ArticlePloS one2019
Whatever you want: Inconsistent results are the rule, not the exception, in the study of primate brain evolution.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Inhibitory control tests in non-human animals: validity, reliability, and perspectives.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- The fish challenge to vertebrate cognitive evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Proximate mechanisms underlying the coevolution of diet quality and relative brain size in primates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Why did the human brain size evolve? A way forward.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Pair-bond strength is consistent and related to partner responsiveness in a wild corvid.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evolutionary trade-offs in dormancy phenology.eLife · 2024Article
- Phylogenetic comparative analysis of the cerebello-cerebral system in 34 species highlights primate-general expansion of cerebellar crura I-II.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Evolution of cortical geometry and its link to function, behaviour and ecology.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The impact of environmental factors on the evolution of brain size in carnivorans.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Causation, not collinearity: Identifying sources of bias when modelling the evolution of brain size and other allometric traits.Evolution letters · 2022Article
- Experts in action: why we need an embodied social brain hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Problems with using comparative analyses of avian brain size to test hypotheses of cognitive evolution.PloS one · 2022Article
- 'Dunbar's number' deconstructed.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Testing hypotheses of marsupial brain size variation using phylogenetic multiple imputations and a Bayesian comparative framework.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Fungus-Growing Ants: Models for the Integrative Analysis of Cognition and Brain Evolution.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Quantitative uniqueness of human brain evolution revealed through phylogenetic comparative analysis.eLife · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Primate brains differ in size and architecture. Hypotheses to explain this variation are numerous and many tests have been carried out. However, after body size has been accounted for there is little left to explain. The proposed explanatory variables for the residual variation are many and covary, both with each other and with body size. Further, the data sets used in analyses have been small, especially in light of the many proposed predictors. Here we report the complete list of models that results from exhaustively combining six commonly used predictors of brain and neocortex size. This provides an overview of how the output from standard statistical analyses changes when the inclusion of different predictors is altered. By using both the most commonly tested brain data set and the inclusion of new data we show that the choice of included variables fundamentally changes the conclusions as to what drives primate brain evolution. Our analyses thus reveal why studies have had troubles replicating earlier results and instead have come to such different conclusions. Although our results are somewhat disheartening, they highlight the importance of scientific rigor when trying to answer difficult questions. It is our position that there is currently no empirical justification to highlight any particular hypotheses, of those adaptive hypotheses we have examined here, as the main determinant of primate brain evolution.
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