The Phantom Menace Turns 20: Is It Actually Good? We’re not even entirely sure he’s a mammal. “But we don’t know how fast he might develop those next two human developmental years so that he can be ready to enter with the other younglings who are at the same developmental stage.”Īs droid bounty hunter IG-11 remarked of Baby Yoda in the first episode of The Mandalorian, “Species age differently.” And just like Mando, the hero of the series, shouldn’t jump to ageist (and probably speciesist) conclusions, it’s a little presumptuous to think Yoda should follow a human-like life course, says Cohen. “We can equate the first 50 years of his development to one human development year,” Spana says. If you’re a human parent who has adopted a Baby Yoda-something the entire Internet has daydreamed about-and you’re worried that he or she isn’t hitting their developmental milestones, and you’ve had whispered discussions with the pediatrician about whether your Baby Yoda is on the spectrum, you can relax.

So Baby Yoda’s slow cognitive development, at least compared to humans, isn’t cause for alarm. “Since Yoda lived much, much longer than any human, we could extrapolate that he had many more cortical neurons.” A bigger brain would require even more time for neurogenesis and synapse formation.” “In humans, much of the first years of life is spent growing the size of the brain, adding neurons and adding connections between the neurons. “Since Yoda lived much, much longer than any human, we could extrapolate that he had many more cortical neurons,” Spana says. Spana points to a recent study from Vanderbilt University, which showed that the longevity and sexual maturity of animals is correlated with their number of cortical neurons. So why does Baby Yoda seem so developmentally delayed compared to humans? He’s been alive for 50 years, and he’s the cerebral equivalent of a one-year-old.

Yoda is really quite human in his pattern of development.” “We then attain full size, complete the maturation of brain function, and look forward to a long adulthood.

“For women, the growth spurt comes at around ages 12 to 15, and for men it comes later,” Reznick says. Not unlike Baby Yoda, humans also have “a prolonged infancy and adolescence followed by a growth hiatus, then a growth spurt with a long adulthood,” says David Reznick, a distinguished professor of Biology at the University of California, Riverside. While Yodas and humans may be dissimilar in many ways, we do share some developmental markers with the green-skinned, floppy-eared aliens.

How does yoda talk