News article: Primate brains follow predictable development pattern: reported 10/8/13
News article excerpt: “This trend argues against the view that specific human mutations gave us these larger areas and advanced cognition and behaviour…”
My comment: Finally, someone else has said that, and it’s been said in the respected Journal of Neuroscience. Now, the idea that specific human mutations gave us our larger brain areas, our advanced cognition, or that mutations contributed to primate-species differences in anything whatsoever, can be examined in the context of mutation-driven evolution in other species. It can then be compared in the context of the ecological, social, neurogenic, and socio-cognitive niche construction. For example, no experimental evidence supports the idea that mutations are fixed in the genome, which means they cannot contribute to natural selection that results in population-wide differences in phenotype. However, all four levels of niche construction are nutrient-dependent and nutrients are obviously required for the evolution of the human brain.
In all species, nutrient uptake is enabled by the de novo creation of olfactory receptor genes. Creation of these receptors allows nutrients to enter microbial cells, which enables the epigenetic effects of olfactory/pheromonal input to alter nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled transposable element evolution. The epigenetic effects on these transposable elements cause genome evolution. Organism level genome evolution should never have been attributed to mutations in the context of natural selection. Furthermore, the idea that the human brain mutated into existence should have been scoffed at. Proponents of mutation-driven evolution should have long ago been driven from the ranks of academia. Instead, they have been allowed to achieve tenure. Their tenured positions have enabled them to continue to tout nonsensical theory despite the accumulation of biological facts that have continued to refute the nonsense of mutation-driven evolution. See for an accurate representation of what is currently known about evolution: Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology.
Journal article: A Conserved Pattern of Differential Expansion of Cortical Areas in Simian Primates published 9/18/13
Journal article except: “…concerted evolution… proposes that the non-uniform scaling of neural structures derives primarily from the application of a common developmental program to species with different brain and body sizes. For example, according to one of the best-supported models, late-developing structures tend to become disproportionally large in larger species.”
My comment: The common developmental program of brain development can be traced across species: Olfaction and odor receptors provide a clear evolutionary trail that can be followed from unicellular organisms to insects to humans.” For example, the behavior of brainless unicellular yeasts is nutrient-dependent and reproduction is pheromone-controlled. However, the conserved molecular mechanisms that enable one signaling pathway for receptor-mediated nutrient uptake to regulate a second signaling pathway that controls receptor-mediated reproduction in species from microbes to man provides insight into how cells and organisms integrate environmental stimuli. That integration allows organisms to produce a thermodynamically controlled coordinated response that requires organism-level thermoregulation of protein biosynthesis and degradation in Deep Lake at -20 C, or in hydrothermal vents more than 100 degrees hotter.
Journal article conclusion: “…it has been acknowledged that some of the variation in the relationships between the volume of specific central nervous system structures (including cortical areas) and overall brain volume is likely to be attributable to other factors, which may include postnatal plasticity that is mediated by environmental interactions.”
