Appears to support the thesis of "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...

Yeah, this books makes the case against raw diets very well:

https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...

That's the thing with diets. There is a real well reasoned argument for and against most anything...

Cooked food often have much more digestible calories than raw food. Because the heat breaks down complex molecules and make them easier to digest. This isn't reflected at all in these measurements.

This is why it's real hard to stay healthy on a raw food diet.

I learned this from this book, which I really recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human-eboo...

> No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end.

Demonstrably wrong.

Desire for power is certainly common among primates, but there are a number of basic drives. Drives people have it in different amounts. Further, there's no particular reason to think it was a huge evolutionary driver for us.

If you're really looking for the evolutionary driver that made us what we are, it might be a taste for cooked food. [1] You could also make a case for tool usage, or an arms race in language capability, a peacock's tail that happened to let us do far more than woo mates.

And even if power were a major drive, it doesn't really tell us much about what we should do. People are naturally violent, but we mostly set that aside. What's natural tells us nothing about what's right.

Of course you won't believe me, because you write like a fundamentalist. You can't tell a Freudian that it isn't about sex or a Baptist that it isn't all about God. Fundamentalism always makes me a little sad because it's so stunting.

It'd as if somebody put on a pair of blue-tinted glasses and ran around insisting that since they only see blue things, blue is the only real color and everybody else is just fooling themselves. They can't quite get that "everything they see" isn't only about everything; its also about how they see.

Could you be pulling our legs? When you call him arrogant and then explain how only you understand the deep, hidden truths of the world, it's kooky enough that I wonder if you're just trolling.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/14...

This means fire was used before homo sapiens existed, fascinating. We might have evolved to eat cooked/roasted food.

I thought a lot of the links to Richard Wrangham's research on the origins of cooking had already been widely shared on Hacker News. Here is a chronological list of a few stories on his research to show how this line of research has developed over the last decade.

http://img2.tapuz.co.il/forums/1_140989346.pdf

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/06.13/01-cooking.ht...

http://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/uploads/assets/Wobb...

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/04...

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/RW%20RC%20Ev%20...

I was very surprised when I saw the early dates (before the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species) for the earliest evidence of cooking. The current view is cooking actually enabled hominin evolution in the direction of smaller gut sizes and larger brain sizes, as is characteristic of Homo sapiens.