Not how I read it. Thought they were saying that our brains could evolve to use more calories since they are abundant now, instead of storing the calories as fat as our bodies currently do. Basically what if you could make your brain 50% more powerful at the expense of needing more calories, it would seem like a pretty good trade off today since many of us eat more calories than we need anyway.
Energy budget of brain compared to rest of the body is already very substantial I wonder if we would face some issues if it was higher. Like maybe overheating.
A good point. Incidentally i need to eat like a whale despite sitting on a chair all day long. Brainpower is a hungry business but i dont get it my body needs to store some of that food as fat. I eat all day long! Perhaps we are feeding it the wrong stuff and what we are used to eating is no longer suitable for how we use our bodies in the modern day? But what about the super developed countries of east asia where people appear to be skinny? Is there something wrong with our diet in the european and american world?
Other than genetics I'm pretty sure there's a lot of things that make people less hungry.
I've heard sugar makes people want to eat more. I'm pretty sedentary, so when I cut back on sugar, I can easily just kind of forget to eat.
Evolution doesn't know about fridges and thinks people still need to store energy, like as if we are going to walk 10 miles after a day long fast at any moment. So many constraints no longer exists, seems like we should definitely be able to eat better than before.
Who knows how many things no longer apply to most people. Maybe some foods enhanced fertility and that preference was selected for, but most people don't need them now. Maybe some things helped people heal from specific blunt trauma injuries that are now rare, but at the cost of causing some extra heart disease.
Almost every overweight person could kick my ass just by falling on me. They can probably lift more than me. Many would do 200% better in the wild than me, but statistically they are at risk for heart problems and many already have assorted aches and pains.
The whole concept of health in popular culture is way too tied to strength and survival and naturalness. Why do we seem to pay more attention to who can climb a mountain and lift 400lbs than we do to which populations live the longest and have the least illnesses?
Although this sounds like a good idea for an individual, there’s really no point, because a group of well educated humans focused on a specific goal can easily have far more brain power than a single individual, and with far great redundancy. Therefore making one single individual far more intelligent and powerful at thinking has little use to society, unless they are focused on tasks that inherently can only be done effectively by a single individual, and which are becoming fewer as our tools for collaboration grow. It’s cool to have someone be like an Einstein figure, but Einstein alone could never match the combined brainpower and output of NASA for instance.
Hmm, I don't agree because I don't think intelligence scales out like that. Certainly a group of people can do more than a single person but I personally think things like increasing a persons short term memory could have pretty profound impact on our ability to have bigger ideas simply because you could hold more things in your head at once for example.
