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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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. ;-)
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,
Re:If that was true.... (Score:3, Informative)
insufficient evidence (Score:2, Informative)
Yet could it be this eternal, special component in the makeup of us all explains why the human is the only creature on this planet, that seeks persistently and actually quite illogically, to worship something or someone beyond the natural, physical world?
Doubtful, because a) of the pervasive physiological similarity of hominid brains and behaviors, b) the light that neuroscience and neurophysiology cast on the nature of consciousness in humans and the great apes, and c) the fact that you are wrong in the following statement:
Man is the ONLY animal with an otherwise unexplainable urge to worship.
Other members of the genus Homo were also spiritual in the sense we would call "religious". Homo neanderthalensis of course, likely as well as some other contemporaneous members of the genus (including Homo sapiens of course) had similar and sometimes intermingled culture.
But that statement is wrong in another way too: human religions are *NOT*, as you seem to think, primarily concerned with "worshipping" anything, let alone with deism. The majority of the world's religions, and the majority of the world's "religious" practitioners aren't even based on faith in the way Abrahamic religions are. For example, most Eastern religions aren't even "religions" in the sense someone with knowledge only of Abrahamic religion might think of the word. There are more practitioners of spiritual religions focussing on self-discovery and sublime, immaterial happiness (Buddhism, Shinto, shamanism, etc.) than of faith-centric, theistic religions (Abrahamic and Homeric religions, etc.), and they are not at all compelled to "worship" in the prostrate, sycophantic way you seem to think.
I believe that the explanation lies in the book of beginnings, the biblical account found in Genesis...
I do not, and the majority of humans do not. "the" book of origins? There are many religious stories claiming to describe the "one true" origin of the universe and humans. They are all, Genesis' account included, based not on empiricism but on creative conjecture; claims made without evidence and often without even reasoning.
Re:Sources? Also, is tofu then bad for you? (Score:3, Informative)
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 Whole Soy Story [amazon.com]. I have followed up with pubmed to critically verify the claims made about soy. Also, there have been a number of recently completed studies appearing in the news lately that corroborate the information in that book.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:2, Informative)
Man..I hope not, I LOVE sushi.
Me, too.
I think we're safe since sushi is actually the rice and that is cooked and vinegared. The fish, or sashimi, is easier to digest than milk, but less digestible than soya bean. PDF [cambridge.org]
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.
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, so while it's not cooking at high temperatures, it's still making food more digestible than just eating it raw.
I'm a veggie, but I'm happy to cook my food - some of the raw-food stuff is good, but I find some of the flavorings they use surprising, such as the "liquid aminos" that are basically MSG relatives, not that I'm particularly bothered by it.