Please send me a PDF of your article.

Kind regards, Adolf Heschl

Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz (Austria)

adolf.heschl@alumni.uni-graz.at

One could even go a little further and say that the fact that single genes often produce incompatible phylogenetic trees also refutes Richard Dawkins’ idea of the - selfish - gene as the relevant “unit of selection.” Referring to Douglas Futuyma’s textbook on evolution from 2013 (3rd edition), a passage from Wikipedia aptly boils it down: “One of the resolutions to reduce the implications of incomplete lineage sorting is to use multiple genes for creating species or population phylogenies. The more genes used, the more reliable the phylogeny becomes” (quoted from Wikipedia: incomplete lineage sorting/implications). In other words, entire genomes should be treated as the real units of selection because they produce the most reliable phylogenetic trees. That the molecular reconstruction of phylogeny is not as straightforward as Richard Dawkins tries to make us believe is already shown by the fact that normal sexual reproduction within a given population always involves some amount of horizontal gene transfer or hybridization between a male and a female lineage, which makes it difficult to follow the path of single genes through the population. In contrast, genomes remain relatively stable over time, even if some smaller parts of their genetic content are exchanged from time to time.

Adi Heschl

Very interesting research.

best regards, Adi

Dear Alex, Congratulation for the interesting paper. I fully agree with the result of your comprehensive analysis because I was never a convinced adherent of the social brain hypothesis which I see as a rather typically human cognitive bias of our world view ("social" is always good). So I hope that your article will provoque a new and more balanced discussion on the intricate interaction between ecological and possible social, i.e. sexual selection factors in cognitive evolution. At the moment I have only 3-4 short questions to you (my special field is self-conscioussness in primates): 1. Many baboon species (Papio sp.) are more successful hunters than even chimpanzees and nevertheless they neither have a larger brain nor self-conscioussness (checked via mirror self-recognition). Based on your results about omnivory shouldn't one expect a different relationship? 2. The same argument holds for the comparison chimpanzee/gorilla. Shouldn't there be a greater difference in brain size? 3. Why didn't you mention Katherine Milton as one of the first researchers who investigated in the field the evolutionary relationship between foraging style and brain size in primates? (howler vs. spider monkey) 4. In your diagram on the phylogenetic relationship between EQ and mean group size, you chose the color red for "low" and blue for "high" (normally, it's the other way round). Best regards, Adolf