Humans mature more slowly because of their big brains

[haidut]

Ray wrote about the phenomenon of cephalization and how higher order species tend to have bigger and energetically more expensive brains. Apparently, up until recently this was just speculation without much evidence going for it. Now, it appears the evidence has been "found". So, in children the brain maintenance consumes up to 2/3 (66%) of the daily resting metabolism and that proportion goes down as we age. In fact, you can say that this is a pretty good measure of aging - what percentage of daily calories consumed goes towards brain function and maintenance. The lower the percentage, the more "aged" the person is.

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014 ... lame-brain
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/08/21/1323099111

 

[Such_Saturation]

There is this awesome blog which discusses nicely Ray Peat's words,

<<In evolution, the tendency toward dominance of the head (cephalization) in animals overlaps with another tendency (known in plants too) called juvenilization, pedomorphism, or neoteny, in which an early stage of the organism’s development, the juvenile stage is preserved for longer periods in the descendants, eventually becoming the normal adult type. Baby apes resemble humans, in body proportions and behaviour, much more than the adult apes do. The infant represents our evolutionary future.>>

http://pranarupa.wordpress.com/2013/07/ ... the-brain/

Young people are beginning to work and raise families later and later. Surely this is good in principle, where it allows for less compromise and where the maturation is not restricted to just a few degrees of the mental spectrum (by toxins and whatnot).