Darwin and the ghost of Phineas Gage: neuro-evolution and the social brain.

摘要

Although Darwin addressed emotions and behaviour at great length in his later books (notably The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals), he gave almost no attention to the brain and its evolution. To be fair, of course, neurobiology was in its very earliest infancy in the mid-nineteenth century, so there was probably little he could usefully have said (though he did rely heavily on the work of Guillaume Duchenne, one of neuro-biology's founding fathers, in the Emotions). Instead, interest in brain evolution took the better part of a century to emerge. In the meantime, neurobiology largely developed in the absence of any real evolutionary underpinnings, with a presumption that, for all practical purposes, brains (or, at least, vertebrate brains) are largely homologous (bar some minor differences in size and detail).