Bifalgorithm post

A fire is doing work your intestines used to do, and the payoff is measurable. In controlled experiments feeding animals identical food raw or cooked, the cooked group consistently gains more weight from the same starting material. Same calories on paper, not the same calories in practice. Now, if that's true, it should be written into our bodies. And it is, everywhere you look. Our teeth are small, not slightly small, anomalously small for an ape with reduced molars and thin enamel in a lineage where big grinding teeth were standard equipment. Our jaws are weak. The muscles that clamp a chimpanzee's bite shut are massively larger than ours, anchored to a skull built to take that force. Our mouths are small too. Our stomachs are small. Our colons are small. Every part of the system that processes raw food is reduced, and the reduction is old. Visible in Homo erectus well over a million years ago, one study out of Harvard put numbers on it. Simply processing food before eating it, slicing meat, pounding roots, no fire required, cut chewing effort by around a sixth. across a lifetime that's millions of chews that never happened, and a skull that no longer needs to be built around them. The face you have is the face of an animal that stopped chewing. Here's where the story gets genuinely contested, and it's worth being honest about it. If cooking reshaped Homo erectus, we should find controlled fire going back nearly 2 million years.

A fire is doing work your intestines used to do, and the payoff is measurable. In controlled experiments feeding animals identical food raw or cooked, the cook…