Scientists Breed Big-Brained Guppies To Demonstrate Evolution's Trade-Offs

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have long suspected that big brains come with an evolutionary price — but now they've published the first experimental evidence to support that suspicion, based on their efforts to breed big-brained fish. A Swedish team found it relatively easy to select and interbreed common guppies to produce bigger (or smaller) brains — as much as 9.3 percent bigger, to be precise (abstract). But the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies."

Comments

Re:Uh

[TapeCutter]

Maybe they're not smarter, maybe they're just interested in different things? Animals with a gut all evolved from worms, in a sense the rest of the animal is there to keep the "worm" inside them alive. A human gut has it's own nervous system that can continue to function normally even if all connections to the brain are severed. If a fish gut works the same way then maybe they are "just" moving computing resources around between gut and brain? Kinda like getting an Obama by selectively breeding Texan Governors.