
Every so often something exquisitely stupid turns up, something worth celebrating on that account:
From ScienceDaily:
A new scientific study puts the final nail in the coffin of a long-standing theory to explain human’s remarkable cognitive abilities: that human evolution involved the selective expansion of the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
It does so by determining that the prefrontal region of the brain which orchestrates abstract thinking, complex planning and ecision making contains the same proportion of neurons and fills the same relative volume in non-human primates as it does
in humans.
“People need to drop the idea that the human brain is exceptional,” said Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who directed the study. “Our brain is basically a primate brain. Because it is the largest primate brain, it does have one distinctive feature: It has the highest number of cortical neurons of any primate. Humans have 16 billion compared with 9 billion in gorillas and orangutans and six-to-seven billion in chimpanzees. It is remarkable, but it is not exceptional.”More. (public access) – Mariana Gabi, Kleber Neves, Carolinne Masseron, Pedro F. M. Ribeiro, Lissa Ventura-Antunes, Laila Torres, Bruno Mota, Jon H. Kaas, Suzana Herculano-Houzel. No relative expansion of the number of prefrontal neurons in primate and human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016; 201610178 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1610178113
So if we could jack up the primates’ neurons they would become smart like humans?
The main thing to see is that Herculano-Houzel herself cannot possibly believe this bunk. She is forced to cough it out. This will not end well.
See also: Are apes entering the Stone Age?
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Duh! Of course not!
There’s nothing exceptional in biology.
All scientists can show is just a bunch of intriguingly/surprisingly unexpected discoveries in their research.
That’s all.
🙂
as to:
Well actually, our brain is basically a bird brain 🙂
As to
You would have to be brain dead to think the human brain is ‘ordinary’ 🙂
When was ‘The Skeptical Zone” launched?
That Darwinists have no clue how the human brain, or any other brain, achieves its ‘form’ is made evident by the following experiment:
Moreover, like ‘form’, functionality is also a ‘top-down’ affair. i.e. Functionality is NOT determined by ‘bottom up’ material particulars as was envisioned in Darwinian, reductive materialism, thought:
Supplemental notes:
nEWS. Wait a minute. is this thread saying the human brain is exceptional?
I welcome this study. it helps get rid of ideas about brain power of people bring in this section or that.
As a christian i insist humans think with the soul/heart. no brain is important except as a memory machine.
So we do have exactly, i think, the same brain power as primates. Or rhinos.
Our thinking is in oir immaterial soul just as it was for jesus. Jesus brain was not exceptional. However his soul was God.
all these lights and flashes in the brain are memory connections i’m sure.
Important but not the source of intelligence.