Word: finarelli
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That widely accepted truth might be coming undone, however, thanks to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the authors, evolutionary biologists John Finarelli of the University of Michigan and John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History, there's a much murkier link than we thought between big brains and big societies. As it turns out, it was our favorite nonhuman critters - dogs - that threw off previous data...
...Finarelli and Flynn did not study as broad a collection of animals as the authors of the earlier paper. They studied just one order, the carnivores, but they did so in depth. Sampling both living terrestrial carnivores and the fossils of extinct ones, they analyzed overall brain volume relative to body mass in fully 289 species. They also factored in what is known (or, in the case of fossils, theorized) about each species' social behavior. What they got was a surprising mix of findings. (See pictures of 10 species near extinction...
What doesn't seem to track, however, is a consistent connection between these measures and the complexity of the animals' communities. "The universality of the social-brain hypothesis does not apply," says Finarelli...
...have co-evolved with humans, growing more social as we selected for those traits. That essentially skewed the results, and the absence of fossil ancestors from the data meant there was no information about whether the brains of the earliest dogs grew or shrank or did both over time. Finarelli and Flynn acknowledge that the modern canine brain has grown along with its sociability, but they do not know which is the cause and which is the effect - or if the two things are linked in any meaningful...
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