>> >
>
> You make a good point.  In an environment swarming with food, cooking is
> a pointless waste of time and energy.  Nonetheless, cooking caught on
> and became universal.  I am still inclined to think that it did so
> because it paid off.  One possibility is that it allowed populations to
> expand into terrain where, without cooking, the food wasn't so
> swarming.  I wouldn't argue that food was always and everywhere scarce,
> but it seems reasonable to suppose that it was sometimes scarce, and
> under those conditions the foods made available by cooking would be a
> definite advantage, and once that advantage was seized, it would propel
> further population expansion, just as agriculture did.

IMO,  cooking caught on because it help to  bypass the instinctive
regulation of eating . once the food is cooked or denatured our genetic is
not able to recognise the food very clearly and we don't experience a clear
"stop" ( when taste becomes not so appealing).
cooking create all kind of new compound ( 450 different molecules in a
simple roasted potato )and it is expected that our genetic didn't adapt to
this new chemical make up of the food as they have never been in our diet
before cooking .

those new molecules  can have caracteristics that makes them peroxydant,
antioxydant , toxique or even  mutagenic and they are addictives like many
substances unknown to our bodies and disturbing its inner chemistry .
animals would keep eating cooked foods if they had the possibility to cooked
for themselves .
on top of that once you start to eat beyond what your body wanted to ingest
by bypassing instinctive regulation , your body is blocking by instinct to
the raw undenatured nutrients  that will overwhelm your metabolism while the
same denatured nutrients will not find any barrier to their ingestion .

anybody can do the experience by quitting any denatured foods for at least
few weeks and see what happen when you start to denature your food a little
, unavoidably you are going to want more and more denaturation till you are
back into cooking again .

alcohol; and other drugs  also caught on and it is not because it gives a
definite advantage to our species .And yes cooking also provide an inner
exitation of the nervous syatem that lead us to overpopulation , call it
advantage if you like but it is what is leading our species to extinction .

jean-claude