IUBio

About fully vs. not fully grown brains.

Brian zhil at online.no
Sat May 19 07:36:33 EST 2001


Mr.Hammond says that the difference is the GROWTH of the brains.
My stance is that that there IS no difference between brains (adults) when
their size is held equal.
What IS different is what is called EXPERIENCE, and that is store in the
MEMORY.
How FAST a brain will grow is determined by what RACE the person belongs to.
African's develope and mature faster, but their growth is arrested early
compared with Asians and
Europeans.

Thus because they have smaller brains, it will have a significant result -
lower IQ (the g-factor).
The other dimension is what I would call COMPLEXITY - how complicated a
brains is wired.
So far our brains have developed consistently in two hemispheres, as Hammond
indicates caused
by evolution and the need to comprehend the world in 3 dimensions (thus two
and not one or three eyes).
If we repeat the evolutionary experiment again and again, it will ALWAYS
produce the SAME result.
Two eyes, bipedal creatures - the only variation would be what kind of
environment they will develope under.
IF we follow Hammonds flawed reasoning, humans should continue to grow
bigger and bigger brains
to continue evolution.

I don't think so, for a couple of reasons.
1.Humans have been on this planet for several centuries, yes even thousands
of years.
And we have through archeology NOT discovered a significant difference in
skull-sizes; taking into account
WHICH species they belong to.
2.The complexity may have varied, because we don't have any soft-tissue
samples from humans several thousand
years ago. We might have some RESSIDUES, but not enought to determine the
COMPLEXITY.

What can we conclude ?
>From my observation, humans will continue to 'compleximize' their brains
until they reach a point when it will not pay
much to compleximize an already small brain.
Thus we might see bigger humans; not much compared with us today; but
enought to significantly alter the brain-SIZE.
The complexity will continue to be a significant factor in human
developement, but the brainsize will take control.

Brian





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