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The Wiley Handbook of Evolutionary
Neuroscience
The Wiley Handbook
of Evolutionary Neuroscience
Edited by
Stephen V. Shepherd
This edition first published 2017
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
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how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at
www.wiley.com/wiley‐blackwell.
The right of Stephen V. Shepherd to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has
been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Shepherd, Stephen V., 1978– editor.
Title: The Wiley handbook of evolutionary neuroscience / edited by Stephen V. Shepherd.
Description: Chichester, West Sussex, UK : John Wiley & Sons, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016019971 | ISBN 9781119994695 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118316573 (epub) |
ISBN 9781118316610 (Adobe PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Neurosciences. | Neuropsychology. | Brain–Evolution.
Classification: LCC QP355.2 .W55 2016 | DDC 612.8–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019971
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: selvanegra/Gettyimages
Set in 10/12pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Index526
List of Contributors
A confession:
It is dangerous to anthropomorphize, but I do it. Watching dogs yawn and stretch,
birds strut in courtship, fish gasp in air, or even plants leaning their leaves toward
the sun—I know this can get ridiculous—I picture my body behaving in the same
manner as their own, withdrawing from or yearning toward the very same things,
and imagine that my own solitary feelings might have a mirror out there, in another
(however alien) mind.
I am not even that contrite. I have no direct access to other minds. I only intimately
know my own consciousness. Still, when I see other organisms that look like, behave
like, and sometimes even talk like myself, I assume their behaviors, like the same
behaviors expressed in my own body, are accompanied by mental experiences. In most
animals, behaviors—including our human reports of subjective experience—appear to
depend critically on the integrity and features of these animals’ brains. I thus gamble
that observing the brain is like observing the mind, and that when other animals’
brains exhibit similar relationships to the world as my own, they and I may be experiencing
similar mental states.
But can we formalize these likenesses? Looking at a human and a monkey brain,
we can see they look similar; comparing our lifestyles, we see many similar behaviors.
Their and our own patterns of brain activity change in similar ways across behavioral
states, perceptual experiences, and motor decisions. Even animals whose brains are
wildly different from our own can achieve behaviors we once thought uniquely
human: witness a New Caledonian crow making tools, or bees describing through
dance where to forage. Are there fundamental features—genetic modules, cellular
structures, neural networks, or environmental interactions—which constrain how
life mediates complex behavior? Conversely, when confronted with an organism
whose sensory environment and affordances differ from our own—say, a naked
mole rat, fruit fly, or slime mold—might shared biological features suggest shared
mental processes?
Our best hope of understanding other species lies in our shared evolutionary
histories. The dog, crow, fly, monkey, bee, rat, and man—and the redwood, the
paramecium, the mushroom, the slime mold—all arose from common ancestors
through natural selection, through the wandering and winnowing of a braided
stream. We interacted with our shared environments and with each other, affected
and affecting in kind. Many animals have, in their behavioral toolkits, mechanisms
for responding adaptively to other animals. It may yet prove that the human of
x Preface
theory of mind is an elaboration on concepts shared with other animals, rather than
a unique and unforeshadowed invention.
Life interacts with the world, maintaining and propagating itself, and does so in a
bewildering variety of ways; conceptual boundaries are rarely well‐defined. Even the
neuron, like the atom, proves entangled and divisible, neither self‐determined nor
ontologically distinct. To understand how animals coordinate their behavior—and
how this behavioral governance can go awry in our own species—we must understand
brains. But the brains of different species take astonishingly different forms in the
zebra finch and the zebra fish, in nematodes, molluscs and man. In this volume, 33
authors attempt to wrangle order from this chaos, outlining how we can understand
the commonalities and complexities of brains across the full span of animal forms.
The Wiley Handbook of Evolutionary Neuroscience is designed to function both as a
reference for researchers and as a textbook for the advanced undergraduate or starting
graduate student. It is roughly organized into five sections: an introduction to evolu-
tionary neuroscience and comparative methods; a section on biological computation
and brain origins; a comprehensive overview of brain structure and development; an
exploration of how brains change through evolution and experience; and a discussion
of how brains interact with one another.
The first section opens with a philosophical essay by Anderson and Chemero
(Chapter 1), grappling with a central issue in evolutionary neuroscience: Why should
brains exist at all? The authors argue that even the most complex brains must
be understood as relational and action‐oriented, rather than objective and
computational.
Suzana Herculano‐Houzel follows, describing how the very concept of “evolu-
tionary neuroscience” has evolved over time (Chapter 2). In particular, she describes
how we have been misled by the Aristotelian scala naturae, in which animals are
organized along an axis leading from more primitive to more human‐like brains.
In particular, she argues that understandings of brain scaling have been distorted by
anthropocentric measures of brain structure which place humans at the pinnacle.
This first section concludes with a chapter by Jon Kaas outlining methods for
researching brain evolution (Chapter 3). Taking mammals as a case study, he describes
how fossils and comparative analyses can be integrated to infer historical changes in
brain structure and function. Finally, he describes the interaction of phylogenetic,
developmental, and biological constraints in shaping brain evolution.
The central and most challenging section of the book covers the organization of the
two key elements of neural networks: structures and synapses. Volker Hartenstein
(Chapter 8) begins by describing the organizing principles of nervous systems, their
diverse structural organization across deuterostome and protostome invertebrates,
and some examples of how these structures mediate locomotor and perceptual
functions. Mario Wullimann (Chapter 9) continues, describing the structural bauplan of
more familiar brains—those of vertebrates, including mammals and birds. Comparative
anatomy can emphasize the patterns in neural filaments at the expense of the synapse.
Michel Anctil fills this (literal) gap by describing how neurotransmitters have evolved
across animal clades (Chapter 10).
Concluding the section, Roger Croll (Chapter 11) and Luis Puelles (Chapter 12)
describe how these systems change during development in both invertebrates and
vertebrates. In describing the development of invertebrate larva, Croll surveys nearly
the full range of programs for early brain development. Puelles, by turn, focuses on
the vertebrate forebrain, detailing the sequence of core mechanisms which parcel and
pattern the telencephalon.
Two chapters address how the brain responds to the environment across and within
generations.
First, Cahalane and Finlay (Chapter 13) revisit the theme of allometry, first raised
in Chapter 2, providing a contrasting perspective from Herculano‐Houzel. Focusing
on the developmental mechanisms that pattern mammalian cortex, they show that
small, commonly occurring modifications have widespread consequences for individuals
and lineages, suggesting they are a major target for evolutionary modification in
response to environmental pressures.
xii Preface
In the next chapter (Chapter 14), Michael Koch looks at ways in which individual
brains change in response to their environment. He highlights nondeclarative memory,
which shares common mechanisms (and, potentially, analogous structures), across
invertebrate and vertebrate lineages.
In the final section, authors examine how these mechanisms and levels of analysis work
together to mediate behavioral interactions between organisms. In Chapter 15, Harris
and colleagues describe the switches that organize neural systems across species—some
deeply conserved—and their role in mediating social decision making. In particular,
they describe how social experience can impact brain function at multiple timescales,
from the momentary to the developmental to the inter‐generational.
Sliwa and colleagues develop this theme in Chapter 16, examining how species
have evolved to read and respond to signals produced by their own (and other)
species. They open with a review of signaling systems, describe the neural mechanisms
reported in primates, and conclude by discussing how these systems may generalize
across species.
When I first envisioned this book, I hoped to move from the evolution of neurons
to that of brains, to that of minds. Since minds are intangible, this necessitates thinking
about the biological and cultural evolution of a theory of minds. Three short chapters
conclude the book, with Bockler and colleagues (Chapter 17) addressing the
behavior of coordinated groups, Street and Laland (Chapter 18) addressing social
learning and cultural evolution, and Juliane Kaminski (Chapter 19) concluding with
the seemingly-unique evolution, in our own species, of a theory of mind.
Acknowledgments
I owe a deep debt to the contributors to this volume, who were often asked to
summarize large bodies of knowledge in too few words and with too little time. I have
been a sometimes negligent and sometimes overbearing editor: Should you chance
upon an awkward turn of phrase, trust it is my fault and not theirs.
I am grateful to Michael Platt for my scientific training; to Asif Ghazanfar for
suggesting I edit this book; and to Winrich Freiwald for encouraging from me the time
and mental space to complete it. Additionally, several previous authors and editors
have guided my thinking on these subjects. Richard Dawkin and Yan Wong’s The
Ancestor’s Tale brilliantly resolves the temptation toward scala naturae thinking by
reversing the narrative: moving from our own species toward our ancient and shared
origins. Contributor Jon Kaas edited the monumental Evolution of Nervous Systems
(and its condensate, Evolutionary Neuroscience), which are unrivaled in scope. Larry
Swanson’s Brain Architecture and Georg Streidter’s Principles of Brain Evolution are
excellent attempts to distill the astonishing diversity of nervous systems into a coherent
set of principles. Finally, John Allman’s Evolving Brains remains my favorite introductory
neuroscience text: No book better captures the excitement of the field.
Finally, I am personally indebted to my parents, Stan and Kris Shepherd, for their
indulgence of their tidepool‐swimming, woods‐wandering, book‐stealing, moody,
spoiled son; and to Drew Orr, for bringing light and life to my sometimes dark days.
1
The Brain Evolved
to Guide Action
Michael Anderson and Anthony Chemero
1.1 Introduction
In the 19th century, major movements in both psychology and neuroscience were
profoundly influenced by Darwin. William James argued for a view of psychology
which ultimately came to be known as functionalism; in neuroscience, Herbert
Spencer and Santiago Ramon y Cajal argued that we needed to study the mind and
brain as adaptations to the environment. In both cases, this evolutionary approach
forced a focus on the role of the brain in action guidance. These approaches were
revived at the end of the 20th century in the form of embodied cognitive science,
which focuses on the importance of action in understanding cognition. Embodied
cognitive science calls for an understanding of the brain as having evolved initially
for perception and action. It suggests that even complex cognitive abilities such as
language and reasoning will use neural resources which initially evolved to guide
action. We close by providing evidence that this is, in fact, how the human brain
evolved.
The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is
indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating
it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more
or less of a proof that the postulate was correct. (James, 1890, p. 4)
The Wiley Handbook of Evolutionary Neuroscience, First Edition. Edited by Stephen V. Shepherd.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Brain Evolved to Guide Action 13
However, there is certainly evidence that, within the brain, cognitive function is a
matter of flexibly assembling the right coalition of neural partners. Some suggestive
evidence for this possibility comes from a meta‐analysis of more than 1100 neuroim
aging studies across 10 task domains: It was demonstrated that, although many of the
same regions of the brain were used and reused in multiple tasks across the domains,
the regions cooperated with one another in different patterns in each task domain
(Anderson & Penner‐Wilger, 2013).
Experimental work investigating temporal coherence in the brain also points in the
direction of large‐scale modulation of neural partnerships in support of cognitive
function. For instance, there is evidence relating changes in the oscillatory coherence
between brain regions (local and long‐distance) to sensory binding, modulation of
attention, and other cognitive functions (Varela, Lachaux Rodriguez, & Martinerie,
2001; Steinmetz et al., 2000). Two early findings illustrate the basic notion well:
Friston (1997) demonstrated that the level of activity in posterior parietal cortex
determined whether a given region of inferotemporal cortex was face‐selective, that
is, its functional properties were modulated by distributed neural responses. Likewise,
McIntosh et al. (1994) investigated a region of inferotemporal cortex and a region
of prefrontal cortex that both support face identification and spatial attention.
McIntosh et al. showed that during the face‐processing task the inferotemporal
region cooperated strongly with a region of superior parietal cortex; while during the
attention task, that same region of parietal cortex cooperated more strongly with the
prefrontal area. Similar patterns of changing functional connectivity are observed
over developmental time, which suggests that acquiring new skills involves changes
to both local and long‐distance functional partnerships (Fair et al., 2009; Superkar,
Musen, & Menon 2009). It seems reasonable to predict that such results will
continue to emerge, given the increasing interest in network‐oriented approaches to
the brain (Sporns, 2011).