Welcome to the worlds of Steven Michael Harris (Author, Theorist, Educator and Performer).
The recent work in the human genome project has identified the approximate number of genes that are in human DNA. The big surprise was that the number of genes is far fewer than were predicted. The reason for the discrepancy is mostly because the complex construction of the human brain has been thought of as a genetically programmed structure with all of the different components in this complex nervous system thought to be programmed by genetics. This thinking is apart from the truth about the nervous system. The nervous system is designed by repeating principles of nervous systems that are affected by the body of which it is a part. The nervous system forms itself without genetics as a major factor. It forms itself according to the logic that exists in thinking and memory. The complexity and variation of the nervous system is not hard-wired to deal with different subject matter, but is a system that wires itself in response to different subject matter, different sense organs, etc. and response is affected by the timing of various shifts in the timing of the many chemical changes that occur from the beginning of fetal development until death. The nervous system forms the body and the body forms the nervous system.
Genetics does not ordain the form of the nervous system. Genetics ordains the mathematical principals of how nerve cells relate to each other and how nerve cells relate to information and how they grow (and divide) in response to various kinds of activity. From the first days of the formation of a nervous system, thought is occurring in a simple form and the colony of nerves grows itself according to its response to influences in the same way that nerves in an adult respond to influences as a course of thought. Repeating mathematical principles grow the brain in accord with the need to make the most successful arrangement between cells in response to the variety of information for the accumulative good of the entire colony of cells (the body and mind). Genetics had already taken care of that part of the design in the earliest of animal life that had arrangements of nerve cells. Very subtle tinkering is all that is needed to create the massive variety of animal life on earth after that initial accomplishment of evolution.
Because a nervous system forms itself according to the environment (the development, the shape, the features of a body, the influences on that body); evolutionary development is much easier to accomplish. If genetic changes were required to micro-manage the various structures of the nervous system as if it were a mechanical structure with different parts doing different things, then it would be more difficult to pull off the entire change in body when an aberration occurs. When somebody is born with an extra arm or whatever (or when scientists tinker with the fetus of some animal and affect such a change), the nervous system that controls such a change comes along with the change. If the genetics that created the extra arm also required genetic changes to manage the structures in the nervous system that controlled that arm, then it would be unlikely that all of the factors involved in any change of this sort could occur at the same time during a mutation (and unlikely that a nervous system would develop to control such a change that was artificially created in a laboratory).
Nerve cells are a colony of cells that cooperate according to mathematical rules and they always deal with the bodily environment that is handed to this colony - is a part of this colony. If a muscle group that never existed before in the same way occurs in a body, the nervous system finds the logic for that muscle group and uses it to best advantage. If such a change is beneficial overall for the organism, then such a change has a chance of succeeding in future generations.
The lack of genetic involvement in the completed complex structure of a mature nervous system makes for better support of evolutionary theory. The right way of thinking about how the nervous system works changes the way you must think about genetics and changes the way you must think about evolution as well.
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Copyright © 1997-2008
steven michael harris
Lexington, virginia, usa