Randall has a post on creating mouse/human chimeras whose brains contain a significant percentage of human neurons. Randall focuses on the possibility that when introduced at an early development stage human cells could lead to human brain structures and more intelligent mice. I hope his post generates an interesting discussion.
I want to consider a side topic related to this GNXP post on bird neurosystems. Human biodiversity gives insight into how IQ varies with human biology. What insight can be gained by comparing animal neural systems to human systems?
What makes humans more intelligent than animals? Is it the increased mass of specific brain regions? Is it brain organization? Or myelinization? Or different types of neurons for specialized purposes? Or differences at the molecular level such as synapses, brain transmitters, and receptors? Is it an extended human infancy that permits gradually organization of efficient learning patterns?
Various species have taken very different evolutionary paths. I believe it is unlikely that human brains are best (in the sense of IQ) in every way. How might animals have evolved superior neural processing compared to humans?
Possibilities are new types of neurons that might improve certain types of low-level function, more efficient neurons, e.g., smaller neurons that allow higher density processing, better brain organization for specific functions such as hearing, sight, or smell, or plasticity that allows retraining throughout lifespan.
Could we build a brain that incorporated the best brain features that evolution has produced in hundreds of millions of years of evolution in diverse animal species?
(From an algorithmic perspective I’ve long been bothered that different species couldn’t share their best evolutionary “discoveries”. Seems a waste. Now biotech could improve the evolutionary algorithm by providing mechanisms for such sharing.)
(I’m interested in links that that provide an overview of how animal neurons and neural systems differ from those in humans.)
Posted by fly at 08:05 PM