Toward the end of the article, they give their theory—that aggressive tendencies were bread out when population density increased. The scenario they describe, is of people getting together to kill off the big hulking brute in their midst.
We became a domesticated species, and like other domesticated species, domestication came with a decrease in brain size.
They note that brain size has been increasing for the last 200 years, but attribute that to increasing nutrition.
I don’t see how the theory that aggressive tendencies were bred out would undermine in any way the hypothesis that intelligence has decreased along with brain size. If we simply bred to be more juvenile as a quick fix for the aggression, that would cause a drop in intelligence. Also I don’t see the data on correlation between brain volume and aggression.
Toward the end of the article, they give their theory—that aggressive tendencies were bread out when population density increased. The scenario they describe, is of people getting together to kill off the big hulking brute in their midst.
We became a domesticated species, and like other domesticated species, domestication came with a decrease in brain size.
They note that brain size has been increasing for the last 200 years, but attribute that to increasing nutrition.
I don’t see how the theory that aggressive tendencies were bred out would undermine in any way the hypothesis that intelligence has decreased along with brain size. If we simply bred to be more juvenile as a quick fix for the aggression, that would cause a drop in intelligence. Also I don’t see the data on correlation between brain volume and aggression.