To be sure, ASPM isn't the gene responsible for building big brains - there's no such single gene. But it's critical to the process, and the primate line has almost certainly benefited from distinct changes in ASPM.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There are many ways in which genes influence the brain.
You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data. But there's no theory. There's a little, wimpy box on top there.
Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.
What causes autism? As far as we know in 2013, there is no single gene or single environmental factor that accounts for the more than 1 million Americans with ASDs.
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.
It could be - and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don't like it - that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.
When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.
The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.
You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human.
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