Principles Of Brain Evolution

by Striedter, Georg F.

• ISBN13: 9780878938209
• ISBN10: 0878938206
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-20
• Publisher: Sinauer Associates is an imprint of Oxford University Press

Summary

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 explores: 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.

Author Biography

Georg Striedter is Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. He received his undergraduate training at Cornell University and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1990. Most of his early research focused on the evolution of various functionally interesting pathways in fish brains. He then went on to study avian brains as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Specifically, he studied how and why parrot brains are specialized for imitating sounds. Dr. Striedter continued this work as a faculty member at UC Irvine and broadened it to include questions about how avian brains differ from those of other vertebrates in terms of structure, function and development. In 1998, he received the C. J. Herrick Award for his contributions to comparative neuroanatomy.

Table of Contents

Evolutionary Neuroscience: This Book's Scope and Ambition	p. 1
The Book's Scope and Major Themes	p. 7
Philosophical Preamble	p. 14
A History of Comparative Neurobiology	p. 19
The Birth of Comparative Neuroanatomy	p. 20
Darwin's Time: The Owen-Huxley Debate	p. 23
The Era of Comparative Cytoarchitectonics	p. 29
Comparative Hodology and Histochemistry	p. 33
The Rise of Neurocladistics	p. 37
The Rejuvenation of Comparative Neuroembryology	p. 45
Conclusions	p. 49
Conservation in Vertebrate Brains	p. 51
A "Who's Who" of Vertebrates	p. 53
Comparing Adult Brains	p. 63
Adult brain regions	p. 65
Adult cell types	p. 70
Neuron-typical molecules	p. 73
Comparing Embryonic Brains	p. 77
The neuromeric model	p. 81
Criticisms of the neuromeric model	p. 84
Mapping Embryos onto Adults	p. 88
Conclusions	p. 90
Evolutionary Changes in Overall Brain Size	p. 93
Changes in Relative Brain Size	p. 98
Mechanisms of brain-body scaling	p. 111
Functional Correlates of Relative Brain Size	p. 116
Changes in Absolute Brain Size	p. 126
Constraints and Compromises	p. 131
Conclusions	p. 133
Evolutionary Changes in Brain Region Size	p. 137
Concerted versus Mosaic Evolution	p. 140
Concerted evolution	p. 141
Mosaic evolution	p. 149
Toward a synthesis	p. 157
Functional Correlates of Brain Region Size	p. 159
The principle of proper mass	p. 159
Absolute size and functional capacity	p. 162
Proportional size and influence	p. 163
Relative size and adaptation	p. 168
Synthesis: The avian hippocampus	p. 171
Conclusions	p. 175
Evolutionary Changes in Brain Region Structure	p. 177
Homology and Novelty	p. 181
Phylogenetic Conversion: Lamination	p. 185
Phylogenetic Proliferation: Segregation	p. 197
Phylogenetic Proliferation: Addition	p. 202
Conclusions	p. 214
Evolution of Neuronal Connectivity	p. 217
Epigenetic Population Matching and Cascades	p. 220
The Parcellation Hypothesis	p. 228
Connectional Invasion and its Consequences	p. 236
General Principles of Network Design	p. 245
Synthesis and Conclusions	p. 251
What's Special about Mammal Brains?	p. 255
Early Mammals and their Brains	p. 259
The Phylogenetic History of Neocortex	p. 268
Beyond the Neocortex	p. 287
Conclusions	p. 294
What's Special about Human Brains?	p. 297
Primate Behavior and Overall Brain Size	p. 299
Evolutionary Changes in Primate Brain Organization	p. 305
Hominin Behavior and Overall Brain Size	p. 310
Evolutionary Changes in Hominin Brain Organization	p. 322
Conclusions	p. 342
Reflections and Prospect	p. 345
Explanatory Strategies in Evolutionary Neuroscience	p. 346
Steps Toward Synthesis	p. 352
Absolute and Relative Brain Size	p. 355
Conclusions	p. 360
Bibliography	p. 363
Index	p. 403
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