Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
We man got smarts by cooking meats you vegan bitches!!! UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH (think Home Improvement)
... if we feed animals with cooked food they will start to get intelligent?
still no explanation for Steak-umms
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
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?
I'm betting there's a giant black obelisk involved ... (cue weird music)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This just in: slashdot editors watch the history channel for their science news.
then America would be choke full of obese geniuses.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
People look at me funny when I ask for my steak well done.
Neanderthal dopes!
If we could get all our food preprocessed (already chewed with the waste removed) we could send more resources to the brain and less to the digestive system. We have the technology.
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.
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.
'A couple of generations', what is this, instant-evolution? Close cousine of instant-ramen?
- These characters were randomly selected.
make one less smart?
or does aquatic life have an advantage in intellect over land based animals?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
There was this article on the Big Foot myth on TV the other day and a good point was made about how primates with big brains generally live in warm climates because of the energy cost of their brain. The idea is that Big Foot can't live in North America the way that Gorillas live in Africa. There just isn't enough food.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
how many generations have pigs been slopped from table scraps?
do domesticated pigs have higher IQs than wild boars?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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.
So are fat people considered over-clockers?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Something seems out of order here...
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.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Fire. Is there ANYTHING it can't do?
Then if animals ate more, then black bears can become smarter at stalking us???? Oh man, we need to eat more and become smarter to outsmart those black bears. ~
However, why are we Americans so overweight (excluding me) and still kinda... not smart.... ?
Maybe a few more centuries of heart attacks from Mickey D's and McMissle cases and then we will become smarter :\
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.
They must. After all, domesticated pigs often co-star on MythBusters and wild boars are almost never on TV shows.
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.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
I am guessing something like this:
Cooked food --> greater expression of 'intelligence'
a) --> more ability to compete amongst cousins --> natural selection
b) the selection is partially genetic and partially memetic --> more natural selection
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.
We started creating art and maybe even religion.
What?! It wasn't the other way around??
I'm lovin' it.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
One of my English profs said "Everything is representation." and he's right in a very literal as well as metaphorical sense.
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."
Eh? You married my ex?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yeah it was also called mastering fire for the first time.... correlation, causation, etc.?
"For a long time, humans were pretty dumb, doing little but make 'the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,'
Yeah, and life itself was pretty dumb for 3 billion years, floating around in oceans being lazy and photosynthesizing for food. Until about 1 billion years ago, one of them said, "screw this, I'm going multi-cellular so I can _earn_ my food."
This is not news, this is evolution. Some species was simply bound to evolve advanced mental capcity at some point.
(Though you wouldn't know it from watching American TV.)
So those raw food guys really are idiots like I've suspected all along?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
HA. To my dogs, I am a GOD! At least as long as I bring treats...
Dust.
I cook using a Wok and a flat iron griddle. I can even pop popcorn in the Wok!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
So, if this is true, it must be that the human brain is now losing its strength and metabolism from being middle aged. It all makes sense!
Audioscrobbler
Given that cooked food is easier to absorb, then what would the raw food proponents say about that. These people keep saying that the nutrients in raw food would break down during the cooking process, yet cooking food may actually help fuel humans much better than animals that eat food raw.
From the article:
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.
That's why humans expend more energy in their brains - because they have bigger brains, not to grow bigger brains. Even before they "discovered" cooking, they still had proportionately larger brains than other animals. I think this article has it's cause and effect the wrong way round
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
it was potatoes and rice, not meat.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Think in terms of an energy surplus. Cooked food gave humans an energy surplus over raw food which fueled brain development. Livestock animals are bred to be docile, dumb and produce a lot of meat with all the surplus food we feed them. Look up "feedlot" sometime.
Yep, yer darn right that cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition. I can verify this from personal experience. First they see the pot of boiling water, and they're like, "What the hell?" You can see them start thinking real hard at that point. Of course, they're still not quite certain what's going to happen, but you can tell they're listening hard to what you're saying, and watching what you're doing, trying to figure it out for sure. There's so much cognition going on, you can practically see the sweat popping off of their foreheads. Eventually they really start to believe it, and usually then the cognition drops off due to panic. Beyond that point, they're mostly just shrieking and straining at their bonds and stuff. And of course once you put them in the pot, pretty soon there's no more cognition at all. I haven't RTFA, but I think the slashdot summary is probably a little inaccurate -- should be more like, "prospect of imminent cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition."
Find free books.
of large quantities of Mountian Dew means it's actually good for my brain? w00t!
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
Abutebaris modo subjunctivo! Better start eatin', kid.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Burned animal flesh. America's favorite food!
No, seriously, cooking probably was 'discovered' by accident. One of our lucky ancestors probably came upon the still smoldering corpse of some tasty animal killed in a brush or forest fire and noticed the enticing aroma, decided to taste what was left (probably because he was hungry), and then made the cognitive leap to use fire to flush out or kill game. After many, centuries of 'take-out', they found that 'home cooking' was easier then setting the entire forest or plains on fire and proceeded to 'bring home the bacon'.
Sig this!
Which cave man came up with the idea in the first place? How did he/she get smart enough to learn how to cook?!
Several articles have been published stating a possibility that early humans eating plants containing psychotropic chemicals as part of thier diet for generations may have lead to advanced cognitive thinking. Psychotropics can also lead to run on sentences.
Well it depends on the organism you're dealing with. If it's something that has a short breeding and life-span like mice, you might be able to setup an extended experiment just feeding them cooked food and testing them on a series of tasks. It would be difficult to verify in higher level organisms like monkeys, dogs, or cats. But, you could at least test the hypothesis to some degree to see if cooked food has some impact and what the degree of that impact might be. This is why many experiments are done on bacteria actually (including ethical reasons). It's really easy to produce a couple generations in the billions to do some tests.
200+ comments and no mention of a Big Mac?
Previous cooking techniques may have made humans more intelligent, but anything eating a Big Mac spends too much time on the can to learn anything worthwhile.
And its always bothered me that a Wendy's Double doesn't trash the colon like a Big Mac does. I'd investigate further, but as a Subway guy I've been busy working at CERN on the LHC.
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.
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.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
At no time in history have humans had access to more calories than we do now. In the US in particular we are in danger of eating ourselves to death. I also notice a lot more stupidity. Bush was elected twice, after all. If that isn't direct evidence of stupidity on the part of people with too easy access to calories, I don't know what is.
You want to see someone who is smart? Let someone go a couple days without eating and you'll see creativity in action.
Any citations for the following? I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely interested in reading up on this. I lived in Japan for years, and thinking back, I don't think I remember seeing *any* soy-based food product that had not been fermented -- or boiled and salt-treated (a.k.a. tofu and yuba). From what you're saying, though, tofu and yuba would also be bad?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
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.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Tenant is someone who rents housing or office space. Tenet 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,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
how many generations have pigs been slopped from table scraps?
do domesticated pigs have higher IQs than wild boars?
Probably not, assuming the higher IQs had a genetic basis (and not just cooked food allow bigger brains regardless of genetics) then humans developed bigger brains because the cost of a bigger brain, the extra calories required, no longer outweighed the added benefits of intelligence, thus the big brained individuals were more likely to raise successful offspring.
For the equivalent to happen with domesticated pigs there would have had to be a similar selection in favour of intelligence. However, the traits that farmers select for tend to be things like size and tameness. A bigger brain would use up calories that could be better used to generate size and tameness would probably be negatively correlated with intelligence.
Thus if anything the pigs would have lost intelligence since domestication.
As to the being fed by table scraps, I'm not familiar with historical pig farming practises but I don't see farmers generating enough cooked table scraps to form a significant portion of their animal feed.
I stole this Sig
Cooking could make a lot of foods more digestible (and softer, useful when there is no dental care...), but it has an additional benefit that would have helped ancient man evolve tech faster, and that is, it kills parasites and bacteria, etc. Those folks who cooked their foods would have lived longer because of this, and had time to take their acquired memories and knowledge and keep trying out new things/new tasks, finding more efficient ways to do things. That just takes time, and having "elders" who lived decades longer would have certainly helped out. And then having elders who were smart and had a lot of wisdom to pass down but were starting to get frail would have meant that those societies who took care of their elders would have developed social cohesion earlier, which would have meant a more rapid "brain multiplier" effect because of having a lot of accumulated knowledge in a small geographic area which was available to more people.
Welcome to Saudi Arabia!
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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.
I always thought it was the high portein diet of shrimp and crustaceans during the aquatic phase of human evolution.
I suppose we did tend to cook that stuff probably.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
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. 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.
That's right, tea. How, over thousands of years, did ANYONE figure out that the stuff was not only good for you, but catalogued and stored information regarding this?
Obviously, early on, people watched animals eat this stuff and figure out it was good when the animals didn't drop dead on the spot, but the actual medicinal qualities? That requires some serious thought to do. Not something that somebody would just come up with on the fly.
Same goes, basically, for drugs, et al. These guys didn't have labs, or grants, or whatnot.
The only logical conclusion is, much like evolution itself, people who ate the right things lived, those who ate the wrong things died, and those who learned what was healthiest to consume lived LONGER. Hardly rocket science here.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This is how the law has worked in the tribal areas of the middle east for thousands of years and yet they can still find plenty of criminals to punish. Am I correct in assuming you don't want to join such a tribe because you would be considered the criminal?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In fact it's only other humans that we're likely to want to have a war with as a species. You, like me, are into oxygen rich atmospheres and non-saline water and other humans so we have a lot to compete for. A gas giant dweller from Alpha Centauri has nothing I want or could even use beyond information and giving me that doesn't cost him anything.
- Just trying to survive until the nanobots make me immortal -
[teaching/learning purely through communication] does not occur in the animal kingdom.
...as far as we know, we're the only species capable of abstract concepts and associated reasoning...
Actually, neither of these is any longer true since experiments beginning in the 1960s (I think; perhaps the relevant work didn't begin until the 1970s).
Chimps do communicate symbolically in ways that still aren't clear today. One of the now classic experiments is to sequester a group of chimps, show *only* one of them a (fake) snake or food or other stimulus, reunite the group, then release them into the experimental area and observe their behavior. Through means not yet understood (some proto-linguistic communication it is thought), the whole group reliably acts appropriately even though only a single member was given knowledge of the stimulus. They find the food quickly or steer clear of the threat. Sometimes the insider even lies about the location of food, sending the group to one corner while he makes a bee-line for the hidden food.
Locke's claim "Beasts abstract not" has also been overturned, particularly by language experiments (chimps do recombine language in novel ways that demonstrate knowledge of abstract meanings and abstract application to novel situations).
Nobody really thinks chimps or any other non-human animal is likely able to do mathematical abstraction or philosophical introspection, but chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and probably several other higher primates demonstrably do abstract. They also communicate symbolically, as do the cetaceans, and even honeybees.
As for the "spirituality" argument, humans are not unique on that front either. Humans, Neanderthals, and at least some other contemporaneous members of the genus Homo had similar and sometimes overlapping "religious" culture, as seen in burial practices and artwork. The difference between humans and chimps is slim indeed, even though humans are not descended from chimps. The differences between humans and the now-extinct contemporaneous members of the genus Homo are smaller still, to the point that humans and Neanderthals (and possibly others) could interbreed.
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.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
In the proposed case, I think cutting off the penis isn't about sex either; it's still about power.
Wow, your family must be really wasteful eaters to be able to raise hogs just on table scraps.
I'm guessing their intelligence has little to do with how many offspring they (are made to) have.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
If they're fenced in, then they're not wild now are they...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Very true, but they make the argument supporting that sort of punishment with the reasoning that it will stop people in order to justify themselves to others. Sometimes they even believe it themselves.
That's the reason that I usually point out the control and power issue.
My personal stance on the subject is that rape is a crime truly worthy of capital punishment (I also have to say that, in my opinion, people who falsely accuse someone of rape and know it's a false accusation should suffer a similar fate). Then again, I am somewhat biased since I've seen what it can do to people.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I have a question: was this study perhaps funded by the same industry that gave us the "Beef: It's What's For Dinner" ad campaign...?
Cooking requires some level of intelligence. How did humans become so clever so as that they started to cook?
I think the weakness in this is that human societies are generally very conservative; which is why there are still tribes in isolated areas that haven't changed the way they live for perhaps 30,000 years or even longer. The basic attitude seems to be "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - so when we have something that we know works well enough, we tend to stick with it rather than invent something new. Our inventiveness only really get fired up when we are squeezed, when there isn't enough food to go round etc. Fire was used at least as early as 300,000 years ago by Homo erectus, so cooked food was probably not unknown at that time; but there was no compelling need to change the diet to include the less edible plants/animals.
Starvation kills people, but the ones who were clever enough to find ways to eat things that you couldn't before, survived - IOW we got cleverer because we had to in order to survive, not because we happened to stumble over something that allowed us the luxury of a big calorie guzzler of a brain. In fairness, this was probably the message the researchers tried to get across, only it was lost on the reporter who thought this version sounded sexier.
Given that we feed our pets cooked food does that mean we can expect an increase in their brain power? Should I be buying my cat her own Mac so that she can begin to grok this interweb thing she's heard us humans are in to? Will she need her own mobile so she can text the hot tom down the road?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
"Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains."
-----Brains don't "run off" of calories. Neurons use the differene in electrical potential, not heat (calories). Nerves fire based on differences in potential and maintaining resting potential (Na+/K+-ATPase). The only things consumed in brain activity are sodium, potassium, and ATP. The brain does not "burn calories", and does not need calories. Calories are a measure of heat energy. The brain functions by using electrochemical, not thermochemical, energy. Rather, it "burns" sodium, potassium, and ATP.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Dogs are the same way. Mine can tell which pup is picked out as sold, and that one will misbehave on the day it's to leave, often by hiding, no matter how bold it is normally. If it weren't 2am I could tell you a lot of stories about that!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Some kinds of crows are already really smart. They can fashion hooks out of pieces of metal, and seem to be able to learn from watching other crows. Maybe we should teach them how to start fires with bits of glass and bottles. Put some meat on some dead leaves, put a bottle on the leaves, wait for the sun to start a fire, and voila, cooked food. Once all the crows learn the trick, they can get smart like us'ns.
Assuming you don'y kill them randomly but based on physical characteristics, the boars probably spend more time than you considering the question of who is next and react accordingly when they see the gun.
It also would allow early hominids to improve language skills by stay up late by sitting around a fire. Allows creation of fire-hardened spears. Creates the need for a division of labor where someone has to tend the fire.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
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/ published some great books on this. In general, macrobiotics recommends a wide variety of vegetables, soaking/fermenting beans and grains, and cooking almost everything.
There was an entire episode of "Evolve" dedicated to digestive tracks and their role in evolution.
This was on last week.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I'm just an overclocked ape.
well, as few as 2 generations ago, America was filled with the 'small family farm' we're talking, maybe 2-3 pigs, a couple cows, and 40 acres of land. and of course, horses and a wagon. i know America doesn't go back many generations, but the British English dictionaries also have words equivalent to slop, what i was trying to figure out was when did slopping start in europe, or even better, when did it start in asia, i know raising a couple pigs and a few chickens has been prevalent for generations in asia, and really selective breeding is a fairly new concept to farming, in the past, you just raised whichever ones survived weaning, and if you didn't have 2 of an animal, you'd make arrangements with another farmer, to get a mate and breed the animals, and for a poor subsistence farmer it was more about cost than anything.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Every second a steak is in your pan, it's losing moisture and tenderness. You can test it yourself with some kitchen scales. Weigh your steak raw, then rare, then medium-well, the difference is the juice you've lost.
The fact that you have to make up the lost flavour with seasoning, butter and sauce just says it all. A rare steak needs none of those.
If your pan is hot enough, though, you're getting a good sear, and provided you're not charring the outside, that lovely Maillard reaction is turning that loss of moisture and tenderness into complex, rich flavor.
It's really a tradeoff. You're going to lose moisture regardless. But then some of the tastiest beef is dry-aged, and that's lost some moisture already.
Cooking a good steak is a delicate balancing act. A delicious, delicious balancing act.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
You are quite the Debby Downer today aren't you?
How could modern humans be LESS intelligent than cavemen? There were only a few thousand cavemen, there's 6.7 billion modern humans. Yes we still fight wars but our periods of peace are much longer than our periods of conflict and its not like the whole world is fighting the same war at the same time, WW1 and WW2 aside, and those two combined lasted less than a decade.
As for the intellect of alien races, why do you assume they'd be peaceful? How do you know they wouldn't be more violent than we are? If there's a community of spacefaring races out there in contact with one another how could they avoid conflict for all of time? Some of their natures might even dictate violence.
You have arbitrarily chosen peace as a sign of intelligence and warfare as a lack of intelligence. This reflects your personal preferences almost certainly but this does not make your assertions fact.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I have long wondered what was the first art form developed. I wonder if it was cooking? Trying out different mixtures of herbs with meat to mix flavors and create new dishes. Sounds plausible to me. That would have easily morphed into painting -making new colorful sauces that could be used to paint with- and then music, beating and stirring mixtures in rhythmic patterns. Then of course farming led to Astronomy, and thus science in general. Wow, I kind like this theory! YEAH FOOD!.
I've given up on Slashdot's comment scores.
This "fuel" is so easily available that it leads to the well known "an hour later you're hungry again" phenomenon.
The "hour later, hungry again" phenomenon also reflects the meat-intenstive American diet, by contrast with the predominantly rice-and-vegetables diet of the Orient.
I'm reminded of my favorite Dick Cavett joke:
"Have you ever tried German-Chinese food? It tastes great, but an hour later you're hungry for power again."
-kgj
Even if there food was cooked and the farmer didn't selectively breed where was the selective pressure for intelligence?
It still takes extra work to make a bigger brain and in the simplified farm environment I don't see that being an advantage.
I stole this Sig
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 them. At some point when the resulting milky mixture looked right to him, he'd add a special sort of salt called nigari or "bitters", which would cause the proteins in the soy milk to coagulate -- much like adding lemon to simmering dairy milk when making paneer. He'd then remove from the heat, and when cool enough, use cheesecloth (though for him I guess it's really tofu-cloth) to press the curds together. He had wooden block molds for giving the tofu a shape, and then it was just a matter of sticking them in the fridge until it was time to cut off a chunk for the day's customers.
The stuff called yuba in Japanese is basically the skin that forms on top of the boiling soy mash, and is essentially the same phenomenon as the skin that forms over simmering or boiling dairy milk. Some places in Japan even specialize in yuba, in particular one restaurant right across the river from the Tôshôgun in Nikkô, on the second story of the building on your left as you cross the bridge to leave the Tôshôgun and head back down to the train stations.
Looking it up over at Wikipedia, I find that the nigari salt is usually magnesium or calcium chloride, derived from seawater. I also find mention of some fermented tofu varieties, but these seem to be specialty products created from regular unfermented tofu, and also appear to be Chinese. I never saw nor heard of them in Japan, FWIW.
(As an aside, what is up with this ancient slashcode not correctly displaying the full range of Unicode? I can't even get macrons to show up properly in simple Latin Extended-A, let alone non-Latin charsets. Growl...)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
maybe cooking just caused culinary interest in people, will to look for more tasty food. and resulting in people tagging different plants and animals with labels like: spicy, sweet, sour etc instead of plain edible/inedible. in forward progress more complicated methods were developed to get better food, resulting in more complex fishing, hunting etc tools. and then we have macdonalds, no wonder americans are viewed as idiots by the rest of the world. eating garbage cant be good for your intelligence. back to the trees with you!
Actually, I think it would be safe to say it would be the contrary. Wild boars would have knowledge of things like getting food, their surroundings, etc. Domesticated pigs get fed, and their only surroundings are the fencing that they are placed behind.
well, okay, http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html right at the top of the page, a pig has a 180 gram brain, while a sheep has a 140 gram brain, i realize pigs are omnivores, and sheep are herbivores, but then look at the jaguar, which has a 157 gram brain, despite being a predator...
evolution can happen by random chance, if it's beneficial the offspring pass it on better than those without the gene.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
....Neuroscience offers a path to discovering....
Yes, but only to a limited extent. What is REALLY going on in either a brain, or even a computer can only be discerned by its input/output. No matter how minutely we are able to examine the electrochemical nature of the brain, we cannot pin down from that where and how thoughts and emotions come into being. If the brain hardware stops working, there is no way to tell what happened to the software and what it's nature was. The same is true of a computer. If the computer is switched off, there is no way to tell what the software was and what it might have done while the computer was turned on.
In the case of the computer, because we built it, of course we know where the software is resident. We can take that software and load it into another functioning hardware and then determine said software's function and nature. In the case of the brain, we do not know what happens to the software. We ASSUME (believe) it is destroyed with the destruction of the hardware, but we really don't KNOW that for sure. The human software (soul, mind, spirit etc.) could conceivably be transmitted somewhere else before the destruction of any particular instance of brain hardware.
We can certainly conceive of such a scenario in the computer case. A sophisticated enough computer connected to a super-fast network could be made in such a way as to sense a disabling malfunction (death) and quickly transmit its entire software to some other network location for storage. From there, at a later time, the sum-total contents of the now destroyed computer could be re-loaded into other identical or even superior hardware and the "consciousness" if you will, of the dead computer will all be back in operation as good as or even better than the original. We could even upgrade the software and fix bugs, before re-loading it into new hardware.
Somehow, mankind has always and still suspects that there is a continued existence of consciousness after the present physical body ceases to function. The pyramids and other elaborate tombs are stark testimony to this ancient and yet persistently continuing religious belief. We have never seen this sort of behavior in any animals. It is unique to the human creature.
All theory is gray
Women weren't sitting home idle while their men were out hunting and gathering (except to the extent that *everybody* in a hunter-gatherer society generally works a lot less than farmers or office-droids.) In most traditional societies they tended to do gathering, and some types of farming after farming was invented. Male brute strength is helpful for some kinds of farm work, such as handling oxen while plowing and maybe fighting off wolves, and men presumably did some amount of gathering work while hunting, but you can't do too much gathering because hauling around lots of food gets in the way of stalking and attacking animals.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most meatloaf recipes I've seen include bread or breadcrumbs and onions; often they'll include multiple kinds of meat. Much of the point of meatloaf is stretching a limited supply of cheap meat.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Ignoring your joke for the moment, cooking veggies affects digestibility a lot more than cooking meat, which stomach acids will grind up quite nicely. Various cooking techniques make meat last longer, so if you kill a megafauna you can eat more of it before it spoils, and therefore get more calories out of it, but otherwise the main effects are making it taste better and make you less likely to get sick.
On the other hand, breaking down veggie materials by cooking can often make them more digestible, so not only can your digestive system be more efficient (and therefore smaller), but also it set us up for the invention of grain-farming a lot later.
The theories about cooking's primary effects being on how much of the calories go to the brain are interesting, but cooking also affects division of labor within societies and need for communication, and those would have affected brain development as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"although definitive claims of causation are premature"
Perhaps reading the entire summary before replying would prevent the miss use of correlation as causality. I know the media is bad for doing this but I expect people on Slash Dot to be better than the average sensation seeking journalist.