Infographic: How A Raw Food Diet Kept Primates Stupid

Sperm whale has a gigantic brain to the human brain.
And the dolphin brain is still bigger than the human.

So, what other important elements of the brain is needed that makes humans so special? Are we special or is it just our belief are special, since we dominate life on Earth.
We humans and our narcissi beliefs system are powerful in shaping our outlook of the world and ourselves.

Just because we love ourselves so much, does it really mean we are better than the rest of life on Earth?
The Earth is 4.54 billion years old and of all those years and all the life on Earth, are we so special, or just continuing a fantasy that we are!

Robot that is an interesting observation... surely, dolphins and whales don't survive on cooked food!

But they too, just as humans, are known to be highly social and use some level of language. Perhaps the distinction between those big brained mammals and us, is that we have opposable thumbs ;). While that was a tongue-in-cheek joke, really what I'm saying is that in addition to highly social communities with integrated language you need to manipulate your environment, not just control it. And the knowledge explosion that allowed us to even have this conservation really started with the written word. Passing experiences and knowledge on, and thus others being able to gain from it without investing the time, is what really separates humans from everything else.

A monkey's life today is probably not much different than it was 1,000 years ago. Compare that to humans, 1,000 years ago we were pretty advanced but stone-age compared to where we are today. Go back another 5,000 years... 10,000 years before that.

Writing is really the difference. But writing comes speech. Speech comes from socialization. Socialization requires less time foraging, ergo, cooked food allowed for the invention of society.

lawsonrw,
We devise intelligence upon human standards, about our goals.
You make the point we have opposable thumbs, but maybe the higher brain development for the Sperm whale or the dolphin came from the fact they do not have opposable thumbs, no means to write things down or carve them in stone.

These mammals do communicate and perhaps with greater brainpower, remember better.
Remember what and communicate what? They remember and communicate to their goals.
So then they will fail the human test of intelligence, they will score high towards their own environmental related goals and we humans would fail their test.

Now imagine if humanity one day has found what appears to be from afar via our distant observation and intelligent cosmic alien race. They might judge us as idiots as we might judge them the similar, while we both live different environments, how we interact in it and what our goals are in that environment.

"Oh we see these aliens on their home planet, flying and swimming about, they must be simple animals".

"As the distance alien culture gazes upon Earth and sees humans can barely swim and cannot fly, we must be simple animals".

If we do not respect or able to communicate with bigger brain sperm whales and dolphins from our home world, I wonder what the odds are to communicate with an intelligent race across the cosmos?

Like I said earlier, " We humans and our narcissi beliefs system are powerful in shaping our outlook of the world and ourselves".

Ok, here is your homework assignment, watch the movie
"Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home".

Class dismissed, lol.

The point here is that cooking food helps it become broken down. This means less work for our bodies to do in harvesting its nutrients, most notably protein required to build the brain. Dolphins have large brains but also larger bodies the article said "relative" brain size. Also, dophins eat nothing but fish. A great source of good fats, B12, and protein. Sperm whales I believe eat krill which has to be similar to other seafood in nutrients. Interestingly off topic, dolphins understand the concept of zero.

Humans are special because we ask "why?" when we don't understand something. That little word is the reason why humans continue towards complexity.

-

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours"

- Stephen Roberts

boka,
How do you know if the whales, dolphins or any other animal ask 'why or why not'?

Robot, the issue is not the outright bulk of the brain. A more relevant number to consider is the ratio of brain size to body size, where humans come in at the top of the pile. Dolphins come close, but we're at the top. Presumably this is because a lot of the brain is simply wiring dedicated to managing the massive amount of data that comes in from the body's nervous system.

--==]] visit my blog at zentastic.com [[==--

The issue isn't the brain size or the cooked food. The issue is there is a huge gap between human and ape brains and no known method to bridge that gap which has been confirmed by observation.

Try cooking a chimps food, we'll still have just chimps by the end of the day.

Put rocket fuel in an old WWI plane and see what you get. You won't get to the moon until you engineer a space ship.

Hahaha way to oversimplify it Babpipes100. We're not talking about feeding a chimp a certain diet and seeing what that chimp grows up to be. We're talking about what their descendents a million years later eventually evolve into.

--==]] visit my blog at zentastic.com [[==--

Cooking food surely didn't help the author correct the simple errors in the article.