Big Brain Evolution
Friday, November 18, 2011 - 11:50
in Biology & Nature
One of the striking features of human beings is the unusually big brain. One of the most well-known hypotheses about how this came to be, is the ‘expensive tissue hypothesis’, which basically explains our big brains through a trade-off between the size of the brain and the size of the digestive tract, which is smaller than expected in human beings when compared to other primates.But now, researchers from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, provide some evidence against this well-established hypothesis. By comparing the brain and organ mass data of 100 mammalian species, including 23 primates, they do not find a negative correlation between brain size and the mass of the digestive tract, or other expensive organs. read more