The bigger they are...

Like any boy, The Boy is fascinated with all things big. His current fetish is construction vehicles and fire engines, but I'm sure dinosaurs and tanks, jets, and other implements of destruction are not far down the line. I remember when my nephew, back when his age was still in single digits, became obsessed with the fact that I was one of the few people he had ever met who was bigger than his dad.

I'm trying to figure out how this mindset fits into brain evolution. For hunters it makes sense to want to figure out how to take down the big game. A single woolly mammoth could feed your tribe for a week, and in a calories-in per calories-expended ratio it's probably more efficient than chasing after rabbits all day. There's also the fact that males are territorial and like to size up the competition (which makes my nephew's behavior a little unsettling).

In the end, I've concluded that the biggest draw to fire engines and dinosaurs is the fact that... they're just so darn cool.