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A Popular Focus For Evolutionary Research Has Been The

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A popular focus for evolutionary research has been the evolution of the human brain. Such research has sought to answer the questions of why our brains evolved to be as large as they are and how this increase in brain size came to be, given the massive energy requirements of neural tissue. Encephalization quotients refer to the size of the brain compared to the size of the body; as brain size increases and body size decreases, the encephalization quotient becomes larger. As would be expected, homo sapiens possess the largest encephalization quotient of all known species on Earth, being 6 times larger than the average mammal (Martin). The evolution of larger brains, which are more metabolically expensive, was made possible by a reduction in …show more content…

In order for a larger brain to be evolutionarily favorable, the net amount of required metabolic energy much remain relatively constant; this means that an energetic compromise must be made somewhere else in the body. The brain is not the only energetically expensive organ in the body; the liver, the heart, the kidneys, and the gastrointestinal tract together account for about 70% of the total metabolic requirements of the body (Aiello). To achieve the overall goal of keeping the body’s net energy requirements stable, a size increase of either the brain or one of the other expensive organs must be accommodated for by a reduction in the size of another. As this hypothesis suggests, a negative correlation between brain size and gastrointestinal tract size was found to be a regular occurrence across many species, including both endothermic and exothermic vertebrates (Aiello, Liao); in other words, as brain size increases, gut size decreases. This result was found to hold true even in Anurans, where 251 adult anuran males were also found to possess a “significant negative correlation between digestive tract length and brain mass” (Liao). In a comparison study between primates and humans, it was found that the amount of gut mass lost is energetically equivalent to the amount of brain mass

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