Human intelligence: how cognitive circuitry, rather than brain size, drove its evolution

By Robert Foley, Professor of Human Evolution, University of Cambridge
Marta Mirazon Lahr, Reader in Human Evolutionary Biology & Director of the Duckworth Collection, University of Cambridge

It’s one of the great paradoxes of evolution. Humans have demonstrated that having large brains are key to our evolutionary success, and yet such brains are extremely rare in other animals. Most get by on tiny brains, and don’t seem to miss the extra brain cells (neurons).

Why? The answer that most biologists have settled on is that large brains are costly in terms of the energy they require to run. And, given the way natural selection…

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