This is categorically false, we know evolving bigger brains required us to reduce our muscle mass compared to other primates, for the energy budget required to create such brains.
And those adorable koalas made the opposite bet, shrinking brain size in order to conserve energy so as to be able to carve a niche no other mammal cared for: https://youtu.be/dXUp_JMQjvg
Do we know that? I thought that the evidence suggested that early hominids lost muscle mass, especially in our arms, as they came down from the trees. We also switched from stronger muscle fibres to high endurance muscles.
You’re right that there was an energy trade-off, but it was being able to run faster and longer that was more important than strength for our ancestors, who still had quite small brains (the brain of an Australopithecus is only 35% the size of a human).
Brain size developed later, probably in a feedback loop with our diet - as we began to eat more meat our brains got bigger, which made us better hunters. And hominids actually got bigger and stronger as their brains grew.
The diminished muscles in our jaws are one of the direct causes we have bigger brains, source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4817-early-humans-swa...
Humans evolved Wesker muscles to gain brain mass, source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/140527-br...
From the first article:
> Humans owe their big brains and sophisticated culture to a single genetic mutation that weakened our jaw muscles about 2.4 million years ago, a new study suggests.
_A new study suggests_
I don’t think you can treat these claims as categorically true. It’s plausible and probably warrants further study, like most things in biology.
Edit: I could not read the second article you linked as it was behind a paywall, but I found the full text of the original paper[1]. The paper appears to make a much weaker claim: that a weakening of jaw muscles in humans coincided with acceleration in brain size. This is certainly intriguing, but correlation does not imply causation.
So we are to believe evolutionary paths are free? A stronger homosapiens could have done much more in their lifetime than an equal specimen with the same brain matter but less muscles, even with all the niceties of common era I very frequently find myself in scenarios where being stronger would have helped, I had to move to a building without an elevator and had to carry the freezer, the washing machine and other stuff to the fifth floor, having more muscles certainly would have helped, more recently I found a screw I couldn't unscrew just because I lacked enough force (not because it was a stripped screw), just imagine the amount of scenarios I would find myself if we didn't had all this technology and kitchen appliances that we have this days? You think our manual farming ancestors didn't need all the extra help they could get? To me it's almost preposterous to suggest we gave up our muscles just because we didn't use them because we lacked reasons to use them.
> So we are to believe evolutionary paths are free?
Huh? Where did I say that?
I was just pointing out you presented two claims as facts and the sources do not support your claims. Maybe there are other sources that do, but the two studies you cited make much weaker claims.
The news article titles misrepresent the findings in the typical way that news articles sensationalize and misrepresent science etc etc.
That cost and benefit trade-off emerged as an opportunity only through luck and it survived only through luck, even if the odds were in its favor.
Biased random walk and luck are related but not the same thing. It is not necessarily correct to term the outcome of a stochastic process as luck.
That's a very broad definition of the word luck, like saying I landed a job by having luck that some company was offering that role, therefore everything is luck, and communication wise would make the word almost useless.
You’re comparing the intelligent design of your job search to evolution.
Luck is defined as something happening that was unlikely to happen, so having that in mind that evolution kept happening that is no luck, happens on every living organism (last specimens before extension being the exceptions), that the smarter apes got to reproduce is not luck, it is predictable, that they had to use less muscles if they are smarter is also predictable, that muscles are something primates can give up easier than e.g. liver function it is fairly predictable, that you would prefer to take better care of your smarter offspring is also fairly predictable (not saying it's morally justifiable), and so there are so many aligned factors and feedback loops at play that calling it luck would be a disservice, yes evolution has a slight "brute-force" approach to it that arguably involves "luck" but that it's just a small part of it
There’s a practically infinite space of possible innovations. The fact that any part of it has ever been explored is just down to luck—and that’s ignoring the fact that once evolution discovers an innovation, survival of the fittest is still itself not a rule but rather a likelihood. Maybe there was a fish who could communicate telepathically and fly at the same time there was a fish with feet, but the latter ended up devouring the former in the nursery.
Once you reach a particular point, things might tend to play out in ways that look more deterministic in specific places, but fate is still hard to predict. Consider the Vaquita. A species that has thrived for ages has been nearly wiped out of existence because a random primate species evolved to invent plastic fishing nets, and now that same primate species might altruistically manage to govern itself out of destroying the Vaquita. Really, nothing in that story was guaranteed to happen based on the frontier of the search process 1,000,000 years ago, it was just how the dice landed.
The Vaquita’s survival or loss is playing out in some ways as an international diplomacy story, where the first Trump administration saw declines in Vaquita numbers and the Biden administration took steps to improve their chances, and then Trump was re-elected, with some people believing that came down to Biden—a single human man who does not live in Mexico—experiencing age-related declines, and with others believing oligarchs bought the election to support causes like Russia’s pursuit of Ukraine. Really, this is about as random and as divorced from survival of the fittest as it gets. But it is no more random than the fact that the person who might have ushered in 1,000,000-year era of world piece and cured all suffering in all species would be just as likely to die as a child in a car accident as anyone else.
In ML, evolutionary algorithms are classified under randomized optimization, due to the way that they take random steps to forge random paths into vast combinatorial spaces that could never be completely understood or completely explored.