
The Energy Expansions of Evolution - hunglee2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0138
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badosu
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0)

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taneq
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.

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mafribe
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](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4272645)

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

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Aardwolf
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?

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undersuit
>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.

