06.08.09
Evolution via cooked food
I Cook, Therefore I Am
How dropping food in fire made us human.
This is a fantastically weird way of looking at evolutionary change. Basic evolutionary theory teaches us that our physical selves are shaped by a genetic lottery in a cruel world. Random mutations in DNA change our biology, affecting anything from what we look like to how our immune systems work. The environment then selects who will go on to live and reproduce. But if cooking pushed us across a species threshold, it means that our biology is also shaped in completely unintended ways by cultural innovations. The impact of culture on biology was first proposed in the late 19th century by philosopher and psychologist James Baldwin, but it’s only in very recent times that exciting experimental work has tried to gauge the evolutionary effects of behaviors, like language and domestication. In the case of cooking, Wrangham’s proposal counters a universal human understanding of how the world works. Claude Levi-Strauss observed that most human cultures draw a line between nature and culture, thinking of one as raw and the other as cooked. Humans—whether they are hunter-gatherers, friends of the earth, or company officers of Archer Daniels Midland—reliably see themselves as the chefs controlling the transformation. But if Wrangham is right, this simple way of seeing things becomes oddly blurred: If cooking transforms nature, and cooking changed us, then human nature is … cooked?
Fascinating idea, but, as usual, we don’t know what the facts are.