In this sense learning to cook cassava roots or disseminate the hard-won knowledge of safe mushrooms is not all that different from recruiting rumenal bacteria to nourish oneself. The cow depends on the ingenious adaptation of the rumen to turn an exclusive diet of grasses into a balanced meal; we depend instead on the prodigious powers of recognition, memory, and communication that allow us to cook cassava or identify an edible mushroom and share that precious information. The same process of natural selection came up with both strategies; one just happens to rely on cognition, the other goes
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