3(b) Brain Refinement’s Limitation

Nerves were originally developed as connections for the co-ordination, or integration, of movement in multicellular animals. Through natural selection the nerve connections between stimulus and response parts of the body were gradually organised, or adapted or refined, to the organism’s reproductive advantage. This was the first use that was made of nerves; we have termed the resulting behaviour reflexes.

The next opportunity for development using nerves arose from their coincidental ability to remember. Electric impulses passed along a nerve pathway leave an imprint in the pathway which can be used again later. This ability to store impressions formed the basis of memory which formed the necessary basis for brain refinement already described.

The limitation of brain learning was that the knowledge discovered was confined to each individual, so if an experiment resulted in self-destruction the learning came to nothing. With genetic learning the inevitable fatal mistakes which formed the mechanism of its learning did not matter since there were multiple copies of the information. The equivalent situation for genetic refinement would be the elimination of the species every time a member made a fatal mistake. In brain learning a fatal mistake eliminated not only the mistake but the whole experimenting machine. Given this, how was brain learning ever to get under way and survive all the millions of trial and error experiments necessary? The solution was the formation of a highly integrated alliance between the genes and the brain.Page 123 of
Print Edition This alliance had two stages of development. The first was instinct and the second was love-indoctrination.