Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Brain Day, Part 2: Size
Size may or may not matter, but it's measurable, and in some cases may lead to discoveries of other things.
Brain size has been used as a measure of many things, some not very nice, but it is clear that the expansion of the brain was critical to human evolution. A gene thought to have catalyzed (or better: allowed) this expansion, ASPM, seems to have set things in motion far earlier than previously supposed (abstract here).
As evolution progressed, ASPM seems to have grown longer, proportional to increased brain size. This is a really cool use of genomics technology. I may write more about it later when my own brain starts working again.
Brain size has been used as a measure of many things, some not very nice, but it is clear that the expansion of the brain was critical to human evolution. A gene thought to have catalyzed (or better: allowed) this expansion, ASPM, seems to have set things in motion far earlier than previously supposed (abstract here).
As evolution progressed, ASPM seems to have grown longer, proportional to increased brain size. This is a really cool use of genomics technology. I may write more about it later when my own brain starts working again.
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