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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.'"
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Does that mean I can belittle people for making fun of my obsession with eating other people's cooking?
1) I'm fat.
2) I eat buffets all the time.
3) Buffets contain mostly cooked food.
4) Eating cooked food makes you smarter.
Therefore, I'm smarter than you.
And if that doesn't work, how about this.
I'm kind of smart. I'm also fat from eating cooked foods. If I marry a fat woman that's good at cooking food and we have kids. That kid should be a little smarter than me. Then we can make my kid fat by feeding him/her lots of cooked foods. As long as he/she doesn't marry a twig, my grandchildren will be brilliant!!!
I have just justified my overeating.
Thank you again /.
This post approved by Shampoo.
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."
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
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.
Actually it was domesticated Barley for Beer making.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
The idea is that an animal cannot normally support a brain as big as ours. The brain becomes a liability rather than an asset. When you invent something that makes calories easier to come by, the biggest liability of the brain -- high energy demands -- is minimized, and the benefits favour growing bigger brains.
In that scenario, cooking is an enabling technology that lets you go from a slightly-larger-than-an-ape brain to the monstrosity that we currently possess.
The process of growing an individual brain has nearly nothing to do with it.
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.
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.
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."
Some nutrients will break down in the cooking process. Others become more available. Cooking vegetables tend to increase the amount of calories, but also loses some micronutrients in the process. Given today's world (1st world anyways) where getting calories isn't too much of a concern, then they can judge that eating raw is 'worth it'. Should be noted that meat doesn't really gain much for being cooked.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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