Asklemmy

There's a reason grass is so common - it's because it's a wildly effective life strategy. Grass is actually quite hard to eat - there's basically no nutrition in the leaves themselves, and grass evolved to incorporate silica "needles" in its leaves, so that it wears down your teeth when you try to eat it anyways.

Not to say that it's impossible to eat grass, but you need to undergo a ton of highly specialized adaptations to make it possible. For most animals (including humans), it's just not worth the effort

All forms of grass:

• Corn
• Wheat
• Barley
• Rice
• etc

Smarts required more calories.

Grass is mostly cellulose and lignin. Those molecules are difficult to break down.

Animals that can digest the cellulose either need a really long digestive track or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.

A lot of grass. Like lawn grass. Is wheat.

If you let it grow more.

So actually we did evolve to eat grass.

Cat grass is wheat grass.

The thing is that cows can't digest grass either. They have an extra stomach along their oesophagus which is basically just a pouch where the grass goes in first. There are a lot of bacteria and they can digest grass. Then these bacteria grow because they eat the grass.

Then the cow swallows these bacteria and digests those. That's where a cow gets their calories from.

It's all down to the way the brain works. Our brains use up something like 20% of our calories when standing still doing nothing.

Grass does not supply the amount of calories and micronutrients needed to keep the human brain running, simply because it is low on both of those things.

Grass eaters have multiple stomachs, slow digestion and graze pretty much the whole time they're awake, and because their brains use a lot less energy than human brains, the balance works out.

It’s more efficient to let others eat the grass, and then eat them

Take the tier zoo aproach. Would you rather use evelution points on grass or evolution points on being big brain.

Vegetables have pretty limited availability for protein, as an animal you have sit there eating grass all day. Our ways allow us plenty of time to be smart & stuff

Return to cow

I'd rather evolve the ability to photosynthesize, now that we have indoor lighting. It'd save a whole bunch of time and grocery bills.

Because it requires a lot of biological investment to eat it. It's rough on teeth and requires rumination or similar calorically expensive techniques to extract much nutrition. We evolved in the opposite path and optimized heavily for easily digested foods. We then take it a step further and cook them breaking the difficult to digest parts into an easer to digest form.

Also we do eat grasses, but only their seeds and fruits. Wheat, maize, rice, and bananas are all grasses

Essentially as others said, because you need to invest heavily in your gut and metabolism to get enough energy out of grass alone. You don't evolve into what you want, you evolve into what you can while you are pressured to do so. There is currently no pressure to rely solely on grass, that pressure hasn't been on us for millions of years. Our foods may be trickier to find but on average they yield more energy compared to grass.

But don't get me wrong. It's a valid strategy. Our ancestors did have the window of opportunity at some point, and they took it... We were something more like rats back then, the grass eaters niche had room. Grass was everywhere. And our cousins back then adapted and spent practically the whole day foraging for grass in order to get by. But you know what also was everywhere? Trees. And our ratlike ancestors that were more inclined to climb, jump, and spot predators from above found it easier to stick to the omnivore diet.

Adapting to trees lets you move into places with less grass... Like jungles and swamps. And while you are there for a couple million years you will have other problems to solve, problems that require wits, sharp vision, and social skills. You don't have time to forage 18hrs every day and grass isn't as abundant here anyway.

If you don't rely solely on grass you will probably fare better during winter. Especially during those ice ages. By the time you have grass as an option again you are pretty much an ape and pivoting back to it makes no sense.

Grass is nutritionally poor. The reason we are smart in many ways is due to our varied diet. Even if we had evolutionary gone in that direction we would be dumber. Eating grass is a specialisation.

Also, we would not look like we do. If you look at the digestive track of a horse or a cow, you will see that they are longer. Carnivores have the shortest and we as omnivores are in between. Being an omnivote is a good thing and in the end, we can get more nutrition by hunting and gathering than by grassing.

Worth noting, while individual cows' behaviour and preferences vary greatly, the time spent feeding and ruminating usually adds up to 4-7 hours a day. Our society would be were we are today if we spent 7 hours as a species eating grass in order to make ir worthwhile.

Evolution can only evolve so much within an existing animal especies in order to specialise or fit in a survival niche. Hence you do not see sea crabs that can fly or flies that live in the bottom of the sea.

That random mutation didn't happen, basically.

Evolution is a purely subtractive process. It doesn't design things in, it just removes poorly-designed creatures (and all hypothetical offspring) until only things equipped to survive are left. And obviously, there are things to eat that aren't grass.

Edit: Herbivores can be smart, even the grazers. Look at elephants.

I can't believe how many other replies heap that fallacy on top of teleological evolution. Apes are mostly herbivorous anyway, WTF.

Because yo mama so fat she'd eat it all

I think that grass don’t have enough energy to sustain our brain and its development.

If you look at all the other animals in the world that do eat grass, we did. But the "we" that eat grass, look like those animals, with those traits.
The "we" that became smart became so due to what we evolved to eat and do.

Why haven’t cows evolved sentience?

Grazing lifestyle doesn’t favor big expensive brains.

We evoled away from eating grass and other such things, it's why our appendix are now almost useless.

We used to be able to eat grass.

Grass came later.

MOOOOOO MOooO MU