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 cantilevered spine into a teetering stack of blocks doomed to slippage and chronic pain. It slowed us down, making us easy prey. And it created a traffic jam in the female pelvis. To accommodate both upright walking and the passage of our ever-expanding crania, the architecture of childbirth had to be re-engineered into a high-risk, high-torque ordeal. Most animals drop their young with the nonchalant ease of a package delivery. For humans, it became a life-threatening crisis, a design flaw so obvious it’s a wonder it ever got past the first round of venture funding.

This was the initial investment, the sunk cost of freeing up the hands. But the truly ruinous spending was yet to come. It was all being plowed into the R&D department located inside the skull.

The Expensive Tissue Trade-Off

There’s a rule in biology, just as in economics, that you don’t get a free lunch. Every complex adaptation has a cost. The human brain is the most expensive organ imaginable. It constitutes a mere 2% of our body mass but burns through 20% of our resting metabolic rate. For an infant, that figure is a staggering 65%. In the brutal, zero-sum game of evolutionary energetics, this was insanity. It was like a Fortune 500 company deciding to spend a fifth of its revenue just to keep the lights on in the CEO’s office.

So where did the energy budget come from?

The leading theory has the cold, hard logic of a corporate restructuring. It’s called the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, proposed by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler in 1995. They looked at the numbers and saw a classic asset reallocation. As the hominid brain began its improbable expansion, another expensive organ began to shrink: the gut.

Compared to other primates, humans have a laughably small and simple digestive tract. A gorilla, with its massive colon, can spend its days leisurely munching on raw fibrous plants.

We can’t.

We traded our gut for our brains. No shit.

This trade was financed by a change in diet: the addition of energy-dense foods like meat and marrow, and later, the invention of cooking.

Cooking is, in essence, external digestion. It breaks down fibers and proteins before they even hit your stomach, outsourcing the gut’s work to the campfire. It made our cheap, shrunken guts viable and freed up the metabolic capital, the calories and oxygen, to fuel the ballooning neural mass between our ears. We weren't just the ape that stood up; we were the ape that learned to cook its books.

The FOXP2 Anomaly

For this high-risk strategy to pay off, the brain couldn’t just be big; it had to be different. It needed a new kind of software, a killer app. And the code for that app is written in our DNA.

For a long time, the 98.8% genetic similarity to chimpanzees was a source of smug humility. But as any trader on the Street will tell you, the devil is in the fractions of a percent. The real story isn’t in the vast stretches of identical code, but in the few, critical lines that were furiously rewritten. These are what scientists call Human Accelerated Regions (HARs) which are segments of the genome that were conserved for eons across species, but then underwent rapid changes in the human lineage. HAR1, for instance, is a stretch of RNA that plays a crucial role in the layout of the developing cerebral cortex. It’s a key piece of the brain’s blueprint.

But the most famous of these genetic outliers is a gene called FOXP2. It’s not, as it’s often mislabeled, "the language gene." It’s more like a master regulator, a tiny piece of code that, when activated, launches a cascade of other genetic subroutines involved in, among other things, the fine motor control of the larynx and mouth. Most animals have FOXP2. But in the human version, two tiny amino acid substitutions occurred sometime in the last 200,000 years. Just two typos in a gene of 2,547 base pairs.

This was an arbitrage opportunity and a game changing trade for humanity.

A minute change in the code, with explosive downstream consequences. It gave us the exquisitely fine-tuned motor control necessary for the vast phonetic repertoire of human speech. It was the hardware upgrade that allowed for the development of complex language. It’s the difference between a dial-up modem and fiber-optic cable. The chimpanzee has something to say, but FOXP2 gives it a signaling apparatus with the bandwidth of two tin cans and a string.

The human FOXP2 variant gave us a global telecommunications network.

The Neural Trading Floor

With the energy budget secured and the genetic code rewritten, the stage was set for the expansion of the neural trading floor itself. The human brain isn’t just a scaled-up chimpanzee brain. Certain divisions underwent massive, disproportionate growth. The real story is in the explosive expansion of the prefrontal cortex. This is the brain's executive suite, its risk-management desk, its scenario-analysis department. The PFC is where we run simulations of the future, weigh consequences, suppress impulses, and engage in the kind of complex, goal-oriented planning that allows you to build a cathedral or execute a multi-year insider trading scheme.

Inside this expanded cortex, we find another neurological quirk: a particularly dense network of "mirror neurons." These are the cells that fire not only when we perform an action, but also when we see someone else perform that same action. It’s neural Wi-Fi. It’s the biological hardware for empathy, imitation, and learning. It’s what allows a skill—a new way to knap flint, a better way to hunt—to spread through a population with the speed of a viral video. Culture, that vast superstructure of shared knowledge and behavior, is built on the foundation of these mirror neurons. It allowed us to create a collective intelligence, a shared pool of knowledge that dwarfed what any single individual could learn in a lifetime. It was the ultimate leverage.

Language, powered by FOXP2 and processed in dedicated neural hubs like Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, became the data protocol for this network. It allowed us to transmit information with unprecedented fidelity and complexity. But its real power wasn’t just in communicating about the here and now. Its killer app was the ability to communicate about things that didn’t exist.

The Invention of Fictional Derivatives

This is the move that broke the market.

This is what allowed a physically unimpressive ape to outcompete saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. We invented fictions.

Think about money.

A twenty-dollar bill is a piece of cotton paper with some ink on it. It has no intrinsic value. It’s a shared fiction. It works because we, all 330 million of us in the U.S. and billions more globally, collectively agree to believe in its value. It's a financial derivative based on the underlying asset of "trust in the full faith and credit of the United States."

This is a uniquely human trick. You can't convince a chimpanzee to do your bidding by promising him a promotion or a bonus. But humans? We build entire civilizations on abstract, non-physical constructs: laws, gods, corporations, nations, human rights. These are stories we tell each other, fictions we collectively agree to uphold. These shared fictions were the ultimate financial instrument. They allowed for cooperation on a massive scale, far beyond the 150-person limit of a typical primate group. They allowed for the creation of cities, armies, and empires.

And what of consciousness, the subjective experience of it all? The "hard problem" of how a lump of wetware produces the feeling of redness or the sting of regret? From a cold, analytical perspective, it might be the ultimate black box, the proprietary algorithm of the trader who doesn't use charts but just has a "feel" for the market. It’s the source of our art, our music, our love, and our dread—the internal, qualitative data that informs our every bet.

The Unsettled Account

So we come back to the original trade.

The long-shot bet on a big brain. On the one hand, the payoff has been astronomical. We went from a marginal scavenger on the African savanna to the undisputed planetary apex predator, a geological force capable of altering the climate itself.

We won.

But any good trader knows that every position has a risk. The very system that fueled our rise is now our greatest liability. Our ability to cooperate through shared fictions has also given us the ability to wage industrial-scale warfare over competing fictions. Our complex, interconnected global system is a marvel of leveraged efficiency, but it's also incredibly fragile, susceptible to black swan events and systemic collapse.

The bet on human intelligence was a bet on complexity, on leverage, on abstraction. It paid off handsomely. But we are now in uncharted territory, holding the most leveraged position the world has ever seen. The account has not yet been settled. And the market, as they say, can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

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I started Life in the Singularity in May 2023 to track all the accelerating changes in AI/ML, robotics, quantum computing and the rest of the technologies accelerating humanity forward into the future. I’m an investor in over a dozen technology companies and I needed a canvas to unfold and examine all the acceleration and breakthroughs across science and technology.

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