Quote:
Originally Posted by lwcamp
There's been an idea kicking around in the anthropological/archaeological/human paleontological world now for a few years that control of fire was a necessary precondition for the development of big brains. The basic concept is that cooked food is easier to digest than uncooked food, so that by cooking our food we can reduce the size of our guts and still extract more nutrients for less energy than if eating uncooked food. Reduced gut size and less effort spent on digestion frees up more resources to develop our big brains, which then allows us to develop complex tools, complicated languages, elaborate societies, and all that jazz. I'm not an expert in the field, so I can only report what I've seen actual experts and researchers in the field say, but it seems plausible, at least.
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True but if so its the latest in a long line of "X was a pre-re for developing big brains". Of course you also get the issue of was X a pre re for big brains, or was big brains a pre-req for X in some cases.
X has also been moving into the plains, walking upright etc, etc To be fair none of these are ever cited as the one thing that did it, it's more likely that a culmination of different things came together over a period of time. (and so see malloyd's point).
I do take the point about freeing up nutrition though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
Yeah, all changes count as evolution. It's not about large scale changes. Just changes in frequency of alleles in the population counts as evolution, certainly any change that becomes effectively universal in a population does, no matter how "insignificant" somebody might choose to label it.
There are essentially never any large changes when you look at it on a really detailed level, though expecting there to be is one of the more common misunderstandings of the process. It's an illusion brought on by the incredible incompleteness of the record.
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No your right, I was basically arguing myself round to your point as I typed!