We know nothing about brain evolution

19 February 2008

 Biologist Prof Richard Lewontin from Harvard made the statement recently that we know nothing about how the brain evolved. Prof Lewontin correctly identifies the fact that evolution is a blind process that can not create an adaption to adapt to its environment. Instead evolution causes the adaption and the creature uses it to influence its environment or moves to a new one.

James Randerson summarizes, “The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can't be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.”

It is interesting how we all have the same fossils but can all have different conclusions. I believe it was Michael Shermer that talked about the “embarrassment of riches” we have when talking about hominid fossils, yet others like Lewontin that understand that we can not tell if those fossils were related at all to hominids. The truth is that all we know about fossils is that it died. There is no way to determine if a fossil has any relation to another species because no one actually saw it happen.

Anyone can line up fossil skeletons from the order of smallest brain to largest but this in no way proves they evolved that way. The evolution of the actual gray matter of the brain is difficult enough to explain, but how can you explain cognition? If you are reading this that means that your brain is automatically processing patterns of white and black that are in rows (letters in sentences) and associating each of those patterns with something it has stored at sometime in the past so you can identify a meaning to each of the pattern structures.

I remember my first scanner in the 90's having an ORC program that could scan a document and put the letters into text so you could simply copy and paste the results. I thought this was a feat of technology, until I tried it and the results were poor at best. Even today some of the best ORC programs have difficulty forming paragraphs and sentences without user intervention. If there is an image on the page, good luck getting it to keep the paragraph together.

1. Fossils don't prove evolution.

2. Evolution is blind so complex structures can not be created by many slight improvements.

3. If you think a brain evolved by chance, how long do you think it will take for a ORC program to evolve by chance that works as good as your brain?

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/02/the_distinguished_biologist_pr.html