Are brains shrinking to make us smarter?

In NOT A CHIMP I argue, quoting John Hawks and others, that there is plenty of evidence - including brain size - to show that, if anything, human evolution has speeded up these last 30,000 years or so, not ceased altogether. This article backs that view up. Domestication is clearly involved and, with it, the retention of juvenile characters - neoteny. Here is the key piece of the article:

"Geary and his colleagues used population density as a measure of social complexity, with the hypothesis that the more humans are living closer together, the greater the exchanges between group, the division of labor and the rich and varied interactions between people. They found that brain size decreased as population density increased......But the downsizing does not mean modern humans are dumber than their ancestors -- rather, they simply developed different, more sophisticated forms of intelligence, said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of anthropology at Duke University.

He noted that the same phenomenon can be observed in domestic animals compared to their wild counterparts.

So while huskies may have smaller brains than wolves, they are smarter and more sophisticated because they can understand human communicative gestures, behaving similarly to human children.

"Even though the chimps have a larger brain (than the bonobo, the closest extant relative to humans), and even though a wolf has a much larger brain than dogs, dogs are far more sophisticated, intelligent and flexible, so intelligence is not very well linked to brain size," Hare explained."