Things are they way they are because they got that way. A remarkably simple idea that explains the complexity of the world. Of course it's true. You need only break open the nearest vertebrate and count cranial nerves to be convinced. And it's a far more satisfying explanation than my Circle Pines VBS could muster, not to mention the shrill shrieking daughters who regularly prowl campus with their mini-wheat bibles railing against the evils of academics, what with our discovering longer-lasting lightbulbs and cures for diseases and whatnot. Say what you will about Darwinists, at least they never bombed a church or flew an airplane into a skyscraper to impress their god.
Still, there are many gaps to fill when considering how we went from amino acids to Shakespeare. This keeps bookstores and libraries well-stocked with evolution titles of every stripe and spot. Alas, I find most of these to be insufferable. Case in point: On the Origin of Species. I've tried to read OtOoS. I really have. It's pretty much required if you want to be taken seriously by the inhaler-and-pocket-protector crowd. But, like the Principia, I just couldn't power through it. The latter because I didn't purchase a Newton-to-reality decoder ring, and Darwin's epic because I couldn't stay awake. How can something so wondrous be made so dull? Beak lengths? Seriously, dude? Darwin could crush the fun out of going to the Moulin Rouge on two-fer night. He's like Malthus for people who find Malthus too randy.
But use cyprinid vagal lobe cytoarchitecture to argue lamination emerged repeatedly during speciation because it's an efficient synaptic geometry and you got a stew goin' baby. So I was muy pleased to recently come across Georg Striedter's (UC Davis) romp through my wheelhouse. In his Principles of Brain Evolution, he sets out to establish, well, principles of brain evolution. How that information processing porkchop in your noggin came to be. How is it different from other brains? What makes mammals special among the vertebrates, primates special among mammals, and humans special among primates?
Fair warning: This is no Gouldian popularization. There are figures and equations in PoBE, and a lengthy bibliography of primary literature. Furthermore, a challenge for the paleo-neuroscientist (or is it neuro-paleontologist?) is that brains -- squishy things that they are -- don't leave fossils. So Striedter is more often than not veering into comparative neuroanatomy, a field cursed with gobs of facts of the memorizin' kind. The standard treatment these days is Butler, and she's not the sort of author you crack open on a Saturday night because your Game of Thrones DVD didn't arrive. Again. (Anymore, Netflix treats their lingering DVD customers like Luca Brazzi at Connie's wedding, forgetting it was us who paid for Reed Hasting's summer home in the Hamptons. But I digress.)
Yet, PoBE is a page turner, save for a few detours into embryology that, tbh, didn't put the meow in my mix. (What can I say? The thought of making a baby gives me the willies. Also, hasn't the whole "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" thing been debunked? Why are we even talking about embryos?). What keeps the book from becoming grindy are the many GTFO moments sprinkled throughout. There's the cyprinid vagal lobe cytoarchitecture thing, to name one gem. Also, Striedter notes a phrenologist mapped the crow's brain in 1836 and, remarkably, got many of its behavioral traits correct. Also, brains appear to have shrunk in many species as the eons spun past, which is not something I knew nor expected. It's as if your ancestor was handed a shiny new MacBook and said: no thanks, I prefer DOS.
Striedter grapples with a cornucopia of competing factors -- anatomical, cellular, genetic, metabolic -- that contribute to the glacial gradual morph of morphology, complex interactions that make obvious explanations almost never true. Addtionally, brains ain't just for show; they're expected to do stuff -- in particular, stuff that helps their vessel leave behind offspring. As such, we must confront the connection of neuroanatomy to behavior. This is properly called neuroethology, and it's the third rail of neuroscience. Striedter steps lightly here, for example connecting the enlargement of prefrontal cortex in primates to the emergence of social behavior, and positing the particularly dense cortical innervation of brainstem motor zones in humans made language possible (I can't help but feel his presentation would benefit from an examination of invertebrates). These are the types of evolutionary topics that are so fascinating, but remain frustratingly difficult to resolve unequivocally. Striedter offers interpretations, but freely admits he may be wrong.
At the end of the day, what are the principles of brain evolution? I don't want to spoil the surprise, but, in a nutshell: 1) bigger is smarter, and 2) primates are different. Humans have bigger brains than, say, anteaters, so its not surprising we write poetry and they don't. However, elephants have bigger brains than humans, and elephants don't understand calculus. Identifying principles such as these is what drives all good science, the difference between a meaningful whole and a "pile of sundry facts" (as Striedter quotes Dobzhansky). Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit, Niels Bohr said. There is still something like Snow's two cultures at work in neuroscience -- a reductionist bench and a holistic ideology -- but engaging books such as PoBE teach us that what defines a neuron, a nucleus, a brain is not only what it can do, but also what it cannot.
Check out Principles of Brain Evolution on Amazon.
Still, there are many gaps to fill when considering how we went from amino acids to Shakespeare. This keeps bookstores and libraries well-stocked with evolution titles of every stripe and spot. Alas, I find most of these to be insufferable. Case in point: On the Origin of Species. I've tried to read OtOoS. I really have. It's pretty much required if you want to be taken seriously by the inhaler-and-pocket-protector crowd. But, like the Principia, I just couldn't power through it. The latter because I didn't purchase a Newton-to-reality decoder ring, and Darwin's epic because I couldn't stay awake. How can something so wondrous be made so dull? Beak lengths? Seriously, dude? Darwin could crush the fun out of going to the Moulin Rouge on two-fer night. He's like Malthus for people who find Malthus too randy.
But use cyprinid vagal lobe cytoarchitecture to argue lamination emerged repeatedly during speciation because it's an efficient synaptic geometry and you got a stew goin' baby. So I was muy pleased to recently come across Georg Striedter's (UC Davis) romp through my wheelhouse. In his Principles of Brain Evolution, he sets out to establish, well, principles of brain evolution. How that information processing porkchop in your noggin came to be. How is it different from other brains? What makes mammals special among the vertebrates, primates special among mammals, and humans special among primates?
Fair warning: This is no Gouldian popularization. There are figures and equations in PoBE, and a lengthy bibliography of primary literature. Furthermore, a challenge for the paleo-neuroscientist (or is it neuro-paleontologist?) is that brains -- squishy things that they are -- don't leave fossils. So Striedter is more often than not veering into comparative neuroanatomy, a field cursed with gobs of facts of the memorizin' kind. The standard treatment these days is Butler, and she's not the sort of author you crack open on a Saturday night because your Game of Thrones DVD didn't arrive. Again. (Anymore, Netflix treats their lingering DVD customers like Luca Brazzi at Connie's wedding, forgetting it was us who paid for Reed Hasting's summer home in the Hamptons. But I digress.)
Yet, PoBE is a page turner, save for a few detours into embryology that, tbh, didn't put the meow in my mix. (What can I say? The thought of making a baby gives me the willies. Also, hasn't the whole "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" thing been debunked? Why are we even talking about embryos?). What keeps the book from becoming grindy are the many GTFO moments sprinkled throughout. There's the cyprinid vagal lobe cytoarchitecture thing, to name one gem. Also, Striedter notes a phrenologist mapped the crow's brain in 1836 and, remarkably, got many of its behavioral traits correct. Also, brains appear to have shrunk in many species as the eons spun past, which is not something I knew nor expected. It's as if your ancestor was handed a shiny new MacBook and said: no thanks, I prefer DOS.
Striedter grapples with a cornucopia of competing factors -- anatomical, cellular, genetic, metabolic -- that contribute to the glacial gradual morph of morphology, complex interactions that make obvious explanations almost never true. Addtionally, brains ain't just for show; they're expected to do stuff -- in particular, stuff that helps their vessel leave behind offspring. As such, we must confront the connection of neuroanatomy to behavior. This is properly called neuroethology, and it's the third rail of neuroscience. Striedter steps lightly here, for example connecting the enlargement of prefrontal cortex in primates to the emergence of social behavior, and positing the particularly dense cortical innervation of brainstem motor zones in humans made language possible (I can't help but feel his presentation would benefit from an examination of invertebrates). These are the types of evolutionary topics that are so fascinating, but remain frustratingly difficult to resolve unequivocally. Striedter offers interpretations, but freely admits he may be wrong.
At the end of the day, what are the principles of brain evolution? I don't want to spoil the surprise, but, in a nutshell: 1) bigger is smarter, and 2) primates are different. Humans have bigger brains than, say, anteaters, so its not surprising we write poetry and they don't. However, elephants have bigger brains than humans, and elephants don't understand calculus. Identifying principles such as these is what drives all good science, the difference between a meaningful whole and a "pile of sundry facts" (as Striedter quotes Dobzhansky). Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit, Niels Bohr said. There is still something like Snow's two cultures at work in neuroscience -- a reductionist bench and a holistic ideology -- but engaging books such as PoBE teach us that what defines a neuron, a nucleus, a brain is not only what it can do, but also what it cannot.
Check out Principles of Brain Evolution on Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment