The Evolving Brain.

As a change from my normal blogs for the next week or so I'm going to post my personal PhD project about the brain. It's approach is to in a sense reverse engineer the brain's evolutionary process. Hope you like it.

Brain1 Introduction.

As we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s publication ‘The Origin of Species’, brain science is making massive strides forward. Though we acknowledge that we are the product of evolution and the survival of the fittest we rarely consider the development and nature of our brain and sensory system from this viewpoint. Though we are aware of our progress from crouching ape to standing man and of the brain’s long evolution before that, we rarely consider the inner evolution of the brain and how that evolution has formed and re-formed it over the millennia. It is the basis of our niche potential as an animal and it seems important that we explore how the necessities of evolution might have formed our brain’s function and capabilities.

            Where the physical sciences have their roots in first principles it is notable that the study of human behaviour has never taken that approach believing it too mechanistic to describe our complex, esoteric cognition and behaviour. I suggest our reaction is a form of defensiveness. Without thinking we see ourselves, our species, as not simply another animal but in a category of one, as perfectly capable but for our many individual weaknesses and foibles. Might it be though that we have intrinsic incapabilities?

            In these essays, though I accept the experiential programming of the brain is individual and infinitely variable, I am searching for the ‘first principles’ of its functionality as might have been formed by the necessities its our long evolution.

It is neither a neuroscience view nor that of evolutionary psychology but rather it stems from my education in maths/physics, art/design and my career as an innovator, and more recently training in numerous strands of therapy. It is I believe unique in being essentially an engineer’s approach. These essays will suggest our best option is to identify our intrinsic and universal incapabilities and work with them rather than assume all our failures are due to the weaknesses of individuals. One would never assume steel to be perfectly strong and conclude every structural failure was due to some local imperfection. Steel and our cognitive powers have very finite capabilities. 

Note. Though the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ is generally used I suggest it adds a certain misleading colour to our understanding. I suggest it’s more accurate to say the ‘proliferation of the best adapted.’ Only when the best adapted proliferates and becomes dominant do the less well-adapted struggle to survive. Taking this alternative phrase the emphasis is on adaptation rather than fitness and proliferation rather than survival.