We investigate the hypothesis that colour vision in primates was selected for discriminating the spectral modulations on the skin of conspecifics, presumably for the purpose of discriminating emotional states, socio-sexual signals and threat displays. Here we show that, consistent with this hypothesis, there are two dimensions of skin spectral modulations, and trichromats but not dichromats are sensitive to each. Furthermore, the M and L cone maximum sensitivities for routine trichromats are optimized for discriminating variations in blood oxygen saturation, one of the two blood-related dimensions determining skin reflectance. We also show that, consistent with the hypothesis, trichromat primates tend to be bare faced.

Are there empirical regularities in the shapes of letters and other human visual signs, and if so, what are the selection pressures underlying these regularities? To examine this, we determined a wide variety of topologically distinct contour configurations and examined the relative frequency of these configuration types across writing systems, Chinese writing, and nonlinguistic symbols. Our first result is that these three classes of human visual sign possess a similar signature in their configuration distribution, suggesting that there are underlying principles governing the shapes of human visual signs. Second, we provide evidence that the shapes of visual signs are selected to be easily seen at the expense of the motor system. Finally, we provide evidence to support an ecological hypothesis that visual signs have been culturally selected to match the kinds of conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes because that is what we have evolved to be good at visually processing.

The neocortex undergoes a complex transformation from mouse to whale. Whereas synapse density remains the same, neuron density decreases as a function of gray matter volume to the power of around -1/3, total convoluted surface area increases as a function of gray matter volume to the power of around 8/9, and white matter volume disproportionately increases as a function of gray matter volume to the power of around 4/3. These phylogenetic scaling relationships (including others such as neuron number, neocortex thickness, soma radius, and number of cortical areas) are clues to understanding the principles driving neocortex organization, but there is currently no theory that can explain why these neocortical quantities scale as they do. Here I present a two-part model that explains these neocortical allometric scaling laws. The first part of the model is a special case of the physico-mathematical model recently put forward to explain the quarter power scaling laws in biology. It states that the neocortex is a space-filling neural network through which materials are efficiently transported, and that synapse sizes do not vary as a function of gray matter volume. The second part of the model states that the neocortex is economically organized into functionally specialized areas whose extent of area-interconnectedness does not vary as a function of gray matter volume. The model predicts, among other things, that the number of areas and the soma radius increase as a function of gray matter volume to the power of 1/3 and 1/9, respectively, and empirical support is demonstrated for each. Also, the scaling relationships imply that, although the percentage of the total number of neurons to which a neuron connects falls as a function of gray matter volume with exponent -1/3, the network diameter of the neocortex is invariant at around two. Finally, I discuss how a similar approach may have promise in explaining the scaling relationships for the brain and other organs as a function of body mass.

A writing system is a visual notation system wherein a repertoire of marks, or strokes, is used to build a repertoire of characters. Are there any commonalities across writing systems concerning the rules governing how strokes combine into characters; commonalities that might help us identify selection pressures on the development of written language? In an effort to answer this question we examined how strokes combine to make characters in more than 100 writing systems over human history, ranging from about 10 to 200 characters, and including numerals, abjads, abugidas, alphabets and syllabaries from five major taxa: Ancient NearEastern, European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Southeast Asian. We discovered underlying similarities in two fundamental respects.(i) The number of strokes per characters is approximately three, independent of the number of characters in the writing system; numeral systems are the exception, having on average only two strokes per character. (ii) Characters are ca. 50% redundant, independent of writing system size; intuitively, this means that a character's identity can be determined even when half of its strokes are removed.Because writing systems are under selective pressure to have characters that are easy for the visual system to recognize and for the motor system to write, these fundamental commonalities may be a fingerprint of mechanisms underlying the visuo-motor system.Keywords: writing; reading; redundancy; complexity; letter perception; character recognition INTRODUCTIONWriting systems (such as alphabets) are visual notation systems wherein a repertoire of marks, or strokes, is used to construct a set of characters. Because writing systems are under selective pressure to be easy to read and write, we reasoned that by identifying commonalities underlying how strokes combine into characters in writing systems over human history, we would, in effect, be identifying fundamental properties of the human visuo-motor system. Here, we are interested in measuring two specific fundamental properties of writing systems: character length, which is the average number of strokes per character, and redundancy, which measures how efficiently characters are built out of strokes. Our main result will be that, after examining more than 100 writing systems over human history (table 1), ranging from about 10 to 200 characters, we determined that writing systems have average lengths of approximately three strokes per character and redundancies of ca. 50%, and these values do not vary much as a function of writing system size. In x 4 we will speculate on what this might tell us about the human visuo-motor system.

Via the accumulation of data from across the neuroanatomy literature, we estimate the manner in which (i) the number of neocortical areas varies with neocortex size, and (ii) the number of area-area connections varies with neocortex size. Concerning parcellation, we find that the number of areas scales approximately as the 1/3 power of gray matter volume, or, equivalently, as the square root of the total number of neocortical neurons. A consequence of this is that the average number of neurons per area also scales approximately as the square root of the total number of areas. Concerning area-area connectivity, we find evidence that the total number of area-area connections scales as the square of the number of areas. These scaling results help constrain theories about the principles underlying neocortical organization.