Rome My Lane
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
There are a LOT of mini posts on this Sunday! I must have rolled them up from a list. (And I did - the process of text->HTML->text into the text dumps stripped a lot of stuff out as I recall.)
Why are brains in the head?
Another biological mystery. Among hundreds...
Many animals, and all known plants, get along without a brain at all. That's a known fact, we have animals like earthworms which don't have centralised hearts and certainly no brains, yet they live. Their hearts are a bunch of nodes along their bodies which just massage their internal juices around, and their nervous systems connect in such a way that there's no 'control centre' anywhere, it's just distributed among the nerve junctions.
Similarly, all the plants we know of have no intelligence that we're aware of, and don't have anything we could call a nervous system as we understand that term. Yet they too live, and we're now not quite so sure anymore that they aren't as aware as, say, an earthworm - they certainly react to their environment, and it's been shown that they react to threats and somehow communicate this to others of their species nearby. Hence, my unwillingness to state categorically that plants don't have brains or at least primitive distributed complexes...
Insects, invertebrates, and plants - they form the vast majority of the biomass on this planet, and most of them seem to do that without needing a brain. In many ways, life gets along far better if it just has no brains, just little biological machines chugging away. Brains just seem to disturb the balance...
So okay, let's get that framed a bit better. Have you ever wondered why we find nature so beautiful? We're born into a whole world full of nature, and then we wonder why we find the only thing we know, the thing that sustains us and nurtures us and provides our only impressions of beauty, beautiful? There's a name for this phenomenon but it just escapes me for the moment. Sort of "QED, now let's test for it and - surprise! - QED!" What it means for the purposes of my discussion is that we rate the success of lifeforms on a profoundly different scale than, say, that earthworm.
To us, intelligence and adaptability are indicators of success. Our brains are what makes us the successful, world-dominating, all niche exploiting, most successful lifeform we've ever known. A large part of what we perceive to be our evolutionary success, is due to those largish lumps of gray matter in our heads, our brains. Without that brain, we'd actually be wiped out by any suitably hungry colony of cave bats or field mice. Minus that pound of not-quite-flesh, we would not survive even if the mice and bats and every damn thing kept their distance as a mark of respect for the late kings. We would starve to death in our idiot bodies.
Hang on - we keep our single most mission-critical organ on an external, sticky-outy fragile bone box? Isn't that a bit silly? Shouldn't we be keeping it right next to our hearts, in a bony box deep in the middle of our bodies? Where the most layers separate it from damage by the big wide external world we supposedly rule? So what went wrong here? Why did this retrograde step happen?
Yep, if you're a four-legged prone animal with a Large Brain, then that's the part which is furthest away from whatever is chasing you. And if you're a four-limbed bipedal animal then it places the Large Brain way above (one would hope) harm's way from attack by ground provided the crittur attacking us is A) on the ground and B) not another four-limbed bipedal animal with a Large Brain intent on bashiing our Large Brain out with the Tool which it's Large Brain just invented...
And similarly, when our prone friend attacks a foe, their large Brain is now at the forefront and most prone to Retaliatory Attack By Other. So I don't get it... Why did Large Brains In Bone Boxes On The End Of Spindly Sticks become the flavour of the aeon? I imagine that the distance from the Bulging Eyes and Large Flappy Ears to the Large Wobbly Brain had to be kept as short as possible to allow us to process input more quickly, because that's an admirable survival trait, to be able to size up a situation quicker than the opposition and then act on it.
But - here's the kicker - now that we've assessed the situation, we realise the Other is much bigger and fiercer than we are - and we now have a problem. Yes, we saw the outcome much quicker than the hypothetical Other With A Large Brain further from their sense organs, but - ... dammit, now we have to wait for the signal to travel from our brain to our legs, and start Evasive Running-Away Manoeuvres 101... Almost as far as if the brain had been in that superbly protected position in the middle of our bodies. We might have lost a few nanaseconds of time for the brain to react, but we gained those nanoseconds in the reduced time it would take for our RUN!!! reaction to reach our legs...
Just like I'm not convinced by men's nipples and other things, the Large Brains In Bone Boxes On The End Of Spindly Sticks doesn't quite convince me either. We're a whole evolutionary system gone wrong, we are, not just one branch of the tree...
So - given that we seem to be built entirely wrong, that we destroy more ecosystem than we contribute, and that 95% of the world's biomass would consider us (if they had Large Brains) a Bad Aberration in the evolutionary course, what precisely are we?
I assume we're a lucky guess, a system that came about by accident and which worked, albeit always to the detriment of the overall system, but it did work. We're now fulfilling our mission, which is to rid the world of all troublesome 'others' and we're succeeding quite well at that, what with the species extinction rate. 'Bang on target, old man, good work!" and all that. We will probably eventually succumb to an Amoebic Entity With No Reasoning Power Whatsoever, and then Life will resume it's pleasant plodding course.
I'd still like to see a lifeform designed by Something With A Smart Brain though...
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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