Re:Why are our brains shrinking?
by rackjack on Thursday October 28, 2021 @06:10PM
(#29032696)
The brain itself is the evolutionary pressure. It is often repeated that the brain takes ~20% of our body's energy despite being ~2% of our body's mass. If there is no need to have a brain so large (due to a lack of predators) it is beneficial to shrink it.
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It's beneficial to lower the brain's calorie intake it if it results in higher reproductive fitness. But like GP said, we have plenty of calories, more than we've had compared to the entire history of humanity. So it doesn't naturally follow that lower calorie brains are higher fitness in 2021.
"Although our brains were getting bigger progressively, around 70,000 years ago they plateaued, and have been shrinking ever since."
From the article. 2021 is very recent.
The article also discusses energy usage a little under the section "Fuel".
There are no guarantees civilization won't collapse. The traits that were essential for our survival in the stone age aren't things we want to abandon. I'm a big fan of redundancy.
Beneficial how? Reduction in calories? We tend to have diseases of excess calories in the developed world now. If anything, the greater brain metabolism may actually help by burning some of those excess calories off…