Cooking May Have Made Us Human

SpaceGhost writes "Anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human believes that the discovery of cooked food led to evolutionary changes resulting in a smaller and different digestive system based on a higher-quality diet, mainly relying on cooked meat. In an interview on NPR's Science Friday (text and audio), Professor Wrangham explores concepts such as the digestive costs of food, the benefits (or lack thereof) of raw diets, and a distinct preference in Great Apes for cooked food over raw."

It changed our relationships with animals as well

[damn_registrars]

One hypothesis is that domestication of the modern dog came about partially as a result of our ability to cook food. The dog was a better hunter but we could much more easily access the marrow that the dogs wanted; especially after we cook the meat.

Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we

[hawkfish]

One hypothesis is that domestication of the modern dog came about partially as a result of our ability to cook food.

Another recent hypothesis is that dogs were domesticated for food. If you look at the genetic diversity of dogs, it is highest in southern China where dogs are still eaten. Archaeological evidence also suggests that the oldest dog bones in the area were butchered.

Re:

[elrous0]

Another hypothesis is that dogs actually domesticated *us*. Okay well, it's actually less a "hypothesis" than an old Twilight Zone episode, but it's a cool twist ending nonetheless.

Re:

[poopdeville]

Have you just not heard of trichinosis? It's common in Middle East. Swine wallow in mud to stay cool. That's a recipe for humans getting parasites.

Re:

[CAIMLAS]

Dogs aren't carnivores. They're omnivores, just like we are, and their digestive system is very similar due to "shared evolution". There's a reason why dogs will get sick if they eat nothing but raw meat; likewise, they'll get sick if they eat only raw foods (like, oh, carrots) they will get ill (and often turn on their owners, if they're large enough)?

Have you ever seen a dog eat grass, bugs, or cooked vegetable/grain table scraps? That's partially because their dietary needs are very similar to our's.

Dogs

Re:

[Will.Woodhull]

Which segues into an important question about the effects of domesticating animals on the species that is doing the domestication.

There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? Dogs have changed markedly since their ancestors began associating with humans; does it not seem likely that th

Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we

[jc42]

There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? ... any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings.

Well, perhaps, in the "silly sciences". But among biologists in general, there has been no sign of such a taboo, and this topic is dealt with quite openly. It is well-understood that, as one text I saw recently put it, humans are one of the species with the most symbiotic relationships. We have domesticated several hundred animal species and several thousand plant species. Much of the reason we've been so successful at this is a major human adaptation that is referred to informally as "empathy". We are capable of understanding other species to a much greater degree than they can understand us.

The dog is an interesting case, because it's clear that they differ from their wolf ancestors in that they have a good understanding of human psychology, body language, etc. This is true to a lesser degree in a few other domestic species, notably cats and horses. But most of our domestic animals don't really understand us; we understand them (to varying degrees).

Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?" But I'd read some of the biological articles on the topic, and (probably more importantly) due to my wife's serious allergies to furry critters, I've lived in a house with birds for several decades. One of them right now is a blue-crowned conure, who was a "rescue" bird. She was found in a tree in a nearby town about 20 years ago, and some people who knew parrots got her to come down for some food. She was nearly starved, and had obviously not been a wild bird. She had a couple of homes for a few years, one of them a friend of ours who had retired, was traveling a lot, and asked if we wanted to give her a home. She has lived with us since.

Now, blue-crowned conures are not in any sense domesticated. It's likely that a very recent ancestor was caught in the wild, and she's the result at most a few generations of breeding (if you can call it that). Her species has no adaptations for living with humans, but she gets along well. And it's obvious that the reason is that we can talk to her in her own language. As the bird books would say, she's now part of a flock that's led by a couple of those funny flightless humans. A year ago, she got outside, and was in a neighbor's tree, totally terrified. We spent an hour "talking" her down to lower and lower branches, until finally she flew to my shoulder and started nibbling my ear. We took her back inside her home, and she shows no interest in that horrible outdoors, except to watch out the window when we're not there, squawking a greeting when we walk up to the house. Just as well; she'd die quickly in the New England winter that's coming, if she didn't starve first. (We also have cockatiels, but they've been domesticated and bred for about 150 years.)

Anyway, this isn't anything at all odd. Around the world, people keep all sorts of "undomesticated" animals as pets. There was a nice example years ago in a National Geographic article that started of talking about an area of India where people express wonder about the Europeans who keep huge "wolves" as pets; aren't they afraid of what those animals will do to their children? The article then went into its topic: In that part of India, people have pet cobras that wander freely around the house. They're not worried about the childre

Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we

[Kenneth Stephen]

Hmm. I come from India, in a place where there are plenty of cobra's and they are killed on sight (i.e - even if they are not causing trouble, because the general idea is that if a cobra doesn't cause trouble today, it will tomorrow). India is a vast place, with a multitude of cultures, so it is possible that in some part of India the situation that you describe does exist. When I searched for this on the web, though, I came up with the following on National Geographic TV:

Hiss of Death
Next Showing: Wednesday 7 October at 8pm
The King Cobra is the largest venomous snake on the planet, but in a small village in northeast Thailand the King Cobra has become a welcome resident. In fact, more than half of the village families keep a cobra as a pet . And so the village is known as Ban Kok Sa Nga - 'Serpent Town'. Many people in Kok Sa Nga make their living from the King Cobra, but in a most unusual way. The men fight these spring-coiled serpents barehanded, while the women dance with fully fanged King Cobras in their mouths. If you thought you'd seen snake wrangling before - you haven't seen nothing until you've seen the snake performers of Kok Sa Nga!!

Perhaps you confused Thailand with India. Or perhaps you are right, and there really is a place like you describe in India. All I could find, though, was the above reference.

Re:

[jc42]

I'll have to look that up; it sounds impressive.

I don't remember where the NG story was in India; I vaguely recall that it was southerly. I also don't know how large an area they were writing about. It is interesting how many different cultures there are in India. It's one of the most culturally diverse part of the planet. Not that people there always get along, but they do seem to be generally more tolerant of differences than people are in much of the rest of the world.

I wonder if I could find the video

Re:

[jc42]

I'm guessing you mean the boas when you say "not a threat to life". My friend did say that she had to learn how to feed them right to keep them friendly and docile. It turned out to be about two mice per week. And she also said she'd had an earlier snake that she fed too well, so it grew to be too big for her to handle or wear as jewelry. She donated it to a local zoo, where it was still living the last I heard, and got a new baby boa.

I've read that most of the "show" cobras are defanged. The story I r

Re:

[jc42]

But someone who has never owned a parrot? If he walked to a person and bopped his head sideways, I am 100% sure that 99% of the people would have no clue that it means that his neck itches. In fact, I'm pretty sure they couldn't even tell if he is tired, scared or in a bad mood. In all of those most people would think "He flies around and screams. He probably isn't happy?" and couldn't interpret anything more.

Yeah; that was basically what I was saying, though I said it the other way 'round. The writer I wa

Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs?

Man is more likely to have been affected by its domestication of annual plants like wheat. Growing wheat required settling down into stable communities, tending the plants meticulously, harvesting and storing them as a mass collective effort. Can't remember where I read it, but man has been described as a subservient species to plants like wheat which modified themselves to capture a host organisms. At any rate, I think at least that the adage "You are what you eat" does apply in some small way to the evolution of humans.

I don't understand

[vrmlguy]

How would our ancestors been able to cook while cavorting with the dolphins [wikipedia.org]?

fast food

[Anonymous Coward]

And fast food made us american!

Re:

[virchull]

Fast food made us fat. A revolution made us American.

vegetarians

[Errtu76]

I'm a vegetarian. Let's say my children will be too, and their children as well (and so on, and so forth). Does this mean that eventually their stomach size will increase?

Re:vegetarians

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it means your line will eventually become extinct

Re:

[GaryOlson]

Before that eventuality, your descendants' brain sizes will be shrinking. Either:

-- your descendants smaller brain sizes guarantee lives as grocery cart attendants, or

-- your descendants brains processing will become more efficient as their brain size shrinks in order to maintain parity with the other humans.

Either way they will be freaks.

Re:

[JAlexoi]

Is there a particular reason you think your children will be vegetarian? A maybe a religion? Or will you just brainwash them into your way of life?
If you think that your children will fall in love only with a vegetarian(That would be messing with their lives very dramatically), then maybe some permanent changes may occur. But only if vegetarians really need to have bigger stomachs to digest the required amount of food.

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[maxume]

It looked an awful lot like a hypothetical to me.

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[Rary]

Or will you just brainwash them into your way of life?

All parents "brainwash" their children into their way of life. My parents never asked me whether or not I wanted to eat meat. They simply fed me what they fed themselves. Thus I became a meat-eater, not by choice, but by default because of my parents' choices (or, perhaps, because of their parents' choices, and so on).

Why should vegetarian parents be any different?

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[TheLink]

The point of the article is the digestive system for most humans has significant subsystem that's outside the body. In some places it's called the "kitchen" and the digestive process that occurs there is called "cooking" and "food preparation".

But yes if you and your line of descendents solely eat raw and unprocessed plant foods and somehow do not die out in the process, it is likely that some sort of adaptation would have to occur, and it may include the increase of stomach size or the number of stomachs,

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[turbidostato]

"The point of the article is the digestive system for most humans has significant subsystem that's outside the body."

Which I don't know how it comes as "news" to anybody. The metabolic trade between brain and everything else (being the digestive apparatus the second in command) has been accepted now for decades.

Re:

[Gordonjcp]

Only if you're eating lots of raw vegetables, typically with a fairly low energy content. Meat is pretty energy-dense stuff, and you don't need a lot of it to supply your daily energy requirements. Vegetables tend to be less energy-dense but stuff like grass and leaves is pretty poor indeed - which is why large herbivores spend all their time eating. The key is that cooking food - both meat and vegetables - breaks down proteins in them. This makes them easier to digest, so we spend less energy digesting

Re:vegetarians

[fosterNutrition]

No. Evolution works only on traits produced by genetic mutation, NOT traits acquired through behaviour. This was one of the flaws in early theories of evolution: it was believed that actions of the parent could influence the genetics of the child, which is not the case. The standard example is giraffes: under the incorrect theory, one could say "they developed longer necks because they stretched them to reach high leaves", but the correct interpretation is instead "the ones with longer-than-average necks could feed better, and hence had more children".

The reason for this is that the genetic material passed on through reproduction comes entirely from the cells in your reproductive organs, so no matter how much you train your neck (or stomach, in your case), none of those changes can in any way get passed to your children, because those cells just aren't involved in the process.

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[maxume]

He is positing that many generations will exist in a vegetarian environment and wondering about the results, not wondering about whether the many generations will be successful in teaching the next to only eat vegetables (so evolution is very much in play if you give the hypothetical question a fair reading).

Also, take a look at epigenetics, there is evidence building that parents can mark their own DNA in ways that alter expression in the child (the genes don't change, the regulation does).

Re:

[mog007]

it was believed that actions of the parent could influence the genetics of the child

Minor quibble, but Lamarckian evolution didn't have a concept of genetics, if he did he wouldn't have been so wrong. The mechanism for passing on traits was a mystery even to Darwin.

Re:

[timeOday]

But the story is still being written. See epigenetics [wikipedia.org]. Differences in environment (e.g. parental behavior) affect gene expression which in turn affect behavior (e.g. parenting behavior).

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[fastest fascist]

How did you end up thinking this equates to the neck-stretching theory? On a low-quality vegetarian diet, the individuals with larger stomachs and intenstines would be able to digest more food and do a better job of it, which would lead to a reproductive advantage. So if you took the GP and their offspring out of modern society and they were able to survive on a solely vegetarian diet without modern agriculture, they could very well develop larger stomachs over time. As things are, though, a high-quality ve

Re:

[khchung]

No, they won't.

Evolution is not a directed process based on what you do, but based on which traits survive and get passed to offspring.

There is no evolutionary pressure for your children to have a bigger stomach at all, i.e. those that have a smaller stomach are not more likely to die, nor will they have less chance to have children.

Actually, the opposite is more likely. Your children that is less suited to be a vegetarian, due to being less able to absorb nutrient from vegetarian diet, and assuming they t

Re:

[mog007]

Vegetarians have to worry about calcium deficiencies when they get older. And fat people who are fat enough to actually have it impact their health aren't being selected against, because they still live long enough to reproduce. I don't see many fat people dropping dead from heart attacks at the age of 20, or 30 for that matter. Coupled that with the fact that girls with a higher fat content in their diet will reach sexual maturity faster, fat people could start reproducing in their early to mid teens.

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[sjames]

Actually, yes they would IF the larger stomach improved their chances of reproduction given that their diet was fixed by an immovable convictions. Of course, it might ALSO (if such a thing has a genetic component) cause them to evolve a more flexible attitude to moral/ethical thinking to erase the disadvantage caused by a raw vegetarian diet coupled with a digestive system inadequate to that diet.

There could even be a split with one line having a more adequate digestive system and the other a more flexible

Re:

[turbidostato]

"I'm a vegetarian. Let's say my children will be too, and their children as well (and so on, and so forth). Does this mean that eventually their stomach size will increase?"

Only if Lamarck were right, which is not.

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[fastest fascist]

You didn't really think that through, did you?

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[fastest fascist]

Unlikely if they all eat modern industrially produced food. The obesity epidemic shows us it's easy nowadays for a westerner to obtain all the calories they need and then some, and just dropping meat out won't change that. We have an abundant supply of calorie-rich starches - you can easily get all the calories you need from grain and rice and potatoes without needing a larger stomach. There are also perfectly fine, rich vegetarian sources of protein available. The agricultural revolution changed many thing

Re:

[fosterNutrition]

No, not possibly at all. That would be a case of traits produced through behaviour being inherited genetically, which is not how inheritance of traits works. Evolution can only happen through *selection* of traits (e.g. those who already have certain traits having more children), not by training/creating traits. See my reply to the OP for more details.

Also, evolution is undirected: there is no such thing as "reverse" evolution, only adaptation to whatever the environment is.

A one month old story

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Is this another slashvertisement to get the story out there and advertise the book again? I already listened to the Science Friday segment a month ago.

From the linked article:
[quote]August 28, 2009[/quote]

It may well be an interesting book, but I don't think I will ever get around to buying or reading it, too much of a backlog as it is.

1.9 Million or 150,000 years ago?

[plsuh]

Compare this article with the one posted back in August 2008:

http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/08/12/2036254/Cooking-Stimulated-Big-Leap-In-Human-Cognition [slashdot.org]

Opinions?

--Paul

Re:1.9 Million or 150,000 years ago?

[turbidostato]

"It's not cooking, but it's a similar issue, and it becomes a rather interesting chicken-and-egg question."

Only because we tend to think about evolution on finalistic terms (such as "this allowed us to go towards this goal").

Darwinian evolution is based on fitness and that means a given genotype is selected by means of its expressed phenotype as a whole. There's no "chicken-and-egg" problem since mutations are not queued waiting to see if they win the prize or not prior to go for the next one. At any given moment random mutations can appear; some of them produce a better fitting to current environment; vast majority are either "bad" or neutral. The "proper" combination of brain size/energy cost plus allowed diet plus difficulty or easiness at childbirth plus... is selected on an "all or nothing" way.

So, in the end, it is not that immatureness at birth allowed to bigger brains or the other way around; it is not that a more energetic diet allowed for less costly digestive apparatus which in turn allowed for a more costly brain or the other way around, etc. it all happened more or less at the same time on a monotonic path (while certainly one given mutation did appeared earlier than any other one; I don't think will ever be able to find what exactly happened, mutation by mutation, nor it's needed go down to such level of detail to understand how happened on a more general but still significant way, except, maybe, for a bunch of big steps if they indeed happended).

Tasty

[ozmanjusri]

Cooking may not have made us human, but it certainly makes us crispy.

Re:

[Will.Woodhull]

Just stew on that for a while...

BREAKING NEWS

[Lord Bitman]

Fire determined to be most important discovery of human history!

Re:

[Jesus_666]

I thought Mass Effect was the most important discovery of human history!

You lied to me, Bioware!

Re:

[Talgrath]

I believe Kanye West actually being a popular "musician" is the last sign of the apocalypse, there is only one solution, Kanye must die to avert the Battle of Armageddon before we are all consumed in hellfire! Kill the Kanye!! Oh, what we were talking about? Oh yeah, this guy is full of shit; brain size has very little to do with your intelligence, besides that, wouldn't it make more sense if the intelligence to cook food came first?

if 'Cooking May Have Made Us Human'

[jopsen]

If Cooking May Have Made Us Human, those that make me an animal ?

Re:

[jopsen]

(Sorry, "does" not "those", I'm tired...)

Logical inverse?

[GaryOlson]

... cooking our food has not only changed our bodies over the years, giving us smaller mouths ... it's given us an evolutionary advantage: bigger brains

Can we imply the inverse: people with big mouths have small brains and prefer sushi?

Dupes make us human..

[HeLLFiRe1151]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/08/12/2036254/Cooking-Stimulated-Big-Leap-In-Human-Cognition [slashdot.org] But I would have sworn it was our oppositional thumbs that did the trick.

Is it a new news ?

[meuhlavache]

Because I heard exactly the same thing on TV report more than 5 years ago !

Cows

[PietjeJantje]

So if intelligence is related to nutrition, why aren't cows (the fat blobs!) the most intelligent species on earth?

Re:

[TimSSG]

So if intelligence is related to nutrition, why aren't cows (the fat blobs!) the most intelligent species on earth?

If I understand the posts and summary, the greater intelligence of the human line results in eating cooked meat; therefore the digestive system changed and in some ways simplified because of the diet change. Cows (bovine) are plant eaters with a very complex digestive system.

I think a reasonable conclusion is a species that uses fire to cook food reduces the need of complex digestive system in order to survive.

Tim S.

Re:

[DuckDodgers]

Read the article. Species with an easy time digesting their food have more resources for thinking. Cows get plenty of food, but their extra stomach and time spent chewing cud indicate that they expend tons of their body's space and resources digesting food.

Aliens guided our evolution

[gmuslera]

The book was "How to serve humans"... they had to make apes evolve to get that critical piece of the recipe.

Brace yourselves

[kheldan]

mainly relying on cooked meat

Shitstorm from the vegetarian/vegan crowd in 3, 2, 1..

Cooking May Have Made Us Human???

[FatdogHaiku]

I would think that at best it might make us tender...

OK, succulent if you use the right equipment.

Re:Not Quite.

[IDK]

What the author wanted to point out was that we could evolve a more efficient digestive system, when we cooked our food. If someone doesn't have to develop an immune system, then that person has more energy left to hunt, which makes that person more fit for that enviroment, thus we evolve.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

Yes one aspect why many feel that Giant Pandas are doomed in the wild. They mainly have the digestive tract of a carnivore but eat mainly bamboo. Because of this efficiency they must consume some 20 - 30 lbs (9-14 kg) of bamboo a day. They also have to eat at least 2 different kinds of bamboo to get enough protein. That combined with a shrinking habitat (and food supply) and low birth rate doesn't bode well for them.

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[Talgrath]

And yet, we try to "save" the pandas...has anyone considered that maybe this creature is supposed to die out?

Re:

[turbidostato]

"Yes one aspect why many feel that Giant Pandas are doomed in the wild."

In the end all K-strategists are doomed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory). They make the best efficience of a given niche but once the niche changes (and it is not "if" but "when") you are out of the game.

Re:

[nizo]

Unless of course we are able to produce a wide variety of enzymes that allow us to digest a greater range of foods than other (competing) animals.

Take the Neanderthals for example; it would appear they were exclusively meat eating. Not so hot when there isn't much meat around.

Re:

[rainmaestro]

On the other hand, this entire argument is meaningless since we are missing a key piece of information: the difference in energy gain during digestion of raw vs cooked foods.

If the energy cost of manufacturing enzymes is less than the energy gained by digesting cooked food over raw food (ie, a cell structure permitting more efficient digestion), you still have a net *gain* in energy over eating raw meat, making cooked foods the better choice.

As far as falling asleep goes, that is caused by what we eat, not

Re:

[Lorien_the_first_one]

Even if there were a "net energy gain", we'd still have to consider the ability of the body to assimilate the nutrition. By assimilate, I mean, using the products of digestion to provide raw materials for repair and building new tissue. Producing enzymes for digestion seems to hinder the assimilation process.

I have a hard time seeing how producing new enzymes is more efficient than letting existing enzymes in food do the work. Could you explain how it could be more efficient to force the body to produ

Re:

[rainmaestro]

I'm not saying either method is more efficient, I'm just pointing out that we can't draw any conclusions without looking at the entire process.

The possibility that comes to mind, however, is this:
--Cooking food changes the chemical structure of the food. For example, the collagen in meat is converted to a more gelatinous form, which requires less energy to digest. Call this change in energy delta-Y.
--At the same time, enzymes in the food are partially destroyed during the cooking process, which must be repl

Re:

[Jaime2]

You didn't read the article. This is exactly the research that was done to come to the conclusion that cooked food allowed us more free time. Humans on a raw food diet were one subject -- they tend to be undernourished even when they seems to have an adequate calorie intake. To verify this, studies were done on humans who had their small intestines removed (the intestines were removed before the study due to unrelated medical complications). These humans allowed the researches to see that significantly

Re:

[dkf]

The Pottenger Experiments. [nutritionreallyworks.net]

While that research might be fine when it comes to cats (I have no knowledge of the field, and I can't be bothered to Google for any scholarly papers to back up the assertions on a website) you are aware that that's completely inapplicable to digestion and nutrition in humans? The issue here is that cats are carnivores and humans are omnivores; the evidence for this is in our dentition, but you can bet that our guts will be at least as different.

Humans have been cooking food for a long long time, through a

Re:Not Quite.

[ferd_farkle]

"fitness", as applied to evolution, has nothing to do with the kind of "fitness" you might acquire by going to the gym; ie, being bigger and stronger.

"Survival of the fittest", (a phrase that did not originate with C. Darwin), means leaving more offspring who, in turn, leave surviving offspring, passing on whatever adaptive advantage led to having more offspring. Certainly our intelligence, tool using, and general intellectual flexibility is highly adaptive. It is, perhaps, our most adaptive trait, along with bipedalism.

Re:

[sexybomber]

"fitness", as applied to evolution, has nothing to do with the kind of "fitness" you might acquire by going to the gym; ie, being bigger and stronger.

Actually it does, for reasons that you stated in your next sentence!

"Survival of the fittest" [...] means leaving more offspring"

I reckon someone who hits the gym regularly (not necessarily daily even) will have more ... shall we say ... mating potential, and thus a higher chance of producing offspring, than a nocturnal Mom's-basement-cave-dweller. (B

Re:

[toriver]

I reckon someone who hits the gym regularly (not necessarily daily even) will have more ... shall we say ... mating potential

Aha! I knew gyms were just a front for coupling services, a flesh market. Largely based on the observations that people in gyms tend to already be well fit when they start attending.

Re:

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Why can't cooking be considered an adaption to the surroundings?

Re:

[kanweg]

Or use thereof. I've always wondered how - according to DNA analysis - humanity may have gone thru the eye of a needle, with only a small population at a particular point in time. Now, imagine that a group of ancestors lived near a volcano, or a region like you have in Yellowstone. The could cook their food there, in hot pockets (it is still being done). That would allow a group to stay in a single place for quite some time, interbreed, and thrive.

Mastering fire could come much later.

Bert

Nonsense

[coryking]

Your ideas about evolution are fairly dated. It lacks our new understanding that there are other things that "want" to replicate besides genes. We know are starting to understand that ideas and culture are a replicant who is on par with genes. We call them memes.

When viewed through the idea that memes "want" to replicate--scientific discoveries and things like cooking become memes routing around meatspace constraints. In otherwords, science is not a hindrance to evolution, it *is* evolution. Just not e

Re:Not Quite.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our ability to think and reason is what makes us the fittest. The concept doesn't just apply to physical traits.

Re:

[Zixaphir]

So... we couldn't be the most physically fit, so we evolved a superiour trait? HAX

Re:Not Quite.

[antura]

... as we aren't the fittest animal out there we simply outthink our enemies which defies survival of the fittest...

Survival of the fittest, not survival of the strongest. Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment? Why would a human need te be able to run 100km/h when you can drive a car?

Re:

[MrMr]

You mean gasoline prices are now a driving force for human evolution?

Re:

[radtea]

Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment?

I'm not sure which is funnier, your comment or that fact that someone modded you insightful.

The specific kind of intelligence found in modern humans--the kind that writes operas and builds space craft and creates the general theory of relativity--is a problem for evolutionary theory because it has no conceivable use in our ancient habitat, and there is no evidence that it was used for anything very interesting back then compared to the vas

Re:Not Quite.

[grumbel]

"Survival of the fittest" means that those survive that are best adopted to their environment, it has nothing to do with fitness, strength or any other property, as properties that might be beneficial in one environment might be useless or even deadly in another.

Re:

[HopeOS]

Actually, fitness has a very specific meaning when discussing evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology) [wikipedia.org] and is similarly applied to genetic algorithms where it's quantified for sorting and culling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(genetic_algorithm) [wikipedia.org] In both cases, fitness is context, and therefore environment, specific. -Hope

Re:

[Rary]

the original use of the phrase, was applied to physical properties not intellectual.

Regardless of what the original use of the phrase may have been, the use that is relevant to any discussion of evolution is that of Charles Darwin. From Wikipedia:

Darwin first used Spencer's new phrase "survival of the fittest" as a synonym for "natural selection" in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869. Darwin meant it is a metaphor for "better adapted for immediate, local environment", not the common inference of "in the best physical shape". Hence, it is not a scientific desc

Re:

[mog007]

In evolution, fitness has nothing to do with it. It's all about surviving long enough to pass on your genes to the next generation. There are several aspects of intelligence that help in survival. There's communication, and spatial awareness, but there's also problem solving. Any one of those things could have been the spark that allowed an ancient group of apes to survive, and the mutation that allowed them to be more spatially aware than before might have gotten bigger and bigger, until you get someth

Re:

[Runaway1956]

As AC says, "Complete rubbish"!

A mere change in coloration can lead to extinction, or dominance in an ecological niche. How exactly, did you arrive at the conclusion that the most intelligent of other species usually dies? Citations, please, or you're talking out your ass.

Re:

[JAlexoi]

Not "fittest" but "most adapted", is the more descriptive term here. And humans are the most adapted creatures on this planet. Even the roach is not as adapted, since we can live in the arctics, they cannot.

Re:

[Dun Malg]

"fitness" != "physical prowess". In Darwin's usage, it's meant in its proper broader sense, and applies to things as diverse as plumage color, instinctive cooperative behaviors, and yes, even having a more sphisticated brain that allows you to out-think your prey.

Re:

[Will.Woodhull]

While Wikipedia's definition of evolution is better than the original, it still fails to provide an adequate model of reality.

Inheritance includes a lot more than genetics. For the human species, inheritance includes the transmission of culture that occurs over the first 10 to 20 years of life; without that transmission, you don't have a functional member of the species. Any useful evolutionary model needs to take this non-genetic critical inheritance into account. It is clearly the only way to reconcile

Re:

[turbidostato]

"It's really not the ability to be the fittest to survive."

The problem with the "fitness concept" in evolution is that it is a tautology: what's in the end fitness? Whatever makes your genomic pool to perpetuate at a higher rate than the alternates. How do you show that a given genomic pool is better fitted for a given environment? By showing that it in fact perpetuates at a higher rate than the alternates.

Re:

[WiFiBro]

On raw meat, if you rtfa he mentions that ppl probably hammered the meat before they thought of cooking it.
On raw food in general the gentleman says it is more difficult to obtain all the protein and energy from it.

Cuisine indicates wealth of past cultures.

[reporter]

Cuisine indicates the wealth of past civilizations. Consider Chinese food. It has complex procedures requiring a wide variety of ingredients. Only a wealthy civilization -- with abundant natural resources -- can afford to create this kind of cuisine.

During the Tong Dynasty, China was definitely a wealthy kingdom in the heart of Asia. Here, "wealthy" is a relative term. Though China of that era is likely poorer than Soviet Russia, China was still the richest nation during the time of the Tong Dynasty.

Now, look at Japanese food. It has simple procedures that require few ingredients. Having few resources, the inhabitants of Japan created cuisine that minimized the use of natural resources. Consider raw fish, which was a common food item in ancient Japan. Raw fish requires little preparation beyond just slicing off the flesh.

Here is an exercise for the reader. The Big Mac is the quintessential item in the American cuisine. What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?

Re:

[donscarletti]

I live in China. Generally speaking I eat Japanese, Vietnamese or Korean food. The flavours are much simpler, I find it much easier to eat. I like to see the faces of Chinese when I am eating a big bowl of Vietnamese rice noodles, with fish sauce, mint, vegetable spring rolls and fresh salad leaves. The fact that I am not personally offended by what they served me is perplexing enough, the fact that it is actually what I ordered is incomprehensable. No meat, mostly raw and barely any flavour, the three forb

Re:

[thetoadwarrior]

There are levels in between raw and burnt.

Re:Raw food

[Sponge Bath]

"There are levels in between raw and burnt."

Raw, Warm and Bloody, Medium, Denny's, Burnt

Re:

[soupforare]

Denny's serves meat now?

Re:

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

There is red, brown, black. One is edible.

Re:

[turbidostato]

"Intelligence created our digestive track, not the other way around."

Hi, Mr. gurps_npc:
1912 is calling and asks its Piltdown Man hoax back.

Re:If you think that through...

[biryokumaru]

Actually, it's a widely accepted fact that cooking food vastly increased the amount of calories early man could consume and led directly to the development of higher functions. If anything, this article is about 40-50 years too late to be considered newsworthy.

Re:

[binarylarry]

Excellent.

Now when I gorge and eat a whole 5000 calorie pizza, I can say it's making me smarter!

Re:

[CDMA_Demo]

you are right. I'd add that its very disappointing when scientists credit "one" and "only one" event in human evolution being responsible for our humanity -- in the loosest sense of the word -- and no one can agree on what that "one" event was. Fire? Weapons? Warfare?
It seems art students are happier to not have to worry about all this... oh wait.

Re:

[WiFiBro]

I bet that if you discuss that the man will soon admit that he just claims it as The Thing to get media attention. I'ld add walking upright, talking, talking is likely related to throwing better -both require detailed muscle control-, agriculture, dividing tasks and task specialisation, some say religion, the scientific method, etc.

But were Neanderthals dumb?

[MaizeMan]

Has anyone conclusively demonstrated we really are smarter than Neanderthals were? I mean clear we had some advantage since we're here today and they aren't but I think you could make a pretty good argument that our advantage was some specific trait, like better language skills which allowed us to work better in groups, rather than overall intelligence.

Please let me know if you know something more about this than I do.

Re:

[DuckDodgers]

I think archaeology has established that farming is only about 10,000 years old. Before that, humans were hunter-gatherers and most vegetables, fruits, nuts, and other non-meats we ate were just picked and eaten.

I suspect he's speaking almost entirely of meat roasting on sticks over a fire. If hunted or scavenged meat was the vast majority of the primitive human diet, then cooking meat on sticks over a fire might be enough to cause the evolutionary changes required.

Now when my wife complains, "Not

Cooking like this

[MaizeMan]

You're right there are a bunch of leaps of faith in his premise but let me address some of your concerns:

Cooked foods, whether meats or vegetables have more calories (energy) although the process may destroy some vitamins. For most of historical and pre-historical time humans have been calorie limited. Vitamin deficiencies are a separate issue and hunter gatherers living on a diverse diet of whatever they could lay their hands on would have had plenty of those with and without cooking.

As for the mechanics