"evolution" news and stories

Toss a steak on the grill and you may be reenacting an event that helped separate men from apes thousands of years ago.

Cooking, according to a new theory from a Harvard anthropologist, was a key turning point in human evolution, and without it, we would still spend significant chunks of our day chewing heaps of raw foods, BBC News reported.

Humans would need to eat more than 10 pounds of fruits and vegetables a day -- a task which would require six hours of chewing, Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham told BBC News. Cooking, he said, allowed humans to begin eating meat.

"I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life," he said.

Recently, German researchers fed lab mice separate "human" and "chimp" diets, and within just two weeks, were able to notice distinct psychological and genetic differences in the rodents.

There were three different diets: a raw food-only diet; meals from the researchers' local cafeteria; and a pure fast-food diet. The researchers found a huge difference in the livers of the mice with a chimp diet versus those with a human diet (I'm scared to hear about the difference in their hearts and arteries!) They found thousands of differences in the genes expressed in the mouse livers, which they think may be caused by our differences in diets.

...You got all that? Okay. The scientists also found that said genes seemed to evolve faster than other genes.

So, basically, our ancestors' adoption of meat and cooked foods may have shaped us into the carnivorous, brownie-eating, beer-guzzling beings we are today.

Source

It's not our fault. It's evolution, man. When the days are short and the weather is cold, all we want to do is snuggle into our comfiest chair with a blanket, a steamy mug of hot chocolate, and maybe a nice slice of meatloaf or macaroni and cheese. Followed up by (naturally) chocolate layer cake with extra coffee ice cream.

But the magazines, the newspapers, heck, even the blogs, all they say is eat right! Lose weight! Get out of the house! And most importantly, lose that comfy chair, man!

We're left with the ultimate D-word: Dilemma. What's to be done when our biology is warring with our better judgment? Diet? Or give in to the Decadence of the season, fill our tummies with warm, fattening comfort food, and just wait 'til spring to follow through on those resolutions?