)
 * On the other hand, I've started thinking about the possibility that the Eloi (and/or Morlocks?) could have passed a disease back to the Traveller; that is, the Eloi could have carried microbes that are benign to the Eloi themselves but have disease effects on present-day humans. A sufficiently serious disease could explain the Traveller's failure to return to the present time, though the mechanism could be just about anything, from an upper respiratory infection to an alteration of brain chemistry... Eighty5cacao 00:44, 8 June 2012 (MST) (last edit 23:53, 11 April 2013 (UTC))
 * I'm aware of the targeted nature of diseases as mentioned at #1 in 5 Scientific Facts That Shatter Your Image Of First Contact, but I'm not sure how relevant the fundamental difference between space and time travel is here. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 20:32, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Note to self: Morlock HVAC
The title of this section may be stretching it a bit; sorry for being clever. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that this refers to the "Thermoregulation" section.

In a recent edit, Tepples made explicit that the Eloi do not use fire. Obviously, it is also true that the Morlocks do not use open flames. However, it is still possible for them to use combustion for power and/or heating in devices where the flame is concealed from view. Internal combustion engines meet this criterion, as do some external combustion engines (for power) and furnaces (for heating). For cooling, the fuel could be burned in an absorption refrigerator.

It is also possible that the Morlocks have devised heat pumps for simultaneously heating some rooms and cooling others; this would allow for both temporary rooms for live Eloi and cold storage for Eloi corpses.

In any case, the efficiency of the refrigeration might be a problem outside the winter season, and it is uncertain what working fluid a refrigerator would use. Eighty5cacao 23:45, 16 October 2011 (MST)
 * There's always the option of carbon dioxide as a refrigerant if the Morlocks can compress it to 10 megapascals. --Tepples 04:54, 17 October 2011 (MST)
 * And to help establish the ballpark on human thermoregulatory abilities, here's a BBC News article about outdoor napping for infants in present-day Scandinavian countries. This doesn't apply that much to the Eloi, though. First, those infants are more heavily clothed than an Eloi would ever be; second, those infants live in an environment that experiences cold climates more consistently than that of the novel, so their metabolic and immune systems would have a stronger incentive to adapt. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 15:04, 23 February 2013 (CST)

Search for monkey butts found
When looking up information on bright red baboon asses for the Poli article, I found a couple interesting links about monkey social structure. Might Fission-fusion society and Allomothering fit into the Eloi social structure or not? --Tepples 08:31, 31 December 2011 (MST)
 * Yes on both counts. For the "fusion" part of fission-fusion society, we could cite the original text's information about Eloi sleeping arrangements. (Search in chapter 5 for the word "blockhead.") For fission, see "We soon met others of the dainty ones..." in chapter 7. As for allomothering, that was something I meant to mention earlier, but I didn't succeed in doing so. It ties in with my argument(s) about failure of kin recognition: any adult is expected to care for any infant, since the biological parents can't be relied upon to stick around. (But what role do the Morlocks play?) Since this eliminates the need for the biological parents to stick around, the brain pathways for kin recognition could weaken over evolutionary time.
 * P.S. When I read the title of this section, it took me a lot of willpower not to LOL nor to assume you were compromised by a spambot. Eighty5cacao 09:41, 31 December 2011 (MST)
 * Maybe not entirely relevant, but dumping a LiveScience article on lemurs sleeping in caves --Eighty5cacao (talk) 20:57, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Parrots don't name themselves
MediaWiki's built-in search sucks because it relies on MySQL full text search, and every shared web host leaves MySQL configured with the default stopword list, which contains both "name" and "themselves". So I had to use Google search. But that's beside my present point, which is this:

You hypothesize a child choosing his or her own personal name. Is that seen in real world humans or other tetrapod animals? Parrots, for one, don't do that; they get their names from their parents. As for matronymics, that'd be a coincidence; I had in fact been planning that for females in the game world. --Tepples 04:17, 9 March 2012 (MST)
 * If you mean that I'm going a little too far out with my WMG, my response is: Do I really need to be able to give a real-world example? There is unlikely to be any community of real-world humans with sufficiently "Eloi-like" social structure to serve as a good comparison. In particular, allomothering would be more extensive among the Eloi than in most present-day human communities. I doubt every mother in an Eloi community would be able to agree upon and remember a name for every child. As for social structure's effects on cognitive development, the parents of an Eloi child would make little effort to guide the child's language development. Many of their conversations might be about the child but not with the child.
 * As for "other tetrapod animals," which ones have mental capacity and speech abilities most comparable to those of the Eloi? Eighty5cacao 10:52, 9 March 2012 (MST) (last edit 11:28, 9 March 2012 (MST))
 * I guess you're right. Again, sometimes my half-baked ideas aren't all they're cracked up to be, and my disbelief may mirror that of the others at the party in the frame story. But now that I think of it, Alex would probably be the closest match. --Tepples 13:59, 9 March 2012 (MST)
 * Ok. I will concede that matronymics (whether or not chosen voluntarily by the child) are not necessarily the best possibility for a transition between the present-day system and self-naming. Eighty5cacao 14:49, 9 March 2012 (MST) (last edit 10:44, 11 March 2012 (MST))
 * On the other hand, there's an example in allthetropes:Pokémon-Speak about Chibi-Chibi from the Sailor Moon manga, who took her name from someone trying to remember Chibi-Usa's name. --Tepples 10:12, 31 March 2012 (MST)

As for a real-world example, I suppose I could mention bottlenose dolphins. Theoretically, this might not be a representative example due to the relatively large brains of bottlenose dolphins. However, my point about the lack of complex Eloi parenting behavior still stands. --Eighty5cacao 20:56, 21 October 2012 (MST)
 * Related article from The Verge (not much real info though); also BBC News on the same research --Eighty5cacao (talk) 00:15, 24 July 2013 (UTC) (more 05:05, 24 July 2013 (UTC))

Existence of insects
I seem to remember recognizable insects having passed away already by the 803rd millennium CE, and a couple Google searches bear this out. I can't find the exact chapter that states it (must have used some term other than "bug" or "insect"), but from chapter 9: "Clearly, somewhere in the long ages of human decay, the food of the Morlocks had run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and suchlike vermin." --Tepples 05:36, 7 April 2012 (MST)
 * I'll look into it ... but the key word is "recognizable." My common sense suggests that insect biodiversity could not have fallen as far as (you claim) Wells literally stated, at least in comparison to other edible animals. The narrator's unreliability also leaves plenty of slack.
 * The usual "sloppy" warning applies because this is a "misc" and "fanon" page. That still doesn't stop me from thinking I'm right... Can you give specific examples of Google queries? Eighty5cacao 09:40, 7 April 2012 (MST)
 * More fanon on the "recognizable" thread, to go on the page once this is resolved: Perhaps the surviving insects have better camouflage than those with which the Traveller is familiar. This is consistent with the Eloi preferring insects that "happen to be sitting on an edible plant" rather than actively hunting for them. Eighty5cacao 09:57, 7 April 2012 (MST)

Bump. Just to let you know that I am still rereading the novel for this reason. I don't see why you picked that particular sentence; perhaps there's a suitable one in an earlier chapter (5 or 7?). Eighty5cacao 09:09, 11 April 2012 (MST) (last edit 18:38, 11 April 2012 (MST))
 * It appears that not all insect species are equally affected. In paragraph 26 of chapter 4, the Traveller says, "The air was free from gnats," but also, "brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither." Eighty5cacao 23:38, 12 April 2012 (MST)

Scratch work: A visualization of migration behavior
Regarding the "Swimming ability" section, the migration behavior of Eloi in coastal areas might occasionally look like Enal the Sharkboy - except that some sort of dolphin or whale would more likely be used.

Okay, I admit this is a stretch, and I wanted any excuse to put in one more link to that Cracked article. Eighty5cacao 21:39, 18 August 2012 (MST)
 * That or something selkies might do. --Tepples 08:47, 19 August 2012 (MST)
 * Yeah, it might fit better there ... it's just that I had TTM on the brain – also the former logo of publisher Houghton Mifflin, and cetacean intelligence – and somehow connected it all with that image. Eighty5cacao 09:19, 19 August 2012 (MST) (last edit 00:32, 3 May 2013 (UTC))

Maintenance note: Allomothering on Cracked
This Cracked article (#2) mentions an attempt to implement allomothering in present-day human society. However, it's not so relevant to this page because the reason was for potential mothers to practice their mothering skills – something that the Eloi would not do, despite it being a common reason for allomothering in present-day primates. Eighty5cacao 22:53, 29 August 2012 (MST) (+ 22:53, 25 July 2013 (UTC)) (maint.: 04:27, 13 January 2017 (UTC))

Engineering humans for global warming
This is "scratch work" but I didn't want to bloat up the section title this time.

In the Oct. 2012 issue of Popular Science, there is an article on genetically engineering humans to cope with global warming. Some of the ideas mentioned include heat-shock proteins, as well as artificial organs meant to reduce the need for water.

One idea that is actually relevant to this discussion is selection for short stature with the aid of in-vitro fertilization. The other is a meat allergy intended to enforce vegetarianism. These both sound like things that could have happened to the ancestors of the Eloi.

(Why isn't this relevant to another WMG that mentions genetic engineering and global warming? It doesn't specifically take rising sea levels into account.) --Eighty5cacao 20:58, 9 September 2012 (MST) (proofread 08:58, 28 September 2012 (MST))
 * Regarding the meat allergy, dumping in http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/11/ticked-off-about-a-growing-aller.html --Eighty5cacao 09:24, 19 November 2012 (MST)

Brooke
Brooke Greenberg hasn't grown since age five. What can we learn? --Tepples (talk) 18:19, 16 January 2013 (CST)
 * See previous discussion: Brooke Greenberg primarily demonstrates progenesis, but a better model would need to take neoteny into account as well. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 22:37, 16 January 2013 (CST)
 * The other problem is that different parts of Brooke's body are at different stages of development to an extent greater than any likely consequence of natural selection. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 12:38, 17 January 2013 (CST)
 * Bronchomalacia appears to have been a contributor to Brooke's death. Normally, it occurs mainly in infants, so any pedomorphizing evolutionary process could conceivably increase the risk. One TODO is to consider how that could be relevant to a project to aquaticize humanity – any such project would need to be done with great care so as to avoid imposing restrictions on the pattern of terrestrial vs. aquatic activity of the resulting organisms. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 06:27, 22 November 2013 (UTC) (+ 19:19, 29 November 2013 (UTC))

Sleeping with eyes open
Cracked recently mentioned that human babies sometimes sleep with their eyes partly open (nocturnal lagophthalmos).

Could this evolve into a mechanism for awareness of predators? Many birds and aquatic mammals accomplish the same thing via unihemispheric sleep.

It helps that human babies have some ability to learn while sleeping (#4). On the other hand, leaving both eyes open would allow them to dry out, so the Eloi would probably do this only when the climate is sufficiently humid and the lunar phase is sufficiently bright to justify it. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 06:47, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Of course there's a catch. If I understand the middle of chapter 5 correctly, a reasonably well-fed Morlock does not openly attack sleeping Eloi; it merely walks around to inspect the herd. (It wouldn't be a good idea to leave bloodstains where another Eloi would see them later.) Even if a Morlock did attack, an Eloi would probably not be able to rouse itself quickly enough to escape successfully. So at the time and place of the novel, nocturnal lagophthalmos would probably have little adaptive value. On the other hand, it could have been more useful to an earlier generation of Eloi, or Eloi living in a region without sufficiently large building ruins for shelter.
 * This may be another point on which Weena's behavior is atypical. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 06:21, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
 * TODO: YouTube also appears to show some examples of dogs and cats exhibiting nocturnal lagophthalmos. Think about how that is relevant, and check reliable sources. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 07:15, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

I am aware of the existence of segmented sleep in present-day humans. It probably wouldn't occur much in the Eloi, however, given that it happens at a more predictable time than anything resembling nocturnal lagophthalmos would; over time, the Morlocks would learn to cease their activity during that interval. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 18:41, 5 October 2013 (UTC) (+ 18:46, 6 October 2013 (UTC))

Human adults may also have some ability to learn while sleeping (Discover Magazine Blogs). --Eighty5cacao (talk) 06:18, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
 * There have been recent reports that segmented sleep is rare in present-day hunter-gatherer societies. For example, see "Ancestors 'had less sleep' than we do" (BBC, citing Current Biology). --Eighty5cacao (talk) 20:09, 20 October 2015 (UTC) (+ 04:56, 21 October 2015 (UTC))

Cracked on infant behavior, again
http://www.cracked.com/article_20494_5-amazing-things-you-didnt-know-babies-could-do.html


 * 1) 2 might give clues about the complexity of the Eloi language. I'd need to think more about the items concerning physical strength. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 17:21, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Multitasking vs. attention span
A BBC News article on gender differences in multitasking abilities mentioned that the loss of multitasking abilities over the course of human evolution could be construed as an improvement of attention span.

(This could probably have been posted in some existing discussion about ADHD; oh well.) --Eighty5cacao (talk) 19:10, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Administrivia: Wiki naming conventions
I have chosen not to locate this page (and the corresponding subpage about Weena) as subpages of the WMG dump, due mainly to the fact that we already have one mainspace article concerning The Time Machine and the possibility that some of this information might eventually "leak" into mainspace. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 18:54, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Plant diet
From "Diet": "In particular, the apparent fruitarianism raises concerns about the inadequacy of protein." In 20th century humans, rice and beans are widely believed to make up a complete protein. Dave Ramsey swears by them. Nuts (these and these, not deeez) are a good source of protein and healthy fat as well. And there would obviously need to be some sort of changes in how carbohydrates are processed, as too much fructose in 20th century humans leads to insulin resistance. (In fact, before insulin was discovered, a low-carb diet was the typical treatment for diabetes.) There are also concerns that the grain-based diet of Americans is similar to the grain-based diet used to fatten cattle. Is this dietary condition imposed by the Morlocks to fatten the Eloi? That said, a herbivore needs a bigger head for a bigger bite,(ref)Kristi Harrison. "7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes". Cracked, 2011-05-18. Accessed 2013-12-08.(/ref) though probably not to the bobbleheaded proportions of chibis. --Tepples (talk) 18:46, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Acknowledged. I should have thought harder earlier and explicitly incorporated this into my explanation (will do ASAP). I still don't think opportunistic entomophagy can be entirely ruled out, though. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 18:59, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
 * And to address the point of the Morlocks feeding the Eloi: Yes, the Traveller could have easily missed some of that; the Morlocks would presumably be responsible for cooking the rice and beans if any. However, there are limits to this, given that the Morlocks would not regularly meet with the Eloi face-to-face non-violently. (Herd inspections are mostly just the Morlocks walking past a sleeping herd.) Given the limited range of chemicals available (mainly minerals containing metals such as copper), the Morlocks would sanitize their hands just enough to remove the urgent microbiological threat, and they wouldn't be able to entirely remove the smell of blood. --Eighty5cacao (talk) 19:06, 8 December 2013 (UTC) (+ 07:52, 29 January 2014 (UTC))
 * Also compare to Paranthropus boisei's diet of tiger nuts (again, these, not deeez). History rhymes again. --Tepples (talk) 19:37, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Not entirely relevant, but a low-carb diet is still considered a best practice for diabetes --Eighty5cacao (talk) 22:11, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Retard pills
Food for thought on the drug hypothesis: I just watched the American Dad! episode "With Friends Like Steve's," in which a drug is used to keep Barry's behavior manageable at the cost of mental retardation.

(TODO: mention something about Ann Coulter calling marijuana "legalized retard pills") --Eighty5cacao (talk) 07:26, 21 August 2014 (UTC)