Brain homology and function: An uneasy alliance
Section snippets
The hippocampal formation of mammals and birds
The topographical position of the hippocampal formation ranges from ventrolateral in humans to dorsomedial in marsupials, but Elliot Smith [3] recognized long ago that a dorsomedial hippocampus is probably primitive for mammals. Therefore, he reasoned, the dorsomedial telencephalon of reptiles and birds (i.e., sauropsids) is probably homologous to the mammalian hippocampal formation (HF).
Since then, several connectional similarities between the mammalian HF and the sauropsid dorsomedial
The theory of functional encephalization
Toward the end of the 19th century, the question of whether specific behavioral functions could be localized to restricted portions of the telencephalon was hotly debated [45]. Proponents of the “doctrine of cortical localization” pointed to data showing that restricted cortical lesions caused specific behavioral deficits, but their opponents argued just as forcefully that even large telencephalic lesions produced only minor and temporary impairments. The cortical localizationists ultimately
A skeptic’s take on extrapolationism
Even someone skeptical of the extrapolationist paradigm must acknowledge that homologous structures, be they molecules or brain regions, often do have similar functions. But is the functional similarity due to common ancestry per se, or simply to structural similarity, which also tends to go along with homology? In my opinion, functional similarity is far more closely associated with structural similarity than with homology. Convergent structural similarities generally point to functional
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