IUBio

About fully vs. not fully grown brains.

maxwell mmmaxwell at hotmail.com
Sat May 19 19:55:35 EST 2001


Brian <zhil at online.no> wrote in message news:IJtN6.982$P7.26028 at news1.oke.nextra.no...
> 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.

Wrong. Volume is but a coarse measure. It say nothing about neuronal density,
and nothing about actual connectivity.

> What IS different is what is called EXPERIENCE, and that is store in the
> MEMORY.

That's part of the difference.

> How FAST a brain will grow is determined by what RACE the person belongs to.

Wrong. That's one of the least significant reasons.

> African's develope and mature faster, but their growth is arrested early
> compared with Asians and Europeans.

See above.
> 
> Thus because they have smaller brains, it will have a significant result -
> lower IQ (the g-factor).

Nope. 

> The other dimension is what I would call COMPLEXITY - how complicated a
> brains is wired.

Complexity is far more important than volume. It's what I called connectivity.

> 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).

How would you generate any falsifiable hypotheses from that presumption?

> If we repeat the evolutionary experiment again and again, it will ALWAYS
> produce the SAME result.

Wrong. You ignore stochastic factors. Determinism is fine for describing simple systems,
but even two petri dishes of the same medium, inoculated with the same prokaryotes,
will grow non-identically.

> Two eyes, bipedal creatures - the only variation would be what kind of
> environment they will develope under.

Well, do tell. Sorry I got in this far.

-maxwell

> 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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