Evolution in the News - June 2011
by Do-While Jones

Cooking Up Big Brains

Some evolutionists doubt that fire fanned the flames of evolution.

Some of the things evolutionists say are so obviously stupid that you might think we make them up just to make evolutionists look foolish—but we don’t. Evolutionists actually say them with a perfectly straight face.

In particular, we love to make fun of the fact that some evolutionists believe that when apes started cooking and eating meat, it caused their brains to get bigger and smarter.

Some archaeologists think that controlled fire use dates back 1.6 million years. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University has even suggested that hominins began using fire 1.9 million years ago, leading to a cooking tradition that made digestion easier and freed up the extra energy our ancestors needed to grow bigger brains. 1

How could anyone doubt a Harvard University professor? Here it is, straight from Richard Wrangham’s mouth (which is controlled by a carnivorous, intelligent brain ).

Maximising energy from food allowed us to lose a third of the large intestine and significantly expand our brain size. It affected our brain because humans were social and there was a premium on being as intelligent as possible in order to outsmart your opponents in competition, ultimately for mates. 2

There has never been a scientific study linking the consumption of cooked meat to an inheritable increase in brain capacity, but why let science stand in the way of a good story? When evolutionists don’t have a good scientific explanation, they just make one up.

Now it appears that cooler heads may prevail.

Humans may have been much later to master fire than we thought. A review of supposed archaeological hearths in Europe suggests that the oldest date to just 400,000 years ago. The finding suggests that humans expanded into cold northern climates without the warmth of fire – and that cooking was not the evolutionary trigger that boosted our brain size. 3

The article goes on to talk about analysis of archeological sites in Europe to determine whether or not they show evidence of controlled use of fire.

The findings controversially suggest that people migrated from Africa to the below-freezing winter temperatures of Europe without fire. These early hominins might have combined a high-protein diet with a highly active lifestyle to survive, the researchers speculate.

The conclusion also questions Wrangham's hypothesis that an increase in human brain size was tied to the invention of cooking. 4

What amazes us is that Wrangham’s hypothesis is thought to be worth questioning. Wrangham’s hypothesis could easily be tested by comparing IQ scores and brain sizes of second-, third-, and fourth-generation children of carnivores compared to similar generations of children of vegetarians. That would be real science. (And we know what the outcome of that experiment would be.) Wrangham’s hypothesis is not science—it’s just another evolutionary fairy tale.

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Footnotes:

1 Hamzelou, New Scientist, 16 March 2011, “First Europeans did not rely on fire”, page 16, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20242-fire-did-not-spark-human-colonisation-of-cold-europe.html
2 New Scientist, 21 December 2009, “Richard Wrangham: Cooking is what made us human”, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427390.200-richard-wrangham-cooking-is-what-made-us-human.html
3 Hamzelou, New Scientist, 16 March 2011, “First Europeans did not rely on fire”, page 16, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20242-fire-did-not-spark-human-colonisation-of-cold-europe.html
4 ibid.