As I've mentioned on many occasions, I was a scrawny little runt when I was kid. I ran around in circles, hyperactively, but no one ever accused me of being athletic. No one now, for that matter, ever asks me if I used to play linebacker back in high school.
But I wasn't a complete wash-out, even as a small dude. I did get good grades. But I suppose some folks -- until now -- might suggest that I spent all those hours in the library simply to over-compensate for my lack of brawn, for my doubtful future as a successful hunter-gatherer.
Ha! I exclaim. Ha, ha! While you were watching professional wrestling on TV, I was perusing this week's copy of The Economist. As my favorite laissez-faire publication discusses, recent studies suggest that homo sapiens has evolved as top dog on the food chain by diverting nutrients from his muscles to his brains.
Our brains use up twenty percent of our metabolic energy. The smarter our species has become, the more energy our gray matter consumes. To provide the brain's needed energy, our bodies have sacrificed muscle tissue metabolism. As a result, fellow primates such as chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys are today twice as strong as humans. Even primates who were forced to imitate humans, by living the life-style of a couch potato, retained a much stronger muscle metabolism.
The article warns that these studies represent comparisons between species, not between human individuals. The Economist may feel it necessary to pander to the feelings of the Neandertals amongst us. I do not.
Those linebackers, point guards, and power hitters, over whom everyone so swooned in high school, succeeded athletically not by use of steroids -- steroids had not yet reached my small home town -- but by diverting glucose from their cerebral cortex to their overdeveloped muscles.
Their brains shrank as their biceps bulged. They headed back to apedom; I swam with the evolutionary current.
I've known it all the time. And so have you. We just needed to see proof. Thanks, Economist.
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