Cognitive Thrift 47 & 48 – Meat
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Bodies, meat, and brains.
Rick Rosner: Any organic costs something. The function of running or not running, climbing, breathing. Bodily functions consume calories. So, a tiger’s body is expensive because it is big and has got a lot of muscles that use a lot of energy and so it has to find a lot of calories in the wild.
I suppose a hummingbirds body is expensive because it’s wings beat about 300 times a minute and proportioned to its body size that is a huge expenditure.
If you run short of calories, you starve and might die. Generally, whatever animals have that costs calories also helps in finding calories in their environment, but everything is expensive. Lost time is expensive.
If a tiger stalks an animal for an hour and a half and the animal gets away, the tiger has spent 90 minutes of calorie consumption and also missed the opportunity. Maybe, it could have found, maybe if it was stalking a couple of ibex, I don’t know what else tigers capture – maybe in zoos or somethin’.
A lot of animals exist on a thin edge of being able to come up with their daily requirement of calories. So, stuff that isn’t necessary; we tend to have stuff that works for us.
Sometimes, you get animals that successful enough in their niches that they can start spending developmental energy on things like the peacock’s tail, which is just an arms race for mating displays that kind of got out of hand.
But generally, we only have stuff that is worth it, and worth it in terms of survival. That kind of analysis can be applied to the brain.
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