Month: September 2022

ON HUMANS AND PRIMATES. “The finding that the same cellular scaling rules apply to humans and non-anthropoid primate brains alike, irrespective of body size, indicates that the brains of the great apes, which diverged from the hominin lineage before humans, should also conform to the same cellular scaling rules.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

RELATED SCALING. “An examination of the cellular composition of the cerebellum of orangutans and one gorilla shows that the sizes of the cerebellum and cerebral cortex predicted for these species from the number of cells in the cerebellum match their actual sizes, which suggests that the brain of these animals indeed is built according to the same scaling rules that apply to humans and other primates.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

MIND BODY DICOTOMY. “In view of the discrepant relationship between body and brain size in humans, great apes, and non-anthropoid primates, these findings suggest that the rules that apply to scaling primate brains are much more conserved than those that apply to scaling the body.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

BODY SIZE ERROR. “This raises the possibility that mass and body mass across species are only correlated, rather than brain mass being determined by body mass, as presumed in studies that focus on the variation of residuals after regression onto body size.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

NAIL IN THE PROVERBIAL. “The different cellular scaling rules that apply to rodents and primates strongly indicate that it is not valid to use brain size as a proxy for number of neurons across humans, whales, elephants and other large-brained species belonging to different mammalian orders.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

DEATH OF EXCEPTIONALISM. “One consequence of this realization is that sheer size alone, or in relation to body size, is not an adequate parameter to qualify, or disqualify, the human brain as “special”.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

MORE THAN MASS. “To conclude that the human brain is a linearly scaled-up primate brain, with just the expected number of neurons for a primate brain of its size, is not to state that it is the cognitive abilities of non-human primates and other large-brained animals progress, it becomes increasingly likely that humans do not have truly unique cognitive abilities, and hence must differ from these animals not qualitatively, but rather in the combination and extent of abilities such as theory of mind, imitation and social cognition.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

THE REAL MEASURE. “Quantitative changes in the neuronal composition of the brain could therefore be a main driving force that, through the exponential combination of processing units, and therefore of computational abilities, leads to events that may look like “jumps” in the evolution of brains and intelligence.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/ View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this journey into the arcane discussion of whose brain is bigger, and the vain search for evidence of human exceptionalism. Nature teaches us that natural diversity is enormous and there are Bell Curves in most things, but more, that exceptionalism of a single species is conflated nonsense, coming from a long tradition of being at the center of the universe, and at the top of the ladder of being. View in LinkedIn