The Energy Expansions of Evolution | Hacker News Reader

The Energy Expansions of Evolution

nature.com

53 pointshunglee26 comments

I highly recommend this Royal Institute talk: Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett [0].

The presenter provides a series of small steps in the way of understanding how the combined leaps of 'dumb' evolution was able to design intelligence. He contrasts the 'bottom-up' approach to the 'top-down' design in a very intelligent manner.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0

I was thinking about something similar just this weekend - how animals are divided into successive epochs of increasing speed and power based on their food source and metabolism. So reptiles have their typically slow (though efficient) metabolisms, then mammals appeared which go racing around with their hot little bioreactor bodies generating more power, humans taking the next step and pre-cooking food to gain more endurance than essentially any other animal... it's all about your fuel source.

In what sense does pre-cooking food give us more endurance?

EDIT: the O. P. Judson paper cites [1] which explores this issue in a mouse model.

[1] E. E. Groopman et al., Cooking increases net energy gain from a lipid-rich food. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4272645

Looking it like this a cultural evolution leading to higher Kardashev scales seems like a natural expansion of the purely biological progenitor system :)

Interesting! But what about plant-eating, there is no real mention of it? Was the transition after oxygen from plant to flesh eating so fast it's too short to mention there, or do they consider plants or fruits also flesh here?

>or do they consider plants or fruits also flesh here?

Yes. The transition to flesh eating happened sometime near the evolution of eukaryotes. Back then the single celled organism would consume another organism by wrapping around the other cell and then breaking down the trapped cell inside. That's where eating comes from. When sufficiently complex multicellular organism evolved the process moved from within the cell to within an enclosed area of cells. Plant and animals have been eaten in a similar manner since they evolved.

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