Cooking Stimulated Big Leap In Human Cognition 473
Hugh Pickens writes "For a long time, humans were pretty dumb, doing little but make 'the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,' says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, 'so strange compared to other animals.'"
AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
We man got smarts by cooking meats you vegan bitches!!! UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH (think Home Improvement)
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All the way down. Now those are little calorie bombs. Feed the brain!
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Hmm... Does this mean fat people are smarter?
(I'm pretty skinny so, well, I am guessing that is going to be my new excuse for doing stupid things.)
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I think it's fairly obvious that we ARE regressing as a species, though I wouldn't blame it on sushi since the Japanese are among the most industrious and clever folks on the planet.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry about liking sushi. Most of the calories are in the rice, and that part is cooked. In fact, "sushi" actually means that sticky rice. The slices of fish supply a bit of protein, and the veggies supply a few vitamins, which you need, though they're really there to give the rice a bit more flavor. But the cooked rice is almost pure carbohydrate in an easily-digested form that is quickly-available fuel for your muscles and brain.
Note that rice nicely illustrates the writer's hypothesis. In its raw form, rice is hard, dense, and nearly indigestible. But when cooked, rice breaks down into simple carbs that your digestive system quickly turns into sugars. This "fuel" is so easily available that it leads to the well known "an hour later you're hungry again" phenomenon. Of course, most grains work about the same way. And this also shows that the article isn't exactly describing a new concept. Many people have inferred from the archaeological evidence that the start of real advances in human society coincided with the development of agriculture, in particular the domestication of grains. That gave us a high-energy food that was easy to digest. The only problem was that eating just grains is boring. So you start mixing in things with flavor, and before you know it, you've invented cuisine.
The real heroes in our evolution were the ones that developed cooking utensils. ;-)
Raw foods and enough calories (Score:3, Informative)
Meat, including fish, is pretty digestible even if it's raw, and the richer ~80% of humanity doesn't have much problem getting enough calories or protein. Cooking does affect how long you can keep meat around after you kill it, but it has a lot more effect on the digestibility of vegetables and (much later) grains and beans, as well as making those foods edible longer after picking.
Also, a lot of the "raw food" movement out there is really processing food using techniques such as hydration and sprouting, s
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It helps that we cooked veggies too.
I mean, what is a burger without pickles, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, and bread?
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
It helps that we cooked veggies too.
I mean, what is a burger without pickles, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, and bread?
Meatloaf.
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Interesting)
Only uncooked.
If you fry mushrooms in a little butter or oil, grill them slowly, or simmer them for a little while until they give up their liquids, their taste and texture changes quite a bit.
There's a lot of flavor in mushrooms and there's a lot of umami [wikipedia.org] in them -- basically it enhances the flavors of other things. The texture changes from a slightly dry and chalky one to a 'meatier' denser bite. Grilled portabello mushroom goes well into a bun like a burger, and also makes a fantastic taco filling cut into strips.
Button mushrooms may not be the most flavorful of all of our mushrooms, but, properly prepared there's a lot of taste to be had in button mushrooms. In a curry for example, mushrooms bring a lot of their own flavor as well as soaking up a lot of the other flavors, you just have to know how to cook 'em right.
I usually cook between 2 and 4 lbs of mushrooms per week -- trust me, they're quite tasty. =)
Cheers
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. The white mushrooms are the ones you're going to see most often, and since they're cheap, it's what most people will buy.
But, to those of us who cook (and, especially those of us who love mushrooms =) your supermarket will usually have trumpet, crimini, portobello,and shitake in addition to the ubiquitous white ones. Then there's usually several dried varieties which usually travel from someplace else -- like a lobster mushroom, which isn't a specific kind of mushroom, but one which has a fungus growing on it which makes it red and gives it a different flavor.
Go to a Chinese grocer (or a good grocery store) and you'll find even more varieties of dried mushrooms, with much stronger flavors.
For many of us, mushroom just covers the whole spectrum of tasty things out there. Include the whole spectrum of fungus, and you'll get up into things like truffles, which can be some of the most flavorful (and expensive) foodstuffs.
Cheers
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
Your sig is oddly and disturbingly appropiate.
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
What did the last one taste like?
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Rape someone, cut off the penis
Working from memory here as I am feeling too lazy to look it up again (not to mention grumpy due to various drama), but a lot of rape cases aren't really about sex, but rather about control and power.
The evidence for this is in the fact that, even after castration (chemical or otherwise), repeat offenders have been known to do it again; sometimes using things like broom handles or the like in order to commit the crime if they are no longer able to get/maintain an erection.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, this implies just the opposite. Cell membranes (meat) are easy for the body to break down. Cell walls (plants) are quite difficult, and cooking greatly facilitates their digestion. Cooking meat usually somewhat increases its caloric density (by driving water off, making it denser), but *decreases* its total calories (by driving fat off and breaking some proteins down). Cooking plants doesn't increase their calories, but generally makes them more bioavailable. It also lets you eat a more diverse variety of plants; many wild plants are toxic in their uncooked form, and heat denatures the toxins. In many more, heat won't denature the toxins, but repeated boils in changes of water can get rid of them. And, apart from some certain hunter gatherer societies (such as the Innuit), most hunter-gatherer groups get about 80% of their calories from plants.
So, really, it's just the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
Cooking also destroys bacteria, which means the digestive tract isn't challenged so constantly. It also helps preserve meat, which means you don't have to eat it the same day. Once you learn to smoke meat you can keep it a much longer time.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
And repelling flies keeps maggots out of the meat, meaning less waste before it gets dried out to the point that it no longer interests flies. Most primitives to this day don't give a flip about flies, they're just a fact of life. But meat consumed by (or ruined by) maggots rather than yourself... that WAS your dinner, so maggots are distinctly undesirable.
Given this chain of thought, and that primitives didn't know fly eggs hatch into maggots -- I begin to suspect that it wasn't the flies they cared about preventing, but rather, the maggots... ie. the same "magic" that prevented maggots happened to discourage flies too. What a coincidence!
Salt or sugar curing can help achieve the same goal -- even if the meat still attracts flies, it's no longer viable for maggots (nor for most bacterias); either disrupts their water balance rather drastically.
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That's probably true (especially given that many primitives eat grubs of various sorts). So it's not an exact "reason" for smoking meat, but rather a nebulous cloud of reasons that happen to all wind up with the same goal (edible meat) and result (preserved meat).
Which is true of many such developments -- they're not either/or situations, but rather an accumulation of loosely related processes, and sometimes of outright coincidences.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
Hunting is a time consuming activity, and meat is perishable compared to vegetables.
Civilization arose because of beans!
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As far as I know, fire/cooking predates farming. Most estimates place the origins of farming 10,000 years ago, and according to the summary, cooking developed 200,000 years ago. So while humans may have been cooking wild plants, I imagine a major advantage of cooking was allowing you to store meat much longer.
You're right about civilization being based on high calorie domesticated agriculture, but your timing is a little off.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
I think cooking pretty directly allowed farming, by giving both time (cooking gathered plants allowed less time spent gathering, leaving time for farming) and motivation (if you can "gather" in your own back yard, there's no need to go to the wild and expose yourself to the predators and human enemies) for it.
I don't know if cooking *really* brings anything extra to preserving meat. Drying meat surely predates cooking, though cooking before drying might make the whole process faster, and help it stay good longer... But probably not a dramatic improvement.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
More time-consuming intially, yes, but it also allowed a centralized location for food production. If you have a "farm", you don't need to travel as far to find food, and you can often generate enough of it to store for the non-productive season - which means you can stay in one place. Get a number of farms in similar areas, you have agriculture. Then specialization. Then towns and cities start to form. And so forth.
Also, a lot of early agriculture was only slightly more advanced than basic hunting-gat
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That's true, but at the level we're talking about in TFA, we're still mystified by seeds, and might have discovered tilling the ground with a pointed stick. Try that someday, if you want to experience real backbreaking labour... especially in grasslands. In fact, healthy grasslands are just about untillable, beyond a household vegetable patch that will take you a month to prepare, without plow beasts and the related technology (we're not even up to iron plowshares yet).
"Good stuff grows here" is gatherer, n
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I don't remember our Innuit ancestors who discovered bronze working, iron, or eventually the scientific revolution. Oh wait. That's right. That was mostly meat-eaters.
Don't be a colossal bonehead, do a little research. The Inuit live in the Arctic, and traditionalists can survive on the ice, making things out of bones and gut and skin and snow and eating mammals and fish. They're at just about the pinnacle of paleolithic tech, and I'd like to see any of your grain-munchin' bath-averse bronze-waving ancestors last a season up there.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah that's exactly what women look for in a man: intelligence.
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So... (Score:4, Interesting)
... if we feed animals with cooked food they will start to get intelligent?
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
If you give them a couple million years to mutate, yes. Provided my step-mother isn't the one who cooks the animals meals of course, in which case they'd devolve faster than you can say "that steak is raw!".
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You would also need selective pressure to bring out the more intelligent individuals for gene selection.
The cooking is a prerequisite for the cause to be able to work but it isn't the causal force itself.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Only if a large stone obelisk moves into the neighborhood at the same time...
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Religion? But I thought you said we got smart [youtube.com].
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Why on earth would we have big brains that were dumb? That doesn't make any sense from a survival aspect. Carrying around extra weight and a non-functional large brain?
If this theory is true, then yes, we should suddenly see the rise of cat and dog civilizations. They will probably be so super-intelligent that they will actually enslave another, dumber race of creatures to take care of their daily needs. This will give them ample time to bask in the luxury of doing absolutely nothing at all besides playing, eating, sleeping and toying with their slaves.
As the parent said, though, that could never happen.
well.... (Score:4, Funny)
still no explanation for Steak-umms
Re:well.... (Score:4, Funny)
Yet it does explain the entire "raw" food movement
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My Obsession (Score:2)
So I can use this to smack down people for making fun of my obsession with cooking, some sort of complicated excuse for my desire to purchase a smoker/kegging system/jet powered coffee roaster?
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Does that mean I can belittle people for making fun of my obsession with eating other people's cooking?
1) I'm fat.
2) I eat buffets all the time.
3) Buffets contain mostly cooked food.
4) Eating cooked food makes you smarter.
Therefore, I'm smarter than you.
And if that doesn't work, how about this.
I'm kind of smart. I'm also fat from eating cooked foods. If I marry a fat woman that's good at cooking food and we have kids. That kid should be a little smarter than me. Then we can make my kid fat by feeding hi
Suddenly... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm betting there's a giant black obelisk [wikipedia.org] involved ... (cue weird music)
Re:Suddenly... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm betting there's a giant black monolith [wikipedia.org] involved ... (cue Richard Strauss [wikipedia.org] music)
There, fixed that for you.
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Humans were carnivores at the beginning (Score:2, Interesting)
to start stabbing pigs and eating meat
Humans didn't START eating meat. They always were.
instead of just plants
There was never a stage in human evolution which involved 100% herbivorous diet.
Humans at first only ate meat. Very soon, they started eating plants too. And much lately, some of them disliked meat and became vegetarians.
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Our teeth are strangely structured if we first ate only meat. I suspect we were omnivores from the start with some populations sticking to fruit, others to nuts, maybe even shellfish or fish or whatever was handy.
That is the only way to explain how and why we became so travelled... we weren't stuck to only one kind of food.
Re:Humans were carnivores at the beginning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Humans were carnivores at the beginning (Score:5, Funny)
Then we got really smart....and started fermenting our veggies/grains, and invented BEER!! That way we could drink it!!
TV Science (Score:3, Insightful)
This just in: slashdot editors watch the history channel for their science news.
If that was true.... (Score:5, Funny)
then America would be choke full of obese geniuses.
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No, the theory could still be true - Americans are just over-eating fake food, forcing their teeny digestive systems to divert energy from the brain, thus reversing the cognitive jump.
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then America would be choke full of obese geniuses.
I'm from South America, you insensitive clod!
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I'm from South America, you insensitive clod!
Aren't you the guys who chew raw coca leaves all day long? hmmm...
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Re:If that was true.... (Score:4, Funny)
No, the geniuses are the ones who aren't obese. They've figured out how to channel 30% of their energy into their brains (and in the process, not becoming fat).
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Re:If that was true.... (Score:4, Interesting)
....we would never would have such big brains ...
If the size of brains were a measure of intelligence or how much of a given brain is used, elephants should be incredibly smart. Just as there is more to the capability of a computer than its raw hardware, so too, is there more to intelligence than the size of a brain. Just as a computer is a careful combination of software and hardware, so it is also with human intelligence. There is the physical hardware of the brain, but there is also the nonphysical software, the mind. Just as in a computer the hardware and software interact to form the total experience, or if you will, its intelligence, so too it is with people.
Just as the basic software that runs a computer is not utilizing its total hardware all the time, so too, the software of the human mind does not always fully utilize the capability of the hardware of the brain.
The whole purpose of this thing we call education is nothing more than a downloading of (mostly anyway) useful information and programming into what was originally a largely empty information processing hardware we call brain. We still know very little about exactly how much information and programming this cranial hardware can accommodate and exactly how it operates.
Hah! I knew it. (Score:3, Funny)
People look at me funny when I ask for my steak well done.
Neanderthal dopes!
Re:Hah! I knew it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Medium-Well is the best (Score:4, Funny)
1" thick and well-marbled
Greek seasoning
rubbing... on the top side
half an hour getting them up
Suffice it to say, you don't have to read your post twice to find the subtext.
Re:Hah! I knew it. (Score:5, Informative)
There's no flavor left when it's well done.
Meat should only be cooked enough to be safe to eat. Anything more than that is just burning the flavor and texture of the meat away.
For a steak from an FDA-approved source, that means red or possibly pink in the middle. For ground beef from an FDA-approved source, pink in the middle (because the grinding process mixes the outside surface into the middle of the beef, so it needs to be cooked more). If you personally trust the source of the meat (was the animal healthy) and the slaughterhouse to have kept the meat uncontaminated, there's no need to cook meat at all (steak tartar).
Meat does not require cooking to be 100% digestible by the human gut. Nor do fruiting plants where the fruit is a deliberate part of the seed-propagation strategy (most of what's called fruits and berries). Cooking may still be useful to minimize the risk of biological contamination. On the other hand, most starchy vegetables (tubers, grains, pulses) have more bioavailable calories after cooking. Like 100-1000% more calories.
Further, whenever you consume the actual seed of a plant (grains, pulses, nuts, etc.), you often also have to overcome the defensive toxins that the plant was using to prevent the loss of reproductive potential (they don't propagate if every animal can consume the whole ovary). Drying and cooking are the most effective way, by far, to eliminate and defuse the risks of those chemicals.
Sometimes, like with soy (phytates and phytoestrogens/isoflavones), cooking isn't good enough, and you need fermentation or another process to eliminate the toxins before they're safe to eat. Too bad most soy-food processing doesn't do that, so the defensive toxins end up in most of the processed crap made from soy protein and soy oil on the supermarket shelves. Soy sauce, miso, tempeh, and natto are safe. Most other soy-based foods are not.
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As you noted, tofu and yuba are treated differently. I didn't put them on that list of safe soy foods because I wasn't exactly sure how much of the phytates and other stuff the salt-treatment eliminated. It's my understanding that tofu and yuba still have some of the defensive chemicals, just a lot less than when they started.
One thing I noted when I was in Japan and China is that soy foods are eaten much more sparingly than westerners assume.
Most of my information on the downsides of soy started from The [amazon.com]
Re:Sources? Also, is tofu then bad for you? (Score:4, Informative)
In addition to what the poster replied, note that soy products in Japan are not the same as what's on the shelves in America. ToFu is made differently in Japan and generally "safe". In the US, most ToFu's are typically not fermented hence tempeh becomes the only option in that area. However I digress, most soy products in America are processed foods, chips, soy proteins mangled into some form of simulated meat, soy milk, etc. These are actually quite detrimental to humans yet they are advertised with "soy protein" and isoflavones. To get more detail, you can search the net. There's plenty out there, but you can also pick up a good book on macrobiotics. The Kushi's http://www.kushiinstitute.org/ [kushiinstitute.org] published some great books on this. In general, macrobiotics recommends a wide variety of vegetables, soaking/fermenting beans and grains, and cooking almost everything.
Tofu not fermented... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you might be a bit confused about how tofu is made. Fermentation has never, to my knowledge, been part of the production process, and it certainly isn't how tofu is generally made in Japan today.
I lived down the street from a tofu shop for close on three years, and had occasion to see the whole process from dried bean to tofu block, which this fellow did every morning. Basically, he'd start with a lot of dried soybeans, cook them, mash them, add lots more water, and then boil the bejebus out of
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My brother made the mistake of ordering a steak "well done" at Peter Luger (probably the preeminent steakhouse in Brooklyn, NY). The waiter looked at him in disgust, and delayed the order 30 minutes. When they finally brought all the food out, the waiter said, "Sorry for the delay but we had to spoil a perfectly good piece of meat for this one." as they put the steak in front of my brother.
If you ever get a chance to order multiple steaks in a steakhouse, I advise ordering one rare and one medium-rare. T
Evolve - eat pre-processed food (Score:4, Funny)
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I think we have to wait for the year 4545 for that.
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When I was at school and had to learn hard for examinations, I always had more hunger than on normal days.
Enabler, not cause. (Score:4, Interesting)
In any case, I don't see how we're "so strange compared to other animals". Seems to me we're remarkably similar, I can't think of any fundamental differences between us and other animals that are more than a matter of degree. Well, I don't know of any animal religions.
Re:Enabler, not cause. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is 150,000 years ago. These people had no electricity, no medicine, no civilization... basically, they had nothing. Average life expectancy was something around 30 years, if that. Break a leg, you're dead. Get the flu, good chance you're dead. Run into a saber tooth tiger, you're definitely dead. At this point of history that they're talking about, humans were *not* at the top of the food chain, there was no civilization where a person could seek shelter, there were no medications, diet was iffy. And there were plenty of nasty animals running around ready to eat a person!
Something else in the environment? I don't think you appreciate just how difficult it is to live off the land and survive out in the wilderness. Particularly when you're not at the top of the food chain.
Re:Enabler, not cause. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just FYI, average life expectancy was low because lots of children died. Means (which is what is typically meant by average) are a pain in the ass like that... they don't take into account the shape of the curve. If you made it past childhood, you stood a fair chance of hitting 45-50 [wikipedia.org]. Then it started going downhill again.
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You can say it is "more than a matter of degree" But then so is walking on a see-saw. Walking up the beam a foot is just like walking up the beam 13 inches. Until you get ot he balance or tipping point. Many things in science and biology are just a matte of degree until you reach so threshold.
Rockets are that way too. Every one of them will fall back to Earth, until you make one just fast enough and it escapes gravity never falls back. There are many examples. What we'd like to know about humans is
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Sounds to me like cooking provided an opportunity to grow a bigger brain, but I don't think it explains the need. Something else in the environment made having a bigger brain increase the odds of reproduction, and cooking made it easier to provide the nutrition needed for that brain.
I'm quibbling with one word here, but evolution isn't really about need. Human-like animals didn't have the need for a bigger brain in the aggregate. The species was stable enough. For hundreds of thousands of years. Of c
Re:Enabler, not cause. (Score:5, Informative)
There is animal language, art, culture, and economics. Animals aren't self-analytical, but they are minimally creative and have abstract communication.
Primates and parrots have been taught vocabularies equivalent to preschoolers. They recognize abstractions such as number and color. They not only make tools, but different populations make different kinds of tools. They pass this knowledge on to their offspring, indicating the existence of culture. Some animals have rudimentary economics and can recognize fair and unfair trades. And even birds create art, though if you are speaking of representational art, the list is much smaller.
Re:Enabler, not cause. (Score:5, Informative)
Art? Depends on your definition. Whale songs aren't understood, dolphins (and other animals) certainly seem to play and generally "do stuff" just for the hell of it. We have a hard time defining human art these days, I'd reserve judgement on non-humans...
Science? True, I'm not aware of any systematic attempts to understand the world building on the experiences of others. I'm not sure I'd call it a fundamental trait, though. It's certainly important to mankind as we know it, but science in my opinion is enabled by too many more fundamental abilities of the human mind to be considered fundamental itself.
Law? There are certainly hierarchies and rules in animal societies. Nothing written down, and no trials as far as I know. Morals, concepts of right and wrong? Hard to say. That requires empathy, primates might exhibit something like a sense of moral.
Culture? What do you mean by culture? I addressed the art part of culture above, that leaves customs specific to a society of animals. I don't think you can just plain say there are no different cultures in animal societies.
No literature? True, no argument.I Don't think it's fundamental in the sense I meant, though. It's a function enabled by a higher degree of intelligence.
Economics... Well, hard to say again. Economics as the systematic study of transactions and their effects on society? No, you won't find that. Understanding of profit versus risk? Certainly on some level that's there. Here's a New Scientist article on macaque monkeys paying for sex: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/mg19726374.100-macaque-monkeys-pay-for-sex.html [newscientist.com]
As for self-analytical, any being that learns from experience is in a sense self-analytical.
Creative? Every species has at some point learned new tricks. Monkeys use sticks to fish for insects - I don't think that's a trait hard wired into their brain. Once upon a time, a monkey got creative and learned the trick, then probably a portion of the other members of the species were smart enough to learn the trick, having seen it, or maybe only that one monkey was clever enough, but by learning a good new trick, gained a clear reproductive edge over the others, and some of it's offspring were sufficiently smart to either learn the trick by seeing it performed, or by figuring it out themselves. And so on. In any case, at some point, a monkey got creative.
Abstract communication? Maybe, frankly I'm not fully sure what you even mean by that. My point is, people have historically been very keen on making these blanket statements on just how we fundamentally are different from the rest of the animals (or, often, "the animals"), and the claims tend to not hold up to scrutiny. The human mind is a remarkably complex thing, but it is born of the nervous system, which is a product of evolution. It's tempting to think of some kind of magic point of complexity or whatever you wish to think creates consciousness where a mind turns from animal to human, but I don't think we'll find one. Consciousness is not something you either have or don't, there are degrees. Sometimes we're not conscious of our actions, like when driving a car down a long, straight road. It's not inconceivable that a being could be more conscious than a human being, so I don't think it's inconceivable that a being could be less so, and still be conscious. It's a matter of degree.
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However, it has been found that primates occasionally react to thunderstorms as they do to rival members of their species (baring teeth etc.), which implies they personify forces of nature to a degree. Stewart E. Guthrie, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Fordham University, has written about that.
so does eating sushi. (Score:2)
make one less smart?
or does aquatic life have an advantage in intellect over land based animals?
Cooking required for living in cold climates (Score:5, Insightful)
So when humans moved into the colder parts of Europe they would have needed ways to gather enough food to avoid starvation. Perhaps cooking made that easier by broadening their diet.
Juice me up! (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)
1. Sit on duff for 2 million years being too stupid to invent anything
2. ???
3. Invent cooking
4. Get smart enough to invent things, like cooking
5. Profit!
I've heard homeless men coming up with more logical explanations than this.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
well, i suppose that's why they're so tentative and saying it is not yet linked as causation. What they're most likely referring to is the possibility of humans accidentally cooking food, realizing it was tastier/giving them more energy, and THEN moving on to deliberately invent things.
Seems like a fair shot in the dark, but it's not entirely without basis. Invention isn't always a proactive process, sometimes things just happen and critters decide they prefer it that way.
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And Prometheus said... (Score:4, Funny)
Fire. Is there ANYTHING it can't do?
Re:And Prometheus said... (Score:5, Funny)
Fire. Is there ANYTHING it can't do?
Stop your liver being pecked out each day by a giant Eagle, apparently.....
The start of the Singularity... (Score:5, Interesting)
The singularity model (some say fantasy, some say theory, call it what you will) is basically that once technology can be used to improve intelligence you get a feedback loop that leads to a society and environment that is literally incomprehensible to the people on the low side of the singularity. This is usually proposed in terms of *designing* brains that are smarter than the ones that designed them, but there's no reason to rule out less fantastic advances as part of the same process.
I think this qualifies as a singularity, from the point of view of the pre-humans.
Re:The start of the Singularity... (Score:5, Insightful)
I gather the idea is that the singularity is the point at which the rate of change is so great that it's almost "vertical", and I'm not sure this would look that way even to proto-humans.
If the rate of change is so flat that it's not perceptible over a single lifespan, which is implied by the comment that it took 2 million years to get from the hand axe to cooking, then everything else has happened in 150 millennia. From that point, what's happened in the past 150 centuries might mostly be comprehensible, but what's happened over the past 150 decades would look pretty close to vertical... and the past 150 years is definitely post-singularity for them.
The singularity isn't an event, and there isn't just one event horizon... think about falling into a black hole: once you pass the event horizon you don't stop there, you keep falling, and there's always another event horizon just ahead of you. Technology is like that: it's a process, and from a distant enough viewpoint we are already on the far side of an event horizon.
Re:The start of the Singularity... (Score:5, Insightful)
One tenant of the technological singularity is that we are completely unequipped to predict what the other side will look like. Our pre-cooking, small brain energy ancestors would certainly be unequipped to predict today's world.
I like your analogy.
Forgive me, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Tenant [merriam-webster.com] is someone who rents housing or office space. Tenet [merriam-webster.com] is a point of view, doctrine, or belief. I rather think you mean the latter of the two.
(doffs Grammar Nazi cap and goes back outside to work in the garden)
Cheers,
A better explanation (Score:3, Interesting)
A much better explanation comes from Dr. Temple Grandin in one of her books: Animals in Translation. She posits that humans and dogs co-evolved, allowing humans to develop their cognitive side at the expense of their sense (smell, hearing).
A lot more convincing argument than cooking, imho.
Perceive things (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything is programmed into us except our reaction to the first stimulus we receive.
The more similar the programming the more identical we are... Travelling to different cities around the world I found that people had similar ways of viewing things.
It's the interaction between different viewpoints that creates the tension that produces innovation.
A brilliant mind sees things more clearly, a genius sees things differently.
Taking a step back and asking what you're really trying to accomplish can make all the difference, that's the great thing about programming... we solve a problem forever the better you become the more global your solution...
"God sees the grain of sand in the beach and also the world in a grain of sand."
I can verify this. (Score:3, Funny)
Cooking == Rotting (Score:3, Interesting)
Cooking is forced decomposition. The "easier" calories are, as TFA says, from pre-processing otherwise difficult to digest material. Scavengers have been around for a long time. Where's the smart vultures?
The pre-processing most relevant to cognition is making making the nucleotides adenylate, inosinate and guanylate easier to extract, from which the neurotransmitter glutamate is made. Glutamate availability is well documented as necessary to effective cognition. We are tuned to detect those nucleotides via the "5th taste", umami. Monosodium glutamate is to tongue receptors what benzodiazapines and narcotics are to the brain's GABA and endorphin receptors -- fake keys that fit the locks. Food treated with MSG seems "heartier" when tasted, and one might feel full sooner because the brain is easily fooled, but hungry again sooner because the stomach is slow, but not stupid. Chinese and similar cuisines are rich in glutamate containing foods, and frequently MSG is added (as "meat tenderizer" or "flavor enhancer") to the food.
It remains to be seen whether the "intelligence" (more undefinable as you know more about it) is a beneficial evolutionary trait. We haven't been around in the "smart" version long enough to serve as proof. "Intelligence" may be nothing more than one mutation that provided a species one means to become the ecological equivalent of a cancer, and providing us with the ability to live in denial of our nature by deluding ourselves about "superiority".
The superior design may well prove to be a scavenger (make no mistake, we are) with low water content and requirement, and cognitive abilities may prove irrelevant or even counter-productive. What species is expected to survive a nuclear war, and what species can conduct one?
Evidence of scavenger nature in humans and cockroaches (and the delusional nature of the former) can be found in "social facilitation". Performance in enhanced by the presence of others. Cockroaches run mazes faster when they "know other cockroaches are watching". Bugger*. How can they have what in us we consider to be a highly complex (ie. "social") behavior with no cognitive ability to speak of? They don't "abstract" being watched. Social psychology needs to check in with evolutionary biology. The scavenger that detects competition will do what it can to get to the calories fastest -- run faster -- and thus be more successful. Or it might just use its mutant powers to conduct rapid decomposition on demand as well as pretend it's not just rotten**.
*,** Both double meanings unintended, but I'll take them.
This theory only works (Score:5, Interesting)
if we ignore all the other palaeoanthropolical evidence, i.e:
1) Bones burned at high temperatures found in caves show that Homo Erectus was regularly cooking food 1.5 million years ago. This is unsurprising because we know they used fire, and and it doesn't take very long for those sitting around a fire to accidentally drop some food in it, fish that food out with a stick, and after eating it, discover that it tastes better than the raw variety.
2) Humans didn't display any technological superiority over H. Erectus, and were technologically inferior to H. Neanderthalenis until around 40,000 years ago. That 40,000 year figure is crucial, because this is the period when we began to produce art, and our tool technology started to incorporate various innovations that H. Erectus and Neanderthal tools didn't have.
3) H. Erectus kept evolving, and eventually developed a brain similar in size to our own (i.e. their brains doubled in size) long before modern humans appeared, while H. Neanderthalensis had a bigger brain than modern humans. It should be noted that H. Erectus is by far the most successful human species, having survived for almost 2 million years (followed by Australopithecus Aforensis, who was around for a million years).
3) H. Neanderthalensis had a more sophisticated culture than ours until 40,000 years ago (again, the 40,000 year break point). They buried their dead, had production lines for tools, and maintained a trading network over long distances while H. Sapiens was spending the first 100,000 years of our existence being primitive aboriginal bushmen in Africa.
The best theory I've seen to explain why humans changed from a very long period in a static, very primitive state is that the climate changes caused by the Indonesian super volcano which led to the "bottleneck event" that nearly destroyed our species favoured the brightest and most innovative people who were able to formulate survival strategies that didn't occur to less imaginative individuals. The ice age which the event caused also wiped out the majority of H. Erectus and H. Neanderthalensis, so those newer, brighter humans were able to expand into new territories without having to compete with significant numbers of other human species who had been technologically, culturally, and physically superior to them before the bottleneck event occurred.
The bottleneck event happened around 60,000 years ago. By the time its effects had completely disappeared, H. Erectus was extinct, H. Neanderthalensis had been depleted to a level they never recovered from completely (they lived in Europe and Asia, both of which were especially badly hit by the after-effects of the super volcano), and the entirety of H. Sapiens was represented by as little as 2,000 individuals living in small, scattered groups whose entire intellectual capacity was dedicated to the difficult business of survival. The fact that it took us another 20,000 years to reach a point where our culture and technology went beyond the levels that other human species had reached hundreds of thousands of years previously is an indication of how difficult the job of merely surviving was during that time, and how close we came to following H. Erectus and H. Neanderthansis into the oblivion of extinction.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
'A couple of generations', what is this, instant-evolution? Close cousine of instant-ramen?
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
how many generations have pigs been slopped from table scraps?
do domesticated pigs have higher IQs than wild boars?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
Ten years ago I helped raise Russian wild boars. They have incredible instincts. We used to joke that the boars had a wiretap inside of our kitchen. In the morning, we'd discuss which boar to kill. We'd get all ready, load the gun, and step outside. The pigs would look up from behind their fence, give a grunt of alarm, and the one we had chosen would run off into the bush. The rest would settle down and continue eating.
Trapping them for transport was also quite challenging. We had a small pen with a portcullis-style drop down gate. You'd drop the gate by pulling on a string. It was easy enough to lure the boars in there with food, but dropping the gate was another matter entirely. Even with ten meters of string, the boar would run out before we got close enough to pull it. We had to resort to seemingly unnecessary measures like 50 meters of string, which would be pulled while out of sight behind a building.
But if we weren't trapping anything that day, we could get as close as we wanted and they'd stay happily eating in the pen. They could also tell when the electric fence was down, and there'd be escapes if the power was out for more than a few hours.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not a biologist, but I do know that traits acquired by the parents, such as the presumed increased intelligence due to cooked food (Which I don't think would actually happen, but who knows?), would not be passed to their children. You could try to sort animals by liking to cooked food, hoping to get the ones with the 'best' genes, but even that would be dubious science at best.
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not a biologist, but I do know that traits acquired by the parents, such as the presumed increased intelligence due to cooked food (Which I don't think would actually happen, but who knows?), would not be passed to their children.
The theory would be not that eating cooked food made them smarter.
The theory would be that cooking food made it biologically feasible for their offspring to develop smaller digestive systems and larger, more calorie-hungry brains. However for that to happen the genes would have to be created and expressed. This necessarily means it happened to the offspring of the ones who started eating cooked food.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:more energy *because* we have bigger brains (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea is that an animal cannot normally support a brain as big as ours. The brain becomes a liability rather than an asset. When you invent something that makes calories easier to come by, the biggest liability of the brain -- high energy demands -- is minimized, and the benefits favour growing bigger brains.
In that scenario, cooking is an enabling technology that lets you go from a slightly-larger-than-an-ape brain to the monstrosity that we currently possess.
The process of growing an individual brain has nearly nothing to do with it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)