THAT swots are weedy and jocks are stupid is a high-school cliché. But a paper just published in PLOS Biology by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institutes in Germany suggests there may be an evolutionary grain of truth in it. When Katarzyna Bozek and her colleagues looked at how quickly human tissues have evolved, compared with those of other mammals, they found that as the human brain has got stronger, so the species’s muscles have got weaker. Intriguingly, in a demonstration of the importance of serendipity in science, this was not a hypothesis they had set out to prove.Human brains are greedy. Though they constitute only 2% of an adult’s body weight, they consume a fifth of his or her metabolic energy. Indeed, according to a school of thought led by Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, keeping the brain running is so demanding that only the invention of cooking, which makes more nutrients available from a given amount of food than can be extracted from it in its raw state, permitted the neurological expansion which created Homo sapiens. This need to supply the brain with...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1k48baM
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