Is your brain full of anachronistic junk?

According to David Linden, author of The Accidental Mind,

David Linden's book "The Accidental Mind" explores the thesis that the human brain is a hotchpotch of suboptimal components gathered together by the vagaries of
evolution.

Even the Nature reviewer, Georg Striedter, baulks at the idea,

"More difficult to show is that the use of pre-existing parts imposes functional constraints or 'bad design'." Also: "Linden is right to stress that brains evolved, but hasty to conclude that they are flawed in their design. What we do know, and what The Accidental Mind helps us to realize, is that the human brain is not designed as many have imagined.

How does reviewer Striedter know that the brain is not designed? Actually, he doesn't; he assumes that as a starting point. The fact that even HE appears to doubt the "accidental mind" thesis should undermine his certainty, but of course it doesn't.

Anyway, British physicist David Tyler disagrees:

Books like this, and reviews like this, demonstrate yet again how unlevel the playing field is in contemporary science journals. Contributions that deny design, meaning and intelligent agency are given space, whereas proponents of design, meaning and intelligent agency are excluded (and told they have abandoned the scientific method). This is a good example of the tendency for "our minds to distort reality and to act foolishly"!

I haven't yet got a chance to read the book, but I expect that I will not find Linden's thesis persuasive, for two key reasons: Our universe itself shows enormous evidence of fine tuning, a fact admitted by so many great scientists that the speculation that there are arbitrarily large numbers of other, flopped universes is considered the only serious alternative. So there is no strong reason, apart from ideology, to doubt that life forms might also show evidence of design.

Second, if there were really a great deal of anachronistic junk in our brains (as opposed to systems that have changed their functions, for example, or systems that use workarounds), neurological disorders would be far more common than they actually are.

While we are here: There are several platforms in our brains, the newer built on the older, but it's best to be cautious of theses that attempt to derive major truths from this fact.

For example, years ago, I was willing to accept the idea that alligators could not feel emotion in the mammalian sense. Canada, after all, is not generously endowed with reptiles, so I don't deal with them on an everyday basis, as I deal with mammals and birds. But then I ran into a man who knew more about alligators than I would have thought possible. His job was tagging them for conservation research projects, and here's how he did it:

Using a headlight on my head, I can see the eye shine of an alligator several hundred meters on a dark night. I then call the alligator for a closer look by mimicking the alarm call of a baby alligator and make splashing sounds with my hand in the water. The sound is irresistible and the alligator swims toward the boat. If I am working in a new area I can usually call about 80% of the alligators close enough for their heads to hit the boat.

No one says alligators are especially clever, but it may be that they use the reptilian brain for things for which the mammal uses the mammalian brain, and that the differences are not as great as are sometimes thought. Anyway, I have become cautious abut reptile brain", "dinosaur brain", and "kludge brain" theses.

Free will and fruit flies And now hornets

If you have been following the recent findings on free will and fruit flies here and here, you'll enjoy Fred Reed's charming reflections on the behaviour of hornets (e.g., "A hornet has practically no brain, probably a few milligrams or some equally depressing amount. But consider what the dangerous little spike can do.") More seriously, he comments,

Today the language and modes of thought of computing dominate the biological sciences. One speaks of behavior as being genetically “programmed” or “hard-wired,” and of a brain’s “processing power,” of “integrating” information in “real time.” We are perhaps not always aware that we do this. When you think in terms of a particular scheme, you can begin seeing it where it isn’t, begin projecting it onto the world.

When I think of how the control of a hornet’s legs must work (except of course that it doesn’t have to work the way I believe it must), I think in terms of sensors of angle and force, of procedures to calculate this and that. Do hornets do it this way? Maybe not. Scientists as much as other people struggle to escape their preconceptions or, more usually, don’t struggle. Many don’t seem to know that they have preconceptions.

He also asks,

Now, add up all hornetary behavior, including a lot we haven’t touched on—communication between hornets, caring for the young, and so on—and ask how much more complex, if at all, is the behavior of whales, who have brains you could sleep in.

Actually, the relationship between brains and thinking (if the hornet thinks) isn't really very clear and I doubt whether computer analogies are really any help at all.

Brains are sites for thinking in those animals that have them. It doesn't follow that they are necessary for thinking. I am reminded of the claim that alligators cannot feel because they do not have a mammalian brain, and the response of a man who worked with alligators for years:

When I call alligators by making the grunting call of a young alligator it attracts alligators of all sizes. It is unclear if they are simply curious or if they will defend the young. It is akin to the alarm call a newborn calf will make where the entire herd will indeed come and defend the young one.

So perhaps the alligator uses something other than the mammalian brain to respond to the baby gator's alarm call? Clearly, we don't know the half of what we don't know.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Reptile brain: Even reptiles don't have one, or not exactly, anyway

In "Reptile Brain: Fight or flight response"(Nora Lockwood Tooher, Lawyers USA, April 13, 2009), we learn about the "fight or flight" response of the "reptile brain" (the part of the brain that humans share with reptiles), and how it might help in convincing juries.

It did not convince me, and I am scheduled for jury duty at some point. As I mentioned to a friend a few days ago, nothing to do with intelligence is ever that simple:

The only person I ever knew who knows a lot about reptiles – he has tagged many alligators for conservation research (which meant climbing into the water and wrestling with the big ones) – laughs at the concept of the reptilian brain.

Here are some things he told me:

Alligator cows behave pretty much the same way as mammal cows if their offspring are threatened. The offspring den with the mother for months or years and often ride around on her back. She may carry them in her mouth down to the water after they hatch, and she doesn’t swallow them.

So the reptile does not need a mammalian brain in order to have primal feelings.

Of course alligators are not especially smart, but how many mammals are? Every porcupine I have ever met has been intensely stupid. It’s easy to understand why. The porcupine spends most of his time alone up a tree, and his quills stand up when he is frightened on the ground. Intelligence would be wasted on him because he doesn’t have any problems that could be solved by intelligence.

The question of whether intelligence is needed could be an interesting concept in understanding the evolution of intelligence. It might help us understand why some birds are vastly more intelligent, in the sense humans understand, than other birds and most mammals, even though their brains are dissimilar to ours.

Of course, any such inquiry would raise issues for materialism.

My alligator-wrestling friend pointed out that the reason he won his fights with big alligators has nothing to do with superior intelligence but rather, the reptile is exothermic and therefore quickly exhausts his energy supply. A human is endothermic and therefore can fight for hours. So if the fight is over in minutes, the human will usually win, assuming he has not sustained a serious injury. And the reptile splashes back under water wearing a conservation tag or a radio tracker.

Fight or flight? Not necessarily, according to my friend. In his experience, alligators sometimes use a third option, they just reduce their metabolism to next to nothing. He actually witnessed that when he was tracking an alligator which he had outfitted with a collar that provides radio signals of metabolism. When his boat passed over the area where he knew the alligator had hidden itself, the signal suddenly declined to zero.

Of course, the alligator could not keep up a zero metabolism indefinitely, but it wouldn’t usually need to.

My researcher friend’s subsequent research showed that a number of reptiles and marsupial mammals could “freeze” in this way. The tactic is well known among Virginia opossums, of course.

I think real intelligence research would best blow clear of simplistic theories like the "reptilian brain." It is far easier to see the harm they could do than the good.

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 18: Can the ancient reptile brain help explain human psychology? If so, how? If not, why not?

(Note: Go here for Contest 16 ("Are materialist atheists smarter than other types of believers?") and here for Contest 17 ("Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion?"). )

We have, we are told, three brains - reptilian, mammalian, and primate. Here is a conventional science explanation, and here is the pop psychology that results.

It all sounds bit too neat to me, for two reasons: First, all the areas are interconnected, and second, it is not clear that reptiles uniformly fail emotionally compared to many mammals. See here, for example.

Honestly, it all sounds like pop psychology, straight from the airport paperback kiosk to the bored passenger. But I would be glad to know more. Here is a popularrendition of "reptile brain" theory, as employed by some lawyers in law courts.

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007), which argues for non-materialist neuroscience, answer this question: If so, how? If not, why not? What can it really tell us?

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 18 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Also, here are some posts at The Mindful Hack that may be of some use or interest:

Reptile brain: Even reptiles don't have one, or not exactly, anyway

Rooks in captivity show more feats using tools. [How come some birds are so smart and others are fairly stupid?]

Great majority of neuroscientists on wrong track?

Is your brain full of anachronistic junk?

Reptilian brain a barrier to investment?

Some fun You Tubes:

Training an alligator:



Alligators and crocodiles as parents





This one is not very funny at all - the alligator death roll - and is presented only as a caution:



Lots of people have died or suffered serious injuries trying to outsmart a crocodilian in a situation where the reptile is the expert.

Great majority of neuroscientists on wrong track?

Here's an interesting site: How the brain works sponsored by Eugene B. Shea.

Neuroscientists around the world are working day and night with their brain scans to analyze the activities of individual neurons and segments of the brain in hopes of learning how the brain works, and eventually, arriving at an understanding of human behavior.

[ ... ]

But since this article will take strong exception to the direction of their research, I must devote the following portion to explaining why I believe the great majority of cognitive neuroscientists and neuropsychologists are on the wrong track.

First however, I want to clearly and largely exempt Bernard J. Baars, Ph.D., and Nicole M. Gage, Ph.D. from my criticism, based on their marvelously lucid and carefully researched new textbook, Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness: Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Academic Press, 2007. Indeed, I am deeply indebted to them for much of the factual neuroscience cited in this article. I think every serious student of cognitive neuroscience should have a copy of this excellent book.

Shea is, I gather, just as impatient as Mario and I are of schlocky pop science theories of how the mind works.

Remember, your brain is like an ocean.

The problem is not that some theorist is wrong about what is in your brain. Rather, so much is in your brain that you should avoid giving his theories an unrealistic amount of attention.

Look at it this way: Suppose an oceanographer told us that his specialty is sea horses. In his view, we cannot understand the history of life - or even our own lives - without an intimate knowledge of sea horses.

Well, maybe - or maybe not.

Similarly, all theories of how the mind works may be true for at least some people some of the time, but probably none is true for everyone everywhere. And if the theorist thinks the mind an illusion or believes that it is some sort of material thing, well ... Anyway, I expect Shea has some good ideas.

He notes, while dismissing shallow theories,

Nor is there any validity to the “triune” nature of the brain, as composed of evolutionary development from reptilian to mammalian to primate brains. The so-called “reptilian brain” is not a brain at all, since it only represents a portion of the reptile brain, which is comprised, like ours, of brainstem, midbrain, and cortex. Nor, for the same reason, is the mammalian brain a brain. And as we shall see, our derogation of these so-called lizard and mammalian brains in favor of the cortex has led researchers to only a perfunctory analysis of their marvelous functions, without which we would be vegetables shortly before our demise.

Ah yes. I am glad he raised that topic.

I have not found any good evidence that reptiles are in principle incapable of emotion, as is often claimed. If you think that, please do not get in the way of a she-alligator nursing her eggs. She will behave exactly the same way as a she-bear nursing her cubs. It seems that, in these situations, the alligator uses the reptile brain the same way the bear uses the mammal brain: To drive off or kill the threat to her offspring. And if you think that that is not emotion, then you must commit yourself to the view that no animal ever shows emotion.

I wrote about the alligator's behaviour here, relying on the expertise of a man who knows a great deal about alligators.

See also: The unfeeling reptilian brain: Don't mess with its babies.