Monday, June 7, 2010

Origins of the Left & Right Brain

A recent Scientific American article (July, 2009) explains the evolutionary roots of your right and left brain. The article, written by three evolutionists, explains that it was once thought that the hemispheric specialization of our brain (e.g., language in the left hemisphere, spatial thinking in the right hemisphere) evolved in our hominid ancestors, over the past few million years. But it now appears to have evolved orders of magnitude farther back in time. Why the half a billion year change? Mainly because of the accumulation of evidence of hemispheric specialization in a wide array of species. "So what" you ask?

If you want to make sense of the evolution genre you must understand that when similarities are discovered between species, evolutionists will think the similarities must have come from a common ancestor. (Unless, that is, if the arrangement would violate other similarities, which, much to the evolutionist's chagrin, often seems to be the case). If hemispheric specialization is found in different species, then it must have derived from their common ancestor, which takes us back to about half a billions years ago.

For instance, right-handedness has been found in various primates. Amazingly, yet true to form, the evolutionists claim that this clearly suggests "that human right-handedness descended from that of earlier primates."

Next add hemispheric specialization findings in birds, the sea lion, and in other species, and evolutionists must conclude that such profound complexity dates back to the early branches of the evolutionary tree. As the authors write:

Here we present evidence for a radically different hypothesis that is gaining support, particularly among biologists. The specialization of each hemisphere in the human brain, we argue, was already present in its basic form when vertebrates emerged about 500 million years ago.

This is a common trend, and today evolutionists must believe that incredibly complex designs mysteriously arose in the earliest stages of evolution.

But what about those species that contradict the hemispheric specializations? That authors admit:

Little is universal in nature, though, and in some animals a vocal response to highly emotional circumstances has also been linked to the left brain, not--as one might expect--to the right. ... But those animals may be expections.

This is another common problem for evolution. Evolutionists try to organize the species by their differences and similarities, but the divisions never really work. Neighboring species have profound differences and distant species share profound similarities. The species do not naturally form an evolutionary tree. Evolution's solution to this dilemma is to count the cooperative comparisons as indicative of evolutionary history, and the non cooperative comparisons as "noise" or "anomalies." True to form, the evolutionists describe the contradictions to their hemispheric specialization groupings as "exceptions."

As is typical of the evolution genre, the article is packed with just-so stories, and baseless hypotheticals. Here are few examples:

In early vertebrates such a division of labor probably got its start when one or the other hemisphere developed a tendency to take control in particular circumstances ... In all vertebrate classes ... animals tend to retain what was probably an ancestral bias toward the use of the right side in the routine activity of feeding ...

The syllable may have evolved as a by-product of the alternate raising (consonant) and lowering (vowel) of the mandible, a behavior already well established for chewing, sucking and licking. A series of these mouth cycles, produced as lip smacks, may have begun to serve among early humans as communication signals, just as they do to this day among many other primates.

Somewhat later the vocalizing capabilities of the larynx could have paired with the communicative lip smacks to form spoken syllables.

The article ends with a classic tautology, with otherwise straightforward observations gratuitously ascribed to evolution:

For example, one would expect schooling fish to have evolved mostly uniform turning preferences, the better to remain together as a school. Solitary fish, in contrast, would probably vary randomly in their turning preferences, because they have little need to swim together. This is in fact the case.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

19 comments:

  1. Cornelius Hunter: This is another common problem for evolution. Evolutionists try to organize the species by their differences and similarities, but the divisions never really work. Neighboring species have profound differences and distant species share profound similarities. The species do not naturally form an evolutionary tree.

    That is simply not a tenable position with regards to most taxa of interest. This has been posted before, but is relevant here.

    The nested hierarchy allows us to make empirical predictions. If you have an organism with mammary glands, we can predict it will have a complex eukaryote cell structure with organelles, ingest other organisms for nourishment, have bilateral symmetry, integument, an alimentary canal, a bony head at one end with an array of sense organs, vertebrae protecting a nerve cord, jaws, ribs, four limbs during at least at some stage of life, neck, neocortex, endothermic, internal fertilization, four-chambered heart, lungs with alveoli and a muscular diaphragm, two eyes, three ear bones in each of two ears, hair or at least hair follicles at some stage of life, sebaceous glands, most will have heterodont dentition, etc.

    All that from teats. It's not a trivial correlation, but one of the most important patterns in biology.

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  2. Cornelius,
    You said:

    'But what about those species that contradict the hemispheric specializations? This is another common problem for evolution. Evolutionists try to organize the species by their differences and similarities, but the divisions never really work.'.....'True to form, the evolutionists describe the contradictions to their hemispheric specialization groupings as "exceptions."'

    I don't see your point, especially as there is no link to the original article and you're not providing any examples. Could you please do this so that I can see where you're coming from? Thank you.
    Ian

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  3. With another argument like this I'm starting to think CH is really a clever deep-cover Poe, doing his best to show how creationists are all brain-damaged nincompoops.

    Oops! Hope I haven't blown his cover.

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  4. CH: "But what about those species that contradict the hemispheric specializations?"

    Can you provide examples?

    CH: "As is typical of the evolution genre, the article is packed with just-so stories, and hypotheticals."

    What's wrong with hypotheticals? It's quite clear the article is speculative, but isn't there a place for that in science? Didn't a lot of what we now consider solid science start off as hypotheticals?

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  5. Ian:

    ====
    I don't see your point, especially as there is no link to the original article and you're not providing any examples. Could you please do this so that I can see where you're coming from? Thank you.
    ====

    I added a couple of quotes from the article to help illustrate. I may add more later, but the greater point I wanted to make is that this is the typical pattern. Initial evolutionary expectations don't work, the theory becomes increasingly circuitous and complex to fit the uncooperative data, just-so stories abound, and so forth.

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  6. Dr. Hunter,

    Why don't you ever blog about the evidence itself? Why do you always choose "sources" so far removed from the evidence, and why do you choose quotations over the evidence?

    And more importantly, if you understand biology better than we biologists understand biology, why are you blogging instead of doing biology?

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  7. Dr. Hunter, you wrote:
    "I added a couple of quotes from the article to help illustrate. I may add more later, but the greater point I wanted to make is that this is the typical pattern."

    How do a couple of quotes from a Scientific American article show that anything is typical?

    In the post, you wrote:
    "If you want to make sense of the evolution genre you must understand that when similarities are discovered between species, evolutionists will think the similarities must have come from a common ancestor."

    If you want to make sense of the creationist/ID genre you must understand that nested hierarchies must always be blown off as mere similarities.

    "(Unless, that is, if the arrangement would violate other similarities, which, much to the evolutionist's chagrin, often seems to be the case)."

    Yet "evolutionists" study superimposable nested hierarchies, which you deride as mere "similarity" because you can't explain them.

    "This is another common problem for evolution. Evolutionists try to organize the species by their differences and similarities, but the divisions never really work."

    That's pretty funny coming from someone who is afraid to discuss the nested hierarchy of a protein family that extends across multiple phyla.

    "Neighboring species have profound differences and distant species share profound similarities. The species do not naturally form an evolutionary tree."

    Yes, they do. That's what we find again and again, mathematically, with the sequence evidence.

    That's why you misrepresent these nested hierarchies as nothing more than "similarity."

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  8. True to form, the evolutionists describe the contradictions to their hemispheric specialization groupings as "exceptions."

    Well, yeah… if they're in the minority, than "exceptions" is what they are.

    I find it hard to imagine that Mr. Hunter would find it more reasonable if the emotional-left-brain animals were classified as the "norm", and the majority of species as the "exception".

    That said, perhaps in the fullness of time, we will discover that our sort of brain is the minority model. It wouldn't somehow blow things out of the water, any more than our "exceptional" hairlessness and taillessness (both of which have clear hairy and taily antecedents) do.

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  9. First, as far as "incredibly complex designs" emerging at the very start of evolution, half a billion years ago was about three billion years after the first appearance of life on Earth. How long it was after the first multicellular organisms, or the first bilaterally symmetric animals, or the first nerves, or the first central nervous systems, is not clear. But the appearance of distinct brain hemispheres or specialization of those hemispheres is not an extraordinary advance in complexity beyond that of bilaterally symmetric organisms with nervous systems in the first place.

    Second, brain lateralization is not uniform in humans. A significant minority of left-handers, for example, have either right-brain control over speech or have speech functions distributed through both hemispheres. The degree to which functions are specialized between the hemispheres differs from one person to another. I would doubt that this is unique to humans; it implies the existence of variation that would be subject to natural selection or genetic drift (i.e. it would be perfectly possible for a species to reverse brain lateralization as it evolved, however rare that might be).

    Third, given that evolutionary theory attributes complex features to natural selection, one might suppose that some, adaptive, similarities would arise convergently through similar selective pressures acting on mutations with similar effects. Homologies (similarities explained by evolutionists as inherited from common ancestors with the feature) have been recognized and defined since before Darwinism (cf. Richard Owen's definition) as detailed similarity of parts beyond that required for similarity of function.

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  10. Steven J:

    =====
    First, as far as "incredibly complex designs" emerging at the very start of evolution, half a billion years ago was about three billion years after the first appearance of life on Earth. How long it was after the first multicellular organisms, or the first bilaterally symmetric animals, or the first nerves, or the first central nervous systems, is not clear. But the appearance of distinct brain hemispheres or specialization of those hemispheres is not an extraordinary advance in complexity beyond that of bilaterally symmetric organisms with nervous systems in the first place.
    ========

    Sorry, that paragraph:

    ---
    This is a common trend, and today evolutionists must believe that incredibly complex designs mysteriously arose in the earliest stages of evolution.
    ---

    was not in reference to the sides of the brain, but rather to the many complexities (eg, photosynthesis) that must have arose at earlier stages of evolutionary history.

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  11. Smokey says:
    "And more importantly, if you understand biology better than we biologists understand biology, why are you blogging instead of doing biology? "

    And most importantly if I, as a practicing electrical engineer, were to have to read on a regular basis, technical papers filled with phrases "just might be ...", "could have ...", "may have evolved ...", I think I would, after a few decades of this, be too frustrated to refer to my field as a science anymore. And maybe try to find another way of thinking.

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  12. MSEE said...

    "And most importantly if I, as a practicing electrical engineer, were to have to read on a regular basis, technical papers filled with phrases "just might be ...", "could have ...", "may have evolved ...", I think I would, after a few decades of this, be too frustrated to refer to my field as a science anymore. And maybe try to find another way of thinking.


    Since you apparently don't understand that all scientific conclusions are tentative to a degree, it's a good thing you didn't pick science as a career.

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  13. said by Thorton "all scientific conclusions are tentative to a degree"

    So evolution is not a fact, is just a tentative hypotesis.

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  14. Blas said...

    said by Thorton "all scientific conclusions are tentative to a degree"

    So evolution is not a fact, is just a tentative hypotesis.


    More equivocation over fact and theory.

    evolution fact - the ample evidence for common ancestry and descent with modification.

    evolution theory - the explanation for the evidence described above.

    evolution theory is the tentative although extremely well supported scientific conclusion and is subject to falsification.

    Why can't any of you guys grasp the simple difference?

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  15. Thornton enlightens us:

    Since you apparently don't understand that all scientific conclusions are tentative to a degree ...

    Wow. I must say that Maxwell's tentative equations have nevertheless exhibited revolutionary implications over tha last 150 years. And for a demonstration of (electrical engineer) Shannon's tentative Information Theory, take a trip to your WiFi hotspot. To believe the tentative Darwinian RMNS has equivalent applicability is just laughable. To think that is has ANY applicability OR demonstrated implication OR utility is to think of a good joke.

    it's a good thing you didn't pick science as a career.

    Quite an assuption there friend. If engineering isn't applied science in your mind, then maybe you don't know that virtually every practicing physicist in this country is a member of IEEE. Here you go, have at it, use whatever science is at your command to critique or refute my thesis in progress: http://www.posterwall.com/blog_attachment.php?attachmentid=863&d=1271776388

    You may be able to help me out here, seriously.

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  16. MSEE wrote: Quite an assuption there friend. If engineering isn't applied science in your mind, then maybe you don't know that virtually every practicing physicist in this country is a member of IEEE.

    I doubt it. This practicing physicist is not a member of IEEE, even though he works on topics in applied magnetism.

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  17. Thorton

    What you correctly call facts, do not support the theory, they are explained by the theory.

    Why can't any of you guys grasp the simple difference?

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  18. Blas said...

    Thorton

    What you correctly call facts, do not support the theory, they are explained by the theory.

    Why can't any of you guys grasp the simple difference?


    If the theory explains the facts in a logical and consilient manner then by definition the facts support the theory.

    Can't any of you goobers do anything but cough up these putrid rhetorical arguments?

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  19. MSEE said...

    Wow. I must say that Maxwell's tentative equations have nevertheless exhibited revolutionary implications over tha last 150 years. And for a demonstration of (electrical engineer) Shannon's tentative Information Theory, take a trip to your WiFi hotspot. To believe the tentative Darwinian RMNS has equivalent applicability is just laughable. To think that is has ANY applicability OR demonstrated implication OR utility is to think of a good joke.


    Maybe you better tell that to NASA. Their Evolvable Systems Group has been using evolutionary based genetic algorithms to design things like analog circuit boards and antennas for years.

    NASA Evolvable Systems Group

    Besides using standard RMNS type algorithms, they have also begun using coevolutionary algorithms to solve particulary knotty problems:

    Coevolutionary Algorithms

    Cooperation and competition between populations of organisms in nature has inspired researchers to incorporate coevolutionary dynamics into genetic algorithms. The common element in these approaches is the inclusion of one or more additional populations. A growing body of research explores coevolutionary approaches that capitalize on this dynamic quality.

    We have implemented a coevolutionary genetic algorithm (CGA) based on an algorithm used in previous evolvable hardware applications, and one that is based on competition between two populations. The population of candidate solutions, or trial population, is represented and manipulated much the same as the main population in a standard genetic algorithm. The second population, or target population, consists of target objective vectors (TOVs), vectors containing targets for the individual objectives to be optimized.


    How does that foot taste?

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