Worming Our Way To The Origins of Our Brain

The human brain is perhaps the most perplexing and complicated instrument of the human body. Our brains not only help us with things that we think about, it also takes care of involuntary things while we are awake or asleep like breathing, Every day, a lot of us tend to take the utter brilliance and complexity of our brain for granted, when it is in fact the deciding factor in making us human. Our brain is a beautifully intricate and complex organ that allows us to be the most intelligent life form on the planet (at least to our knowledge).

So how does such an amazing instrument as the brain come about? This is the question numerous scientists seek to find an answer to.

The truth is, the earliest ancestors we evolved from did not even have brains, yet we still managed to develop one over the millions upon millions of years of evolution our species has undergone. Scientists have been unable to find very much evidence to support the origins of a larger, centralized brain, at least until a group of researchers looked upon the acorn worm.

Now, don’t get me wrong, these worms are absolutely brainless. They live their pathetic little existence buried in the deep-sea beds and have never seen the light of day (of course they are blind so that would not matter). What researchers are interested in in these worms is a set of signals in the genetic patterns of their developing larvae that are seemingly similar to the ones we use to construct our central nervous systems. This is science though, so the other scientists would be fools not to debate these findings on what could potentially be the early beginnings of the vertebrate brain.

The scientists who did not partake in this study raise several other points. Another idea on the origins of the brain include the composition of several simple structures that served different purposes to one central structure that served several purposes at once.

Alas, most researchers believe that the origin of our complex brains will most likely remain controversial as long as the evidence remains scant.  After all, you can only do so much with the fossilized remains of a 500-million-year-old soft-bodied invertebrate.

The original article can be found here.