The Evolution of the Human Brain :: Biology Essays Research Papers

The Evolution of the Human BrainAlthough my previous autodinal papers concerned the interplay between neurobiology and genetics, I have not kind of worked the issue out to my satisfaction nor to the depth which I think the number warrants. Therefore, I will over again tackle this complex set of biologic questions pertaining to the ways in which our genes shape our brains. My first paper dealt with the nature-nurture debate and its carnal knowledge to the brain-behavior problem raised in class. Then, in the second paper, I move on to a narrower issue in neurogenetics I wrote about sparse X Syndrome and the ways in which a specific genetic renewing can drastically change behavioral output. I would now corresponding to enlarge the scope of this outlook on genes and the brain to encompass the bailiwick of the ontogeny of the human brain. Throughout the semester, as we covered sensory arousal and motor output, a single neuron and complex motor symphonies, car sickness and dr eaming, I have left class wondering how are these behaviors, from the micro-actions of a neuron to the macro-actions of a human being, adaptive? How did large brains and gigantic nervous systems come to be selected for? And why have humans, alone, acquired them? Some aspects of these questions calculate to reside in the realm of the paleontologists, others, in the realm of the neurogeneticists. They do, however, seem to me to be central to neurobiology. For it is drilled into us that form connotes function, and, perhaps, if we come to understand how and why the human nervous system was formed, we will have a richer reason of how and why it functions as it does.The work and thoughts of Richard Dawkins, author of The selfish Gene, have been utilizable to me in working out the issues of my previous papers, and I will again employ his theory that people are merely survival machines for the genes they carry. This is, I think, a logical argument with which to begin a discussion of t he evolution of the brain, as it reduces evolutionary processes down to the bare bones of living things, that demand material human genes and the DNA comprising them. This viewpoint excludes the complicated semi-philosophical questions pertaining to consciousness, higher thought, and the Self experienced by human beings via their neural processing it primarily addresses the good to human beings of the inordinately large organ contained within the skull.