Has anyone ever thought that maybe we devolved?

Question

We are currently only able to use a small percentage of our total brain power. If evolving makes us the best we can be, the top of the evolutionary scale, the most intelligent we can be... why the big waste?

Another possibility, for the creationists:

After the falling, god took away a majority of our mental capacity as penance for disobedience?

Answer 1

There is no such thing as devolving.

The effect of natural selection is to produce an organism that is best suited to its environment, not to produce an organism that is perceived as superior to others. In other words you cannot say that one organism is more evolved than another since all life has been evolving for a similar amount of time.

You should not assume that advanced intelligence is the "top of the evolutionary scale" because it is just an adaptation that humans have evolved for their particular environment.

It is important to remember that certain traits are only beneficial for survival if they are appropriate for their environment. So a human who is well suited to life on land is poorly suited to life on the ocean floor. In this environment a fish is better suited, but we would not say that the fish is at the top of the evolutionary scale.

As far as only using a small part of our brain, this simply means that we do not use all parts of our brains at once, the part of our brain that we use will obviously be dependent on the activity that we are doing.

As far as the god part is concerned, god doesn't actually exist so asking a question  in reference to him is about as valid as me asking if the flying spaghetti monster had a hand in making it rain yesterday

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain

"Even though many mysteries of brain function persist, every part of the brain has a known function."

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There is no such thing as being at the top of the evolutionary scale. For one thing, that scale does not exist. Evolution is not a gradient from simple to more complex, although complexity is a byproduct. Evolution is simply populations of organisms responding to their environment. Furthermore, humans are not at the top, we are just currently the best at thinking and there are many other creatures on this planet that exhibit some form of intelligence and sentience and self-awareness. We are not the best at severing the jugular of wildebeest with our canines, lions and hyenas are currently the best at doing that.

There is no such thing as devolution in the same sense that there is no such thing as the deceleration of an object. Acceleration is defined as a change in velocity, thus a change in either speed or direction over time. When an object such as a car slows when coming to a stop light, it is undergoing /acceleration/ from the force of friction, just in the direction facing backwards. Evolution is the change of genetic information in a population over time and says nothing about organisms progressing toward a perfect organism, just a better suited organism for their environment.

If an environment changes and a population once suited for life in that environment becomes unfit for their niche, that organism will suffer natural selection through environmental attrition and may face extinction unless a trait that was once useless becomes advantageous, a mutation develops and spreads more quickly through the dwindling population which improves their chances of surviving to reproduce, or the environment changes back to something more tolerable. We see this: most of the organisms that ever swam, walked or flew are already extinct. If the environment is stable and the pressures are relaxed, a species may remain relatively unchanged for many millions of years. We see this in the fossil record as well as in living organisms such as various tortoise and turtle species.

Conjecture -- everything below may be flawed:

If human beings were to "devolve" or -- rather become more unfit --, it would come in the form of decreased brain function and impaired tool manipulation. And seeing as brainpower and technology are a self-supporting cycle, we're only getting smarter as our technology unlocks more to investigate and manipulate on finer levels (even ourselves), the trend in the fossil record supports the idea of the genus /Homo/ becoming smarter and dexterous. This progression will not stop for our self-perceived importance and who knows how far biology can take us. One thing is for sure, our descendants will change into something else: maybe smarter, maybe faster.

The niche -- the hole we've dug for ourselves is The Thinker, if we were to somehow lose this advantage over other animals (maybe an over-reliance on artificial intelligence to think for us) we would face environmental pressures to better physically defend ourselves. When pitted in a match of strength against a member of our closest related species, the /Pan troglodytes/ or common chimpanzee, a human would almost always lose. Our descendants would fare better and out-perform their weaker ancestors and /Homo sapiens/ would disappear.

Answer 3

I like this question. It makes me think in a different perspective, this will be fun. I will put in my opinion.

1.) Using only 10% of brain power/ devolved:

We need to think in terms of neuron function. You are saying that we have such a large brain capacity, but we use so little of it at a certain time. Lets make this scenario. You are going to do two things, completely different at once. Lets say playing the piano and doing homework at he same time (you are playing a complex song like Queen's "seven seas of rhye.").

Ok,, you will find out that you cannot do both of them at once (or play the song perfectly). Well lets think of the pathways in the brain for each scenario.

Homework: Light bouncing off the the paper goes into your eye and hits the retina --> down the optic nerve (to save time and space, I will not add the exact path through the thalamus and optic chaism, etc)     ---> to the striate cortex, where simple cells pick up the information (each line orientation etc), --> then to the extrastriate cortex, which contains complex and hypercomplex cells (puts info together and makes sense of the image). ---> down two different streams towards the posterior temporal lobe and posterior parietal lobe (parietal lobe = understand where it is in space and temporal lobe = what the object is).

Piano: same optical path for the musical notes on the sheet.

Ok we can see both at the same time, but now the meaning and action aspect becomes much more complicated. This is where the analysis is and motor actions take place. The brain is a categorizing type of system which saves information (long term memory) and takes it out of the filing cabinet when needed.

This means if we have two completely different types of works that require different pathways and/or similar pathways, then the information might start to get mixed up. Your brain might make start to put musical notes on your math homework or integral signs all over the musical sheets. Or start singing mathematical terms instead of Queen's seven seas of rhye. If the brain started to use use more of itself, then maybe we would be smarter, but this statement I disagree with. I will get to that later. I philosophy is the simple the better. If you add more and more brain functions to the brain just for one activity, you will be wasting energy from your body and maybe mixing up other information with this function. Remember the brain uses most of the energy we take in, so energy conservation is very important when it comes to brain function. You need to know that the brain never sleeps. It analyzes a bunch of other information (please refer to Luria's rules) that we are not conscious of, until the brain tells us. For example, Your brain is constantly getting information about the intestines and other organs second by second. If there is an inflamation in any part of your body, the brian realizes that there is a problem and then we get a symptom like pain. This of which tells us to get this checked out or stop what we are doing.

So maybe that having smaller brain activity was actually an evolutionary advantage than a disadvantage/devolution. This is because we can handle larger bodies and deal with a lot more information and other fuinctions with useing that much energy.

Now what makes you smart. As I said in previous posts that smartness is not a measure of IQ scores or other garbage standarized tests or how well I can do in a class. All of this means nothing to me. What I believe in is truely the idea of creative thinking. This is located in the pre-fronatl lobe (actually the dorsal lateral pre-frontal cortex). If you look at abunch of other organisms, they have very poor pre-frontal cortex formation. All they have is a small amount of brain matter, but we have many gyri and sulci for the storage of all of this brain matter.

Creative thinking is what leads scientific fields and other great fields to create many great theories. Lets look at Einstein. He proposed that Light acts like a particle for the photoelectric affect and also produced the special relativity laws. If you actually read these laws, at first glance you might say that this is not true or anything along this sort. Well, under careful examination, you see the beauty of the mathematics and how true all of this can be. Just because of creative thinking, einstein produced a few of the greatest theries in mankind's history. If you look at any field of study, you will see creativity. Another amazing story is the idea of Chaos theory. How can a system not follow the normal linear algebra laws. How can a system actually become unpredictable. Anyway, the list can go on and on.

Again I do not think we are wasting the brain. I think this is a way for the brain to conserve the energy it uses. Also you need to understand the neurons can also be polymodal (which means that it can deals with a different amount of stimuli). One example it the superior temporal sulcus (superior to the temporal lobe),

Answer 4

> "Has anyone ever thought that maybe we devolved?"

There is no such thing as "devolution".

"Evolution" means "a change in the frequency of alleles in the gene pool" - so an increase or a decrease of allele number is still "evolution".

> "We are currently only able to use a small percentage of our total brain power."

This is untrue.

At any one time, only about 10% of the neurons in your brain are actually "firing" (much more and you're having an epileptic fit) - but WHICH 10% is different from moment-to-moment, and averaged over time, we do use 100% of our brains.

> "If evolving makes us the best we can be, the top of the evolutionary scale, the most intelligent we can be... why the big waste?"

Evolution makes us better adapted to our environment - that's all.

If "better adapted" means no limbs, we'll lose our limbs (like snakes and whales/dolphins); if it means no eyes, we'll lose our eyes (like cave fish); if it means bigger brains, we'll get bigger brains (like we already have).

> "After the falling, god took away a majority of our mental capacity as penance for disobedience?"

This is fiction, not science.

But even by your analogy, Adam and Eve GAINED knowledge and mental capacity when they ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; Genesis does not describe them being mentally regressed afterwards - their punishment was to be cast out from paradise and (in Eve's case) to suffer pain during childbirth.

Answer 5

despite what you might think, we are the top of the evolutionary scale. what we are is what has worked. this is how evolution works. the people who use this amount of brain power lived long enough to reproduce, so the trait was passed on.

if you want to go around naked and knowing actually way less, go ahead and do it. nobody is stopping you. you realize that it was called the tree of knowledge or something like that, so it made us smart, according to christians. you must realize this.

make it a good day

Answer 6

Actually, we use all of our brain.  The 10% is a rather popular myth.