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Cooking Stimulated Big Leap In Human Cognition
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.'"
I'm betting there's a giant black monolith involved ... (cue Richard Strauss music)
There, fixed that for you.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
On animal language, I think the jury's still out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language
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
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.