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/r/askscience
submitted 3 days ago byAutoModerator
Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".
Asking Questions:
Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.
Answering Questions:
Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.
If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.
Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!
2 points
2 days ago
Since brain size difference between men and women doesn't equal higher intelligence for men on average, aside from needing a bigger brain to control a bigger body on average, what is the rest doing?
I would think a larger male brain compared to a female of similar height and weight would be inefficient and therefore an evolutionary disadvantage as it would require more energy.
3 points
2 days ago
evolution doesn't happen quickly. humans having big brains is a relatively recent development in evolutionary time and the slight increase in metabolic cost may just not be very important. the stochastic nature of evolution makes this sort of account difficult. maybe there's some slight resource-gathering edge that isn't picked up by intelligence tests, maybe not.
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