I was watching a brief talk from the TED website (cool stuff) from a guy who runs a tinker’s camp for kids. Great idea — they break stuff down, rebuild it, build their own designs, blow stuff up. Great fun.

Anyway, his talk’s titled “5 Dangerous things to do with your child.” This links to the video’s original context, but I’ve embedded it in this post for the sake of convenience. If you want to skip right to the end, I’ve listed the five things below.

1. Play with fire
2. Use a knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Take apart appliances
5. Drive a car

That’s a good list, and one I agree with largely. We’re working on several of them with our kids, as a matter of fact. The one that really struck me, though, is the third there: Throw a spear.

Really, it doesn’t have to be a spear. It can be any thrown object, but objects with consequence are significant for this guy’s example. He asserts that “Humans are hardwired for throwing.” That’s not the first time I’ve ever heard that, though I’m finding a hard time finding supporting research. Despite that, I can still believe it.

We humans are fairly squishy critters. Certainly compared to our historical prey, which generally has something particularly sharp and dangerous with with they would attempt to disembowel us if we got too close. Our advantages are chiefly the ability to craft tools, determination, and bodies built for endurance. Take the hamstring, for instance. That one ligament demonstrates that we’re not well suited for flat out speed, but we can keep chasing something down long after that something, whatever it may be, has long tired out. Even better if we can poke it with something sharp before we have to start running too hard.

So, since the dawn of time, our kind has been conditioned to perform the calculus of throwing — binocular input, wind speed, relative height, distance, power, angle — all of it. Ask any comp sci major and they will tell you that crafting a rigid body simulation with a computer to accurately perform the computational analysis of a throw isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, except that it is. Our bodies can do all of that in the blink of an eye, and what’s more, We’re really good at it. Throwing is one of the first things we can do. Give a baby something they don’t like and FLING! away it goes. Throwing is easy.

Catching is hard.

Just as we’re hardwired over the millennia to be great on the throwing end of the spear, it would follow that we would be equally hardwired to not be on the catching end of a spear. For a less deadly example, to catch a ball, not only do we have to perform those ridiculous levels of calculus on the fly, but we have to force our little primordial crocodile brains to stand in the face of certain death and not flinch when something has been flung at out bodies. Hardwired for throwing means hardwired for dodging.

So, when a kid has to stand there and catch a ball, it’s not an easy thing to do. Yet, it’s a common indicator used as a developmental milestone that so happens to require overcoming millennia of conditioning before one can establish a basic competency.

No deeper meaning here. Just that it’s hard to catch a ball.

Next blog post: we discovered a fun book for the kids. We’re thinking about buying it. I’ll tell you about it soon.

Ok. Here’s the movie.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.