Recipes Came About By Evoultion

New Scientist ^ | 3-22-2008

[blam]

Recipes came about by evolution

22 March 2008
From New Scientist Print Edition.

COQ AU VIN and steak-and-kidney pudding may not bring to mind the principles of evolution. Yet evolutionary mechanisms may well be reflected in recipes for these tried-and-tested dishes.

Physicist Antonio Roque of the University of São Paulo in Brazil and colleagues analysed thousands of recipes (arxiv.org/abs/0802.4393v1) drawn from the French Larousse Gastronomique, the British New Penguin Cookery Book, three editions of the Brazilian Dona Benta spanning nearly 60 years, and a medieval cookbook. When they looked at how often ingredients appeared in recipes and ranked them accordingly, they saw a precise mathematical relationship across the board between an ingredient's position on the list and how commonly used it was. "There's a remarkable similarity," says Roque, "independent of culture and author."

This similarity, they suggest, may point to an evolutionary mechanism at work in the way recipes are passed down. When they tested their idea using a mathematical model in which additions, deletions or errors could be introduced into recipes, they obtained the same relationship as long as they assigned each ingredient an inherent "fitness" which made it more likely to be retained. This fitness might in practice reflect, say, its nutritional value or flavour.

There was also a curious tendency for some low-fitness ingredients, which add little to a recipe, to become locked in, says Roque. These can persist by default if there are no obvious substitutes.

[Hoplite]

Haggis didn't come down from no tree.

= )

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP

[SoftballMominVA]

Haggis is straight from the outer circles of Hell

[Fiddlstix]

Bump

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Foodie Ping? ;)

[Berlin_Freeper]

Hardly anyone cooks anymore. How’s that for evolution?

[Diana in Wisconsin]

As soon as trigger fingers “evolved” in my Family Tree, whatever you shot that day was what ya ate, recipe or not.

My Grandma is famous for feeding a table full of kids on one boiled potato, and whatever roadkill she found that day. ;)

[Rudder]

When they looked at how often ingredients appeared in recipes and ranked them accordingly, they saw a precise mathematical relationship across the board between an ingredient's position on the list and how commonly used it was.

This needs translation. What, exactly, was correlated to what, exactly?

[mylife]

This is the goofiest thing I have read in ages.

Recipes change from region to region with availability of ingredients and with different regional tastes.

Evolution my eye

[mylife]

Ms Behavin

[xmission]

It all makes perfect sense. The more it was used, the more it was used...

[mylife]

Its all intellectual masturbation by a bunch of eggheads

[mylife]

I like Coq au vin too, but why is the author shouting?

[The_Reader_David]

This is rather amusing, as recipes are obviously the result of intentional action by cooks, chefs and old grandmothers.

Secularists assume that the description of biological diversity (or anything else) by a Darwinian mechanism is ‘proof’ that it did not arise by intentional action. Curiously so do creationists, who reason from the intent inherent in divine creation to the falsity of Darwinism.

[dynachrome]

Downlaod the whole thing here (pdf file):

http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.4393v1

[dynachrome]

And you can “download” it too! downlaod. sheesh

[dynachrome]

eyeglazing.

"A common measure used to characterize complex networks is the degree distribution, which gives the fraction of nodes with k links [7]. A bipartite network has two kinds of degree distribution, one for the ingredient nodes and the other for the recipe nodes. The degree distribution for the ingredients is the probability distribution PI (k) that a randomly chosen ingredient appears in k recipes. Plots of the degree distribution for the ingredients of the cookbooks show that they are right-skewed with a two decade power law region well fitted by PI (k) ∝ k −α with α ≅ 1.72. This value has been found by a fit proportional to k −(α −1) of the complementary cumulative distribution (Fig. 2), = − Σ k I C P (k) 1 P (k) , (2) which gives the probability that an ingredient is used in more than k recipes. It is compatible with the relation α = 1 + 1/β valid for pure power laws present in rank plots and degree distributions. This anomalous exponent cannot be obtained from a general Yule process [6] since in this latter case α ≥ 2. The degree distribution for the recipes is the probability distribution PR ( j) that a"

[IrishCatholic]

We do not hold a candle on the Europeans for science.
Not even close.
They did a study about what goes on in a woman's brain during orgasm.

Can you see the scientists that got funding for that? IT WAS BRILLIANT. I can see it now. The committee that approves funding is looking down at their application in the boardroom. “You want funding for what?....You mean all day long you get to....no dinner or drinks or anything?....They volunteer for this?...You just sit in your lab coat and they line up outside?...Can we help in the study?...My God man, this is the Holy Grail!” Hand shaking and backslapping going on all around.

Meanwhile our university geeks were studying methane emissions from cows.

[mylife]

There is probably an egghead joke in there somewhere.

These people need to get a life.