Neural Darwinism

Neural Darwinism is a biological, and more specifically Darwinian and selectionist, approach to understanding global brain function, originally proposed by American biologist, researcher and Nobel-Prize recipient Gerald Maurice Edelman (July 1, 1929 – May 17, 2014). Edelman's 1987 book Neural Darwinism introduced the public to the theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS) – which is the core theory underlying Edelman's explanation of global brain function. Owing to the book title, TNGS is most commonly referred to as the theory of neural Darwinism, although TNGS has roots going back to Edelman and Mountcastle's 1978 book, The Mindful Brain – Cortical Organization and the Group-selective Theory of Higher Brain Function – where Edelman's colleague, the American neurophysiologist and anatomist Vernon B. Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015), describes the columnar structure of the cortical groups within the neocortex, while Edelman develops his argument for selective processes operating among degenerate primary repertoires of neuronal groups. The development of neural Darwinism was deeply influenced by Edelman's work in the fields of immunology, embryology, and neuroscience, as well as his methodological commitment to the idea of selection as the unifying foundation of the biological sciences. Neural Darwinism is really the neural part of the natural philosophical and explanatory framework Edelman employs for much of his work – Somatic selective systems. Neural Darwinism is the backdrop for a comprehensive set of biological hypotheses and theories Edelman, and his team, devised that seek to reconcile vertebrate and mammalian neural morphology, the facts of developmental and evolutionary biology, and the theory of natural selection into a detailed model of real-time neural and cognitive function that is biological in its orientation – and, built from the bottom-up, utilizing the variation that shows up in nature, in contrast to computational and algorithmic approaches that view variation as noise in a system of logic circuits with point-to-point connectivity.