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10/20/2014

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Jim

The study smacks of phrenology and anthropocentrism by itself, and I know the humor here is that greater cognitive ability doesn't normally equal greater understanding in humans, but I'll take the subject seriously (and boringly) for a bit.

I can tell you why Dr. Herculano-Houzel hasn't measured a female human brain yet. It's because others have done that, and the general findings are that males have more neurons in their cortex than human females:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10073431

That would be a highly inconvenient result as it would apply to her theory. Here's Dr. HH on TED:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw

It's a hard watch. She's not alone in her posit that humans developed a larger and denser neuronic cortex because of cooking, though:
http://io9.com/5895119/how-cooking-turned-humans-into-an-invasive-species

Personally, I think we'd be better off understanding our similarities to our animal brethren than our differences, and what makes us "special", but I suppose both have their place.

And now, I'll take the remaining .814 of my brain and eat nachos. Nom nom.

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