They say human brains are almost as smart as life/evolution is capable of achieving! True or false and why?

Like I just caught a bit of a documentary and if the brain gets any bigger it takes longer for the electric signals to reach another part of the brain and becomes less efficient or slower than our close to perfectly sized brains!/ True or false I find it hard to believe that the human brain is the best evolution can come up with but they do make logical sense





What do you think?They say human brains are almost as smart as life/evolution is capable of achieving! True or false and why?
Many documentaries (especially ones you find on the likes of the Discover Channel or History Channel) make a great deal of speculation and fail at telling the audience that it's speculation.





There's a good chance that this might be true, considering the oddity that our brains are actually quite smaller than some of the brains of other (extinct) hominids such as those of H. neaderthalensis and H. heidelbergensis.





Obviously, there will come a time at which the increasing size of our brains will become inefficient *assuming* all of the machinery remains constant. That's a might big assumption though. Who's to say that the H. sapien brain won't get larger as it also re-compartmentalizes ?They say human brains are almost as smart as life/evolution is capable of achieving! True or false and why?
Interesting. If it's true (';if the brain gets any bigger it takes longer for the electric signals to reach another part of the brain and becomes less efficient or slower than our close to perfectly sized brains!';) then that is one more piece of evidence that God is the Creator!





Below please find some articles that mention the brain. I hope they will be of interest:





http://creation.com/the-human-bodygods-m鈥?/a>





http://creation.com/the-brain-brainier-t鈥?/a>





http://creation.com/the-non-transitions-鈥?/a>





http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/around鈥?/a>





http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles鈥?/a>





http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles鈥?/a>





http://www.icr.org/article/thinking-abou鈥?/a>





http://www.icr.org/article/brains-emerge鈥?/a>





http://www.icr.org/article/mankind-pinna鈥?/a>
False.


Through technology, we make better switches than biology has. You can imagine that biology could do better.


a) Synapses are slow. Selective unidirectional junctions would work faster.


b) We forget stuff, and stuff gets compacted. Some people are better at remembering than others. You can imagine that a selective breeding program might produce a breed of humans with superior memory.
they miss the point of evolution...its not a planned thing...we only use 10% of our brain capacity just now..and who's to say that we wont evolve other chambers or a quicker nervous system in the future ..if it works well it will become the norm
i believe false because our brains are still evolving and i think its not possible to tell yet.
There has been a number of scientific papers published about the limit in the size of the human brain.





Particularly


Hofman, M.A. (1989). On the evolution and geometry of the brain in mammals. Prog. Neurobiol. 32, 137-158.


Hofman, M.A. (2000). Brain evolution in hominids: are we at the end of the road? In Evolutionary Anatomy of the Primate Cerebral Cortex (eds. Falk, D. %26amp; Gibson, K.) Cambridge Univ. Press, in press.


Prothero, J. (1994). Scaling of cortical neuron density and white matter volume in mammals. J. Brain Res. 38, 513-524.


Ringo, J.L., Doty, R.W., Demeter, S. %26amp; Simard, P.Y. (1994). Time is of essence: a conjecture that hemispheric specialization arises from interhemispheric conduction delay. Cerebral Cortex 4, 331-343





The research does indicate that any increase will be unproductive, due the declining capability of neuronal integration and increased conduction time.


There is also another reason that there is a limit to brain size and that's how difficult it would be to give birth to anything bigger.


Big brains have a cost and that's high infant and mother mortality rates.


It's not so obvious now with the standard of medical care we now enjoy, but if you go back to pre 20th century mortality figures it makes for some pretty grim reading





But as it has been suggested, just because the brain can't get any bigger there can't be any improvements within the brain, but a recent study from Chung-I Wu, at the University of Chicago seems to indicate that the brain is not evolving very quickly at all.





Even more depressingly, we may not want our brains changing much for other reasons as well





http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200鈥?/a>





So quite possibly the only way we'll get smarter is by taking over from evolution and doing it ourselves. Either by genetic engineering or by other technological means.





Badwolf - the story that we only use 10% of our brain is a myth.More details here :





http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/te鈥?/a>


http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10pe鈥?/a>


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10%25_of_br鈥?/a>
Can you give a link, or more information so we can find this documentary?





That doesn't sound right, but it's hard to say without seeing what they are saying.








BTW, in defense of good documentaries, like on the Discovery Channel, or NatGeo, most are quite clear about when they are going from known science to speculation. But this is where your basic school science education needs to kick in, and you have to pay attention to phrases like ';most scientists think X'; vs. ';professor Jones thinks the answer may be Y.';





Speculation is part of science. That's what a hypothesis is. It starts with one scientist hypothesizing an answer to some question, based on some evidence. Other scientists evaluate that evidence and agree, disagree, or modify the hypothesis. If enough scientists agree, then it grows from a hypothesis (a speculation) into a full-fledged theory (no longer a speculation) where a significant percentage of the scientists who have evaluated the concept agree that there is abundant evidence for it. A theory is as good as it gets. A theory cannot graduate further to a 'fact' or 'law' (by being ';proven';) ... a theory cannot ';become'; a fact because a theory is an *explanation* for facts.





(BTW, this is why the words ';only a theory'; are the three most scientifically illiterate words in the English language. It is the sign of someone who has *no clue* what the scientific method is, or the fact that a 'theory' is the highest compliment an explanatory idea can achieve.)





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'Former MN Science Teacher' writes:





%26gt;';Interesting. If it's true (';if the brain gets any bigger it takes longer for the electric signals to reach another part of the brain and becomes less efficient or slower than our close to perfectly sized brains!';) then that is one more piece of evidence that God is the Creator!';





This shows beautifully that Creationists get to be Creationists by not thinking about things very hard.





If it is true that the human brain can't get any bigger ... then this would be perfectly consistent with evolution by natural selection. It would mean simply that any tiny increase in the size of the brain would be *detrimental*, and therefore would not propagate into the gene pool.





In other words, evolution by natural selection *predicts* that if *ANY* trait has an optimal size, then natural selection will find it. Because once it reaches that optimal size ... where any increase or decrease would be a *detriment* ... then natural selection MUST stabilize on that value.





It's not that complicated UNLESS you are trying really, really hard not to understand things.