The Myth of the Evolution of the Brain in The Daily Telegraph

On its web site The Daily Telegraph newspaper carried a Darwinist myth about the supposed evolution of the brain. The report in question was titled “Study traces the evolution of the human brain” and described a new study by researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and published in the British scientific journal Nature. This article is a response to the Darwinist myth contained in the report and exposes the inconsistencies in the idea of the evolution of the brain.

Seth Grant and his team’s study

Comparative studies involving the brain and the idea of evolution are generally based on synapse numbers. However, this study investigated synapses’ protein compounds. In an article on telegraph.co.uk Seth Grant from the research team described this feature of the research in these terms:

Although many studies have looked at the number of synapses, none has looked at the molecular composition of synapses. We found dramatic differences in the numbers of proteins in the synapses between different species. We studied around 600 proteins that are found in mammalian synapses and were surprised to find that only 50 percent of these are also found in invertebrate (creatures without a backbone, such as insects) synapses, and about 25% are in single-cell animals, which obviously don’t have a brain.

As we have seen, in their study Grant and his team revealed the extent of the similarities between mammals, invertebrates and single-celled organisms in terms of the proteins in their synapses. It is clear, however, that this is merely the identification of a similarity and provides no scientific explanation of the supposed evolution of the brain. The Telegraph is reporting an evolutionary myth based solely on preconception and conjecture.

Richard Emes’s Darwinist myth about the supposed evolution of the brain

At the end of the Telegraph article appears an analysis, or rather a Darwinist fantasy, by Richard Emes, one of the authors of the report at a researcher into bioinformatics at Keele University. Emes attempts to account for the brain in terms of the Darwinism to which he is so blindly devoted, and says:

It is amazing how a process of Darwinian evolution by tinkering and improvement has generated, from a collection of sensory proteins in yeast, the complete synapse of mammals associated with learning and cognition.

Emes’s claim here shows that he draws his support, not from the study they carried out, but from dogmatism. To look at the protein structures in the synapses of the brains of mammals and invertebrates and single-cell organisms and infer from it a story encompassing 1 billion years, a story that is entirely fictitious, is a violation of logic and science. This obviously stems from a one-sided perspective known as “scientific materialism” which imposes materialist thinking on science from the outside. Although, with the perfect complexity of their structures, the life forms in the study constitute evident proof of creation, his blind faith causes Emes to regard these as the product of an evolutionary process. The biologist Richard Lewontin, himself a materialist, admits this unscientific perspective adopted by Emes:

We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, so we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[1]

The brain is an exceptionally complex marvel of creation and definitively refutes evolution

The complex design of the human brain is far more advanced than modern technology. World-famous computer firms are attempting to inspire their engineers to come up with new designs by holding seminars about the organisation of the brain. The eminent biochemist and science writer Isaac Asimov makes this comment on the subject:

For example, even though he was speaking in 1929, when our knowledge of the brain was incomparably less than it is today, Henry Fairfield Osborn felt obliged to say the following at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

To my mind the human brain is the most marvelous and mysterious object in the whole universe and no geologic period seems too long to allow for its natural evolution.”[3]

The well-known biologist Jean Rostand admits how he has been unable to convince himself of the scenario of the evolution of the brain, no matter how long the time involved:

No, decidedly, I cannot make myself think that these “slips” of heredity have been able, even with the cooperation of natural selection, even with the advantage of the immense periods of time in which evolution works on life, to build the entire world, with its structural prodigality and refinements, its astounding adaptations . . . I cannot persuade myself to think that the eye, the ear, the human brain have been formed in this way.[4]

The study in question reveals no findings apart from comparative data regarding the protein structures in the brains of mammals and invertebrates and in the bodies of single-cell organisms. Interpretations of the study stem from the dogmatic devotion to materialist philosophy of those making them as they add Darwinist myths to it as if it supported the theory of evolution. Our advice to Roger Highfield, The Daily Telegraph science editor and author of the report, is that he should abandon his blind support for Darwinism.