So this morning I encountered, coincidentally, three articles, one on the 6 Weird Theories on Early Human Intelligence and the other on some general SETI / Fermi Paradox stuff, and PPP's new poll on Conspiracy Theories all interesting reads but it was theory #5 from the first article which stuck in my head, in tandem with the second article and the poll question about who believed in aliens... and for brevity I'll post that one alone, though '6 weird theories' is definitely a fun read.

Meat and Fire Made Our Brains Grow

While it’s obvious that fire and meat-eating were a large part of everyday life for our ancestors, it appears likely that cooked meat may have also played a huge role in our brain development. Harvard University Biological Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has developed a theory that he thinks explains exactly how it worked.

Because brains like ours use up as much as 20 percent of our caloric intake, they require high-calorie foods to keep working. Since Twinkies weren’t around yet, cooked meat was the next best thing for early man. Cooking meat releases more calories, making it even better than raw meat, which we were probably already eating (judging from our appendixes).

Cooking also makes meat faster to eat and easier to digest. Our primate cousins, meanwhile, spent significantly more time eating fewer calories by consuming fruits and veggies. Those extra calories helped grow our brains.

But even an argument as straightforward as this one is contentious—science has yet to discover evidence that humans were capable of controlling fire at the time period specified by Wrangham’s theory.

click to read the full article

I don't happen to put much stock in #5 here, though it's not as outrageous as #4: Stoned Ape Theory, but the other article got me thinking on the Fermi Paradox (if there are aliens, where are they?) and I thought that whole calorie intake thing probably deserves special note. If running a big brain takes a lot of energy, it probably needs to be pretty immediately useful in acquiring calories - or not ending up being acquired for calories - or it isn't likely to persist.

That's not a brand new concept of course, a lot of Fermi Paradox and modified Drake's Equations discuss the probability of multi-cellular life and intelligent life arising compared to a planet full of algae or some such. Plenty address whether or not intelligence is really an evolutionary benefit. However I think it is a fairly interesting variation to tack on, not so much that intelligence isn't automatically beneficial or not really an evolutionary 'goal', so to speak, but that reminder of just how expensive it is to run a major brain, especially for smaller animals. Sperm whales pack the most massive brains but it takes up very little of their power supply, for instance, but we don't talk too often about how differences in an alien planet might dictate size in regard to intelligence. Which is to say, on a high-grav world can a creature even afford a skull big enough and thick enough for intelligence and not having your head cracked open every time you slip. Double your surface gravity and you double the energy and general kinetic damage you have falling from the same height. Similarly brains need a lot of cooling and that's likely to be accomplished by evaporative cooling, which is heavily influenced by pressure, atmosphere make up, and other Psychrometric considerations [note: Psychrometric, not Psychometric, different things].

So it adds an extra layer of complexity and probably improbability to the discussion of the probability of mental complexity developing [say that ten times fast ]

Anyway, three interesting and completely unrelated articles for your morning amusement, and we'll throw in an entertaining io9 article from last month to round it out, 11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and a xkcd comic on the matter.