I Like Big Brains

Of all the bets ever placed in the history of this planet, the wager on a creature like Homo sapiens was the longest of long shots.

It was a trade so audacious, so contrary to the market fundamentals of the natural world, that any sane biological investor would have dismissed it as a crank’s fantasy. The market, for 3.5 billion years, had favored sensible, diversified portfolios: toughness, speed, claws, shells, camouflage. It rewarded creatures that were energy-efficient and risk-averse. And then along came this one lineage of primates that decided to go all-in, leveraging everything it had on a single, wildly speculative, and metabolically expensive asset: a big brain.

If you were a ratings agency in the Pliocene, you’d have rated the hominid business plan as junk.

The physical plant was a disaster.

The decision to stand up on two legs was the biological equivalent of a leveraged buyout that strips a company of its most reliable assets. It ruined the back, turning a perfectly good ca…