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Brains don’t, but skulls do. So the volume of the brain is discernible if the skull fossil is sufficiently complete. And I think this contains some information. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocast “While an endocast can not directly reveal brain structure,[1] it can allow scientists to gauge the size of areas of the brain situated close to the surface, notably Wernicke's and Broca's areas, responsible for interpreting and producing speech.”

Including Pongo, Pan, Gorilla and forebears? Just looking at late Homo erectus, adult brain sizes varied between 550 cc and 1250 cc depending on physical size and local environment due in major part to phenotypic plasticity - different populations adapting quickly to highly divergent habitats. Add to that the extreme rarity of good fossil crania and consequent large statistical uncertainty, you can imagine almost any trend pattern you like. But the data is just too scant and variable to justify it.

Yes. I think some people confuse knowledge with intelligence. Knowledge is a collective possession of humanity that accumulates down the centuries and possibly increases exponentially. But people in earlier times were obviously intelligent. They built the pyramids, calculated the circumference of the Earth and so on. They just had fewer intellectual tools, and less information, to work with.

How could we know? Brain tissue does not get fossilised sufficiently perfectly. But there is no reason I am aware of to think early man was any less intelligent than we are today.

Villmoare et al (2022) have yet to see a serious challenge to their summary:

Claiming we’re running out means quantifying how much we have, and how much we use. Otherwise this is just empty rhetoric. Science forum, remember? “the burst emitted more energy than the lasers delivered. But it didn’t produce enough energy to run all the lab equipment powering the lasers. It took some 300 million joules of energy from the electrical grid to do the experiment” https://www.snexplores.org/article/breakthrough-physics-experiment-fusion-energy 300 MW-s of energy might sound like a lot, but 300 MW-s is less than 0.1 MW-hr, and the US alone produced more than 4 billion MW-hr of electricity in 2023. One part in 40 billion, of just one country’s generation. That’s a tiny drop in the bucket. It’s not “vast”

That's doesn't answer the question, I'm not suggesting we shut down humanities R and D department, just the one that doesn't seem to work, after all this time and mental efforts. Our time and efforts are better spent on projects that do work, you know the clock is ticking, right?

Why don't we wait until we know how to do it successfully before doing any more R & D on it?

Just to share my personal experience. I never was a 'womanizer', and not great at courting. For me, women were from Venus, and I from Ceres (definitely not from Mars...). I suffered from not having a romantic and erotic relationship with a woman. But halfway my student days, I got my first 'half-relationships', but suffered again when they broke up. Then I met the woman who is still my wife. From the moment that I got my feeling (and her's) that 'this is it', I suddenly got more involved with other women, even had a few extra-marital affairs (and was open about it to my wife, and she could accept it). Now we are already married for 30 years. My interpretation: since my fixed relationship, I could be much more relaxed in relations to others in general, and specifically to women. The pressure and the need were gone. But I see all this pressure (and aggressiveness) and need in what you write here. And that does not make you attractive at all. In those days, it was my fault, and so it is yours. My advice (which you already got from many here): let go the feeling of need, do not put pressure on others in your relationships. Do not whine, do not be aggressive, and do not be picky. And if you notice you can't, yes, search for help, e.g. psychotherapy. And let go the idea that you must be bodily attractive to attract women. Being pleasant company to others, men and women alike, is the most important. Having implicit demands does not work, people (e.g women ;-) ) feel it, and it shies them away.

Are these copy/paste responses to other replies? I don't see how your reply to my post makes any sense. What happened recently? What's been happening since the first generation? What first generation are you referring to? Why are you bringing a 12 step rant into this response to my question: what would you propose this legislation do to force women to acknowledge your amazingness?

Look, he certainly had interesting hypotheses, but I will add that some of his arguments are questionable from a scientific standpoint. There is a strong "supernatural" undertone including invoking "Black Magic" in some of his earlier works.

How about masturbation ??? You and the OP sure seem to do a lot of verbal jerking off in this thread. Can we please ignore these two, so that they hopefully go away, and we can go back to discussing the sciences this forum is designed for ?

In weightlifting, this is similar to tricep extension, where your lunges and squats deload the plyometrics of the overhead press, depending on which bicep curl gives you a good standing row.

This is an ethical question, the numbers don't matter if it's not part of the solution.

It takes vast amounts of energy to even get a second or so of actual fusion and how costly that energy is, in terms of cost to the planet. The money is better spent on something achievable in terms of clean energy, perhaps fission. I'm not suggesting we entirely give up on the potential benefits, we mothball the project until the energy cost is not on the planet.