Week 4 Post 3

Gerald Edelman says that the brain is not a computer. He compares it to an evolutionary forest. He says that the brain has a lot of individual variation and even goes on to say that it has more variation than almost anything else. That variability comes from different neurons moving in different ways. That is what he means by Neural Darwinism. Each brain evolves differently even amongst twins.

Second Nature is the way that variation manifests itself. Different things have different habits. Even twins who share all of the same DNA have entirely different shapes and ways that the neurons work. It is unique to everyone. It is the neurons that make up the brain order which shows the biologically significant variance. This variation even occured in brains that had been built in the Darwin 10 machines. Two exact clones did not do the same thing to find their way through the "maze". The first one went to the blue wall every time and the second one did not. So variation in neurons is Neural Darwinism.