Co-evolutionary dynamics of mammalian brain and body size.

Accounting for the true scaling relationship, we document dramatically varying rates of relative brain mass evolution across the mammalian phylogeny, and we resolve the question of whether there is an overall trend for brain mass to increase through time.

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However, when we allow the slope of the relationship between relative brain mass and pathwise rate to vary among orders (that is, test to see whether the trend is the same among mammalian orders), we find a significant trend in only three orders: rodents ( β = 0.998, P x = 0.002), carnivores ( β = 1.845, P x = 0.000) and, most strikingly, primates ( β = 2.074, P x = 0.000) (Fig. 3 ).

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