Discover Magazine:
Q: Why don’t apes have bigger brains? A: They can’t eat enough to afford them
Excerpt: “The raw jungle diet just doesn’t provide enough calories for apes to nourish brains larger than they already have.”
Excerpt: “Fonseca-Azevedo and Herculano-Houzel developed their argument using data on 17 species of primates, from the tiny common marmoset to the huge gorilla.”
My comment: I developed my argument using the molecular biology of adaptive evolution via ecological, social, neurogenic, and socio-cognitive niche construction in species from microbes to man. It is the common molecular biology that enables human brain development as exemplified in the honeybee model organism.
James V. Kohl detailedl how quantized energy-dependent microRNA biogenesis links the pheromone-controlled physiology of reproduction to biophysically constrained viral latency and healthy longevity. Links from what organisms eat to the enzyme-dependent metabolism of food also link metabolic networks to microRNA-mediated genetic networks in the context of RNA interference. Drug therapies alter RNA interference by altering cell type differentiation in all cells of all individuals of all species. For comparison, during the past 26 years, Kohl has detailed how the chemistry of protein folding is biophysically constrained at every level of biological organization by conserved molecular mechanisms.