The Wiley Handbook of Evolutionary Neuroscience

Stephen V. Shepherd

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781119264781
  9781119994695
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118316573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie cognitive et cognition

Comprehensive and authoritative, The Wiley Handbook of Evolutionary Neuroscience unifies the diverse strands of an interdisciplinary field exploring the evolution of brains and cognition.

• A comprehensive reference that unifies the diverse interests and approaches associated with the neuroscientific study of brain evolution and the emergence of cognition
• Tackles some of the biggest questions in neuroscience including what brains are for, what factors constrain their biological development, and how they evolve and interact
• Provides a broad and balanced view of the subject, reviewing both vertebrate and invertebrate anatomy and emphasizing their shared origins and mechanisms
• Features contributions from highly respected scholars in their fields 

1
The Brain Evolved to Guide Action

Michael Anderson and Anthony Chemero

1.1 Introduction

In the 19th century, major movements in both psychology and neuroscience were profoundly influenced by Darwin. William James argued for a view of psychology which ultimately came to be known as functionalism; in neuroscience, Herbert Spencer and Santiago Ramon y Cajal argued that we needed to study the mind and brain as adaptations to the environment. In both cases, this evolutionary approach forced a focus on the role of the brain in action guidance. These approaches were revived at the end of the 20th century in the form of embodied cognitive science, which focuses on the importance of action in understanding cognition. Embodied cognitive science calls for an understanding of the brain as having evolved initially for perception and action. It suggests that even complex cognitive abilities such as language and reasoning will use neural resources which initially evolved to guide action. We close by providing evidence that this is, in fact, how the human brain evolved.

1.2 William James and the Functionalist Tradition

In the Principles of Psychology (1890), William James described a plan of research for psychology that put front and center both the brain and evolution by natural selection. In the introductory chapter, James contrasted his approach with that of prior (nonscientific) psychologists by pointing out the necessity of the brain for the existence of any experience at all.

The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct.

(James, 1890, p. 4)

Modern psychologists of the late 19th century, James wrote, had to be “cerebralists” (p. 5). At the same time, however, James felt that psychology could not be only about the brain.

it will be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. The ideas and feelings, e.g., which these present printed characters excite in the reader's mind not only occasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements of articulation in him, but will some day make him speak, or take sides in a discussion, or give advice, or choose a book to read, differently from what would have been the case had they never impressed his retina. Our psychology must therefore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.

(James, 1890, p. 5)

Focusing on the brain as the “immediate bodily condition” of the mind, then, required that we understand the brain in light of its (eventual) connections to actions that we engage in.

This last point is a consequence of Darwin’s influence on James. Following Herbert Spencer (1855), James thought the purpose of the mind is to adapt to us to the environment. As Spencer put it:

The fundamental condition of vitality, is, that the internal order shall be continually adjusted to the external order. If the internal order is altogether unrelated to the external order, there can be no adaptation between the actions going on in the organism and those going on in its environment: and life becomes impossible.

(Spencer, 1855: §173)

Such adaptation occurs only via action that adjusts the body so that it fits in with the world. Thus, for James, the subject matter of psychology had to be every aspect of our mental life, understood in the context of how it adapts us to the environment. It is this feature of Jamesian psychology that led him and his followers to be condescendingly called functionalists (Titchener, 1898), because they believed that the way to do psychology was to understand thoughts, habits, emotions, etc. in terms of their adaptive function. Because James was a cerebralist, the same has to be true of the parts of the brain that are these thoughts’, habits’, and emotions’ “immediate bodily conditions”. Indeed, Chapter 2 of the Principles is called “The Functions of the Brain.”

James’s combination of functionalism and cerebralism, then, committed him to specific views concerning the evolution of the brain. To understand consciousness, for example, would be to understand how consciousness adapts an animal to its environment. But this adaptation to the environment can only be understood in terms of the other aspects of the animal’s life right now, over developmental time, and over phylogenetic time.

It is very generally admitted, though the point would be hard to prove, that consciousness grows the more complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom. That of a man must exceed that of an oyster. From this point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the other organs which maintain the animal in the struggle for existence; and the presumption of course is that it helps him in some way in the struggle, just as they do. But it cannot help him without being in some way efficacious and influencing the course of his bodily history.

(James 1890, p. 138)

Brains evolved to guide adaptive action, and human‐specific actions must result from evolutionary “superaddition” on to the abilities of human ancestors.

Jamesian functionalism and cerebralism were the dominant views in American psychology for roughly the first half of the 20th century, up until the cognitive revolution. The counterpart view in the neurosciences was not so long‐lived.

1.3 Ramon y Cajal’s Functionalist Neuroscience

Like James, Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal was influenced by Spencer’s evolutionary approach to understanding brain and behavior. Spencer argued that one had to approach the investigation of life and mind taking fundamental principles into account: First was the primacy of adaptation, the continual adjustment of inner to outer conditions. Second was a principle of growth and development, whereby both an organism’s repertoire of responses and the biological structures supporting them increase in number, diversity, and complexity. Organisms evolve and develop by becoming at one and the same time more differentiated and more integrated or coordinated in both structure and behavior. It is from these parallel developments (and not from either acting alone) that the increasing complexity of organisms emerges over time.

In the progress from an eye that appreciates only the difference between light and darkness, to one which appreciates degrees of difference between them, and afterwards to one which appreciates differences of colour and degrees of colour—in the progress from the power of distinguishing a few strongly contrasted smells or tastes, to the power of distinguishing an infinite variety of slightly contrasted smells or tastes … in all those cases which present merely a greater ability to discriminate between varieties of the same simple phenomenon; there is increase in the speciality of the correspondence without increase in its complexity… But where the stimulus responded to, consists, not of a single sensation but of several; or where the response is not one action but a group of actions; the increase in speciality of correspondence results from an increase in its complexity.

(Spencer 1855: §154)

Finally, there was the principle of continuity, which stated that new developments emerge from, build upon, and (partly) preserve what came before. This implied not just that organisms can be arrayed on a biological and psychological continuum, with many differences in degree but few fundamental discontinuities between the mental powers of “higher” and “lower” organisms, but also that, within each organism, the higher mental faculties develop from and rest upon the foundations of the lower. As Robert Wozniak commented:

The implications of these evolutionary conceptions … are clear. The brain is the most highly developed physical system we know and the cortex is the most developed level of the brain. As such, it must be heterogeneous, differentiated, and complex. Furthermore, if the cortex is a continuous development from sub‐cortical structures, the sensory‐motor principles that govern sub‐cortical localization must hold in the cortex as well. Finally, if higher mental processes are the end product of a continuous process of development from the simplest irritation through reflexes and instincts, there is no justification for drawing a sharp distinction between mind and body. The mind/body dichotomy that for two centuries had supported the notion that the cerebrum, functioning as the seat of higher mental processes, must function according to principles radically different from those descriptive of sub‐cerebral nervous function, had to be abandoned.

(Wozniak, 1992)

Ramon y Cajal took Spencer’s principles to heart, and clearly saw them reflected in the neural structur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Brain Evolved to Guide Action
• 2 The Evolution of Evolutionary Neuroscience
• 3 Approaches to the Study of Brain Evolution
• 4 Intraneuronal Computation
• 5 The Evolution of Neurons
• 6 The First Nervous System
• 7 Fundamental Constraints on the Evolution of Neurons
• 8 The Central Nervous System of Invertebrates
• 9 Nervous System Architecture in Vertebrates
• 10 Neurotransmission—Evolving Systems
• 11 Neural Development in Invertebrates
• 12 Forebrain Development in Vertebrates
• 13 Brain Evolution and Development
• 14 Comparative Aspects of Learning and Memory
• 15 Brain Evolution, Development, and Plasticity
• 16 Neural Mechanisms of Communication
• 17 Social Coordination
• 18 Social Learning, Intelligence, and Brain Evolution
• 19 Reading Other Minds
• Index
• End User License Agreement