> Speech is a crowning achievement of human evolution, the skill that separates us from every other animal. So, it would stand to reason that evolving this capability required some enormous leap in brain complexity.

I have this theory that researchers and science journalists' internal bias is a gradation between the huge shadow projected by millennia of religious culture and the huge shadow projected by the things we have learned recently. The quote above, particularly the term "leap", evokes intelligent design.

> Instead, evolution roughly tripled the number of neurons that connect the brain's mouth-movement control center with just two target regions.

This, on the other hand, outright sounds like scaling the size of the model, which is on the opposite direction of the bias axis. FWIW, my own bias also tends in this direction.