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The Conversation
The Conversation
Robert Foley, Emeritus Professor of Human Evolution, University of Cambridge

Human intelligence: how cognitive circuitry, rather than brain size, drove its evolution

wikipedia/Foley, CC BY-SA

It’s one of the great paradoxes of evolution. Humans have demonstrated that having large brains are key to our evolutionary success, and yet such brains are extremely rare in other animals. Most get by on tiny brains, and don’t seem to miss the extra brain cells (neurons).

Why? The answer that most biologists have settled on is that large brains are costly in terms of the energy they require to run. And, given the way natural selection works, the benefits simply don’t exceed the costs.

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