Creationism in Crisis - How Mammalian Brains All Work The Same Way - Just Like They Evolved From A Common Ancestor

MIT neuroscientists have found that the six anatomical layers of the mammalian brain cortex show distinct patterns of electrical activity which are consistent throughout the entire cortex and across several animal species, including humans.

Credit: Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT; iStock

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Study reveals a universal pattern of brain wave frequencies | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It's a central dogma of creationism that humans are a special form of life created distinct from all other animals. This is one of the appeals of creationism to those who have such a high opinion of themselves that they like to believe they were created by and have a special relationship with the creator of the entire Universe, which it created specifically with them in mind.

However, when we look for evidence of this biological difference, we find instead evidence that we have the same biology as all other mammals and have much more in common than the relatively small differences that, like all other species, place us in a separate taxon. The similarities for a nested hierarchy which shows how closely (or distantly) related we are to the other mammals, particularly, in descending order, the other African great apes, the other anthropoid apes, the old-world monkeys and the other primates.

But creationists particularly like to point to our greater intelligence and aesthetic appreciation of art and music, and our ability to communicate. However, they too can be shown to be fat from unique to humans, who differ in those respects only by degree. Having special abilities with an organ of our body no more makes us a special creation than an elephant's special abilities with its trunk makes elephants a special creation, or a dolphin's special abilities with sonar makes dolphins a special creation.

Now, a team of neuroscientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA and Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA have shown that there are six distinct layers of the mammalian brain cortex and that each of these is associated with the same distinctive pattern of electrical activity. Their results were the subject of an open access paper in Nature Neuroscience a few days ago.

Creationism in Crisis - Human Intelligence Is Not So Much A Matter of Quantity But Of Quality

Human intelligence: how cognitive circuitry, rather than brain size, drove its evolution

Researchers have shown that human intelligence does not depend primarily on the size of our brain - there are animals with bigger brains (elephants, orcas) - but on the cognitive circuitry.

The team, led by Valentin Riedl of the Department of Neuroradiology at Klinikum rechts der Isar, TUM School of Medicine and Health, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany, have published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances. It is explained in an article in The Conversation by two Cambridge University professors who were not involved in the research.

Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - Human, Other Ape and Monkey Brains are Very Similar

Study shows differences between brains of primates — humans, apes and monkeys — are small but significant

Researchers analyzed genetic material from cells in the prefrontal cortex (the area shaded in each brain) from four closely-related primates to characterize subtle differences in cell type and genetics.

Ask any Creationist to list the physical differences between humans and chimpanzees, and they will usually focus on the different brain size, but how different are our brains at a fundamental level?

New research by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison together with colleagues from Yale, has shown that the difference between the human brain and that of the other apes and monkeys are actually small, but those small differences are responsible for the qualitative difference. As explained in the University of Wisconsin-Madison News release:

When comparing a chimpanzee to a human the differences seem huge — from their physical appearances down to the capabilities of their brains. But at the cellular and genetic level, at least in the prefrontal cortex, the similarities are many and the dissimilarities sparing.

The team collected genetic information from more than 600,000 prefrontal cortex cells from tissue samples from humans, chimpanzees, macaques and marmosets. They then categorized the cells into different types and determined the differences between cells of similar type. They found the vast majority of cells were fairly comparable.