Principles of Brain Evolution

by Georg F. Striedter

Brain evolution is a complex weave of species similarities and differences, bound by diverse rules or principles. This book is a detailed examination of these principles, using data from a wide array of vertebrates but minimizing technical details and terminology. It is written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and more senior scientists who already know something about "the brain," but want a deeper understanding of how diverse brains evolved.

The book opens with a brief history of evolutionary neuroscience, then introduces the various groups of vertebrates and their major brain regions. The core of the text what aspects of brain organization are conserved across the vertebrates; how brains and bodies changed in size as vertebrates evolved; how individual brain regions tend to increase or decrease in size; how regions can become structurally more (or less) complex; and how neuronal circuitry evolves. A central theme emerges from these chapters--that evolutionary changes in brain size tend to correlate with many other aspects of brain structure and function, including the proportional size of individual brain regions, their complexity, and their neuronal connections. To explain these correlations, the book delves into rules of brain development and asks how changes in brain structure impact function and behavior. The two penultimate chapters demonstrate the application of these rules, focusing on how mammal brains
diverged from other brains and how Homo sapiens evolved a very large and "special" brain.

Genres: Neuroscience, Evolution, Science, Nonfiction, Psychology, Textbooks, Biology

436 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2004

Reviews

[Reenie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A seriously, seriously amazing book, which sadly very few people, even among neuroscientists, are ever going to read, even though pretty much all of them should. It's funny how easy it is to forget about evolution when studying biology, or to take the concept and whore it out for whatever fits for a particular line of argument without thinking too hard or in a good comparative manner about things.

Comparative studies of brains were very popular around the time people started seriously studying neuroanatomy (1880s and 90s), but got off to a pretty bad start with fitting a bunch of inconclusive data into theories of how brains were increasingly added onto and 'perfected' with mammals. That idea has weirdly managed to both badly discredit comparative neurobiology as a field and still become massively pervasive in 'general knowledge' in ways that screw up normal thinking.

So this book is a brilliant primer on better ways to think about the diversity of vertebrate brains that exist in the world today, the fact that they are all descended from the same ancestral bauplan (-why are German words so much more awesome at describing biological ideas?-) but have become specialised over and over again in multiple different, but often convergent ways. There's a nice mix of detailed examples (who knew that goldfish have localised taste perception on their tongues like we do with our sight?) and distillation of some general principles, and some great analysis and discussion of arguments in the literature.

All around, really very awesome.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

very, very good overview.

[Lakmus]

*skimmed*

After reading the first couple of introductory chapters that went over the history of comparative neuroanatomy and such, which was useful, the rest was mostly long lists of brain parts and types of cells and just a lot of painful detail to display either some possible principle (or pattern, rather) in brain evolution or to illustrate a story of what we think happened in this or that case of evolution.

Predictably, this whole thing boils down to the typical case in biology and every other living-organisms-based science: there are some general patterns that apply sometimes but not always, usually interacting in complex ways with each other, that we can use to explain existing cases but not really predict anything because it's a goddamn mess. Complex systems are really a bitch to study, it's all downhill from swinging your good ole pendulum and rolling balls down a plank, no offense to physics intended.

[Yibei · Rating 3 out of 5]

The explanation of brain size comparison is impressive. That is to say, we should consider both the absolute brain size and the relative brain size.
Also, think about homology. I remember that we had a similar discussion on comparison in the Ancient Greek Mythology class. The professor threw the question that why we want to find the similarity among all those myths? What is the goal of getting similarities out of two things? So that we can understand their differences better? It's a worth digging question.

[Daniel Toker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good book - every neuroscientist should read this.