Dinosaurs had scales

I was bored, and remembered back from my days of music theory that there are a bunch of different 7-tone scales, more than just Major, Natural Minor and Harmonic Minor. I don't really care about all of them, so here's the short list of ones I was thinking of. On a piano, starting on the following notes and hitting the 7 following white keys (no sharps or flats) gives the following scales:

• C Major


• D Dorian


• E Phrygian


• F Lydian


• G Mixolydian


• A Natural Minor


• B Locrian

Now on to dinosaurs...

In my psychology class, the teacher was talking about evolution. The first thing that caught my attention was his discussion on heart disease (we'll get to dinosaurs in a minute). He said that the reason humans are susceptible to heart disease now is that for a long period of human history we weren't living very long. The average lifespan was probably somewhere in the 20s or 30s. If heart disease doesn't set in until the 50s or 60s, then nobody would be living long enough for that to be a problem, so we never bothered evolving to be less vulnerable to such a fate. But, now that we are living to be old enough to encounter the problem, humans may wind up evolving wider coronary arteries that are harder to clog, or something along those lines. (He didn't mention that, while we weren't living that long, we were also much more active and probably ate less fatty foods, but that's not a big deal.) What bothered me is that, while yes, people are dying of heart attacks, most people have them when they are old and have already had children, so the genes are already passed on. This sort of thing is called a selection shadow, and it sort of shows that he should stick to psychology and stay away from biology.

The other thing he said, that really got me, was about how human memory evolved. He said that our early ancestors probably had worse memory than us today, and our memory today still isn't perfect (though, his idea of perfect is also flawed, ignoring the concept of efficient storage of relevant facts instead of brute-force perfectly-photographic memory.) He then, in his infinite wisdom, went on to say that a probable reason for this was that humans with better memory could remember where dinosaurs tended to hang out and avoid them. My professor suggested that humans had to avoid dinosaurs. DINOSAURS!

And people are surprised that, in the beginning of a college evolution class when the teacher asks for a show of hands who thinks that humans and dinosaurs coexisted at the same time period, a significant portion of students raise their hands. (true story)

I'm going to go drink heavily and hope to forget this.