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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."
Our ability to think and reason is what makes us the fittest. The concept doesn't just apply to physical traits.
... 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?
"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.
Fast food made us fat. A revolution made us American.
"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.
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
"There are levels in between raw and burnt."
Raw, Warm and Bloody, Medium, Denny's, Burnt
"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).
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
Why are you so convinced that "opera" or "build space craft" intelligence (whatever that is) is somehow fundamentally different from "teach your kid to start a fire" or "design a bow and arrow" intelligence? The more I think about it, the less sense your argument makes.
I think the order of Denny's and Burnt should be reversed.
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.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I agree that thinking and reasoning has caused us to be more advanced than animals. Being able to cook is one of the many great things that we have been able to adapt with. I do like to bake, and some times I wonder how people came up with the recipes that exist. Some combinations of ingredients don't seem to make sense why they are together, but in the end it tastes good. Yes, our intelligence makes us human, but I think one of the first examples of the human intelligence must have been that of cooking.