Related papers: Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evo…
Growth in brain volume is one of the most spectacular changes in the hominid lineage. The anthropological community agrees on that point. No consensus, however, has been reached on selection pressures contributing to that growth. In that…
A variant of microcephalin, MCPH1 gene, was introgressed about 37,000 years ago into Homo sapiens genetic pool from an archaic (Homo erectus) lineage and rose to exceptionally high frequency of around 70 percent worldwide today. It is…
The material bases of information - paper, computer discs - usually scale with information quantity. Large quantities of information usually require large material bases. Conventional wisdom has it that human long-term memory locates within…
The ``social brain hypothesis'' for the evolution of large brains in primates has led to evidence for the coevolution of neocortical size and social group sizes. Extrapolation of these findings to modern humans indicated that the equivalent…
Despite differences in brain sizes and cognitive niches among mammals, their cerebral cortices posses many common features and regularities. These regularities have been a subject of experimental investigation in neuroanatomy for the last…
The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…
The comparative genomics revolution of the past decade has enabled the discovery of functional elements in the human genome via sequence comparison. While that is so, an important class of elements, those specific to humans, is entirely…
The cerebrum of mammals spans a vast range of sizes and yet has a very regular structure. The amount of folding of the cortical surface and the proportion of white matter gradually increase with size, but the underlying mechanisms remain…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
The famous claim that we only use about 10% of the brain capacity has recently been challenged. Researchers argue that we are likely to use the whole brain, against the 10% claim. Some evidence and results from relevant studies and…
Organoids are prototypes of human organs derived from cultured human stem cells. They provide a reliable and accurate experimental model to study the physical mechanisms underlying the early developmental stages of human organs…
We propose a working hypothesis supported by numerical simulations that brain networks evolve based on the principle of the maximization of their internal information flow capacity. We find that synchronous behavior and capacity of…
In early years of life, the cranium rapidly changes in size and shape to accommodate brain growth, primarily driven by mechanical stress from brain expansion. Developmental disorders such as premature fusion of sutures in craniosynostosis,…
How does the human brain encode complex visual information? While previous research has characterized individual dimensions of visual representation in cortex, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how visual information is…
Very low levels of genetic diversity have been reported in vertebrates with large genomes, notably salamanders and lungfish [1-3]. Interpreting differences in heterozygosity, which reflects genetic diversity in a population, is complicated…
Brain-body co-optimization remains a challenging problem, despite increasing interest from the community in recent years. To understand and overcome the challenges, we propose exhaustively mapping a morphology-fitness landscape to study it.…
While it is relatively easy to imitate and evolve natural swarm behavior in simulations, less is known about the social characteristics of simulated, evolved swarms, such as the optimal (evolutionary) group size, why individuals in a swarm…
Recent research has suggested that the brain is more shallow than previously thought, challenging the traditionally assumed hierarchical structure of the ventral visual pathway. Here, we demonstrate that optimizing convolutional network…
The cerebral cortex displays a bewildering diversity of shapes and sizes across and within species. Despite this diversity, we present a universal multi-scale description of primate cortices. We show that all cortical shapes can be…