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Carving the mind at its homologous joints

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Abstract

My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I provide an analysis of the notion of cognitive homology. In contrast with the well-known concept of structural (or morphological) homology in biology—defined as the same structure in different animals regardless of form and function—the notion of cognitive homology captures the idea that the basic cognitive contribution of a given homologous brain structure tends to remain stable over long evolutionary time scales. Second, I argue that this notion provides a powerful conceptual tool for the study of cognition. Since a cognitive homology will often consist of an evolutionarily conserved relationship between a homologous brain structure and its basic cognitive contribution, such structure–function map**s can be conceived as basic building blocks of human cognition.

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Notes

  1. This term is defined in Section “Cognitive homology” below.

  2. This example is taken from Amundson and Lauder (1994, p. 454).

  3. Bock and Wahlert (1965) emphasize the need for a clear distinction between these two senses of the term ‘function’ in biology, but especially in the fields of functional anatomy and evolutionary biology. They define the workings of a structure (they use the term ‘functions’) as the “class of predicates which include all physical and chemical properties arising from its form (i.e., its material composition and arrangement thereof) including all properties arising from increasing levels of organization” (p. 274), and define the uses of a structure (they use the term ‘biological roles’) as “the uses of the [structure] by the organism in the course of its life history” (p. 278).

  4. A clear example of the long term stability of the workings of homologous structures is the case, discussed earlier, of the arrangement of bones in the bat wing and the human arm. This is not to say, however, that the workings of homologous structures cannot, and do not, change in the course of evolution. More on this in the next section.

  5. For recent philosophical analyses of the concept of functional homology that do not tie it to the concept of structural homology, see Ereshefsky (2007), Love (2007), and Matthen (2007).

  6. See Bergeron (2010) for an earlier discussion of the notion of cognitive homology.

  7. I give two specific examples of this in Section “The amygdala” and Section “Temporal and parietal projections to Broca’s region” below.

  8. A particularly striking example of this is the recent discovery, based on connectivity and gene expression analyses, that the neural circuitry of the avian and mammalian telencephalon (pallium in birds, cerebral cortex in mammals) is fundamentally similar, and is therefore likely to perform equivalent operations (Briscoe et al. 2018, Karten 2015). This despite the fact that the bird pallium is organized into nuclei, as opposed to the 6 layers of the mammalian cortex. These findings not only support the hypothesis that parts of the bird pallium and mammalian cortex are homologous structures, but also suggest that their basic cognitive contribution might have been conserved throughout vertebrate evolution.

  9. An alternative possibility, discussed in Section “Cognitive homologies as basic building blocks of human cognition”, is that a brain structure may support more than one set of cognitive workings, and each could contribute to a subset of all the cognitive functions it participates in.

  10. In humans, the map** of these pathways is done by diffusion tensor imaging, a method which, unlike the autoradiographic method, does not allow the identification of the precise origins and terminations of long fibers. Nevertheless, the pathways identified in human studies are consistent with the findings in the macaque monkey (Frey et al. 2008).

  11. An anonymous referee suggested that the kind of functional analysis proposed here appears to be similar to both Daniel Dennett’s homuncular functionalism (Dennett 1978) and William Lycan’s teleological functionalism (Lycan 1987). My approach is similar to theirs in that I take the mind/brain to be composed of systems and subsystems, each of which contributing to the functioning of the whole. It differs, however, in that my analysis of the basic cognitive contribution of these systems and subsystems is importantly non-teleological. In this sense, my view is much closer to the account of functional analysis provided by Robert Cummins (1975).

  12. If the two cognitive homologies were to use distinct parts of Broca’s region, such that the mechanisms underlying the second cognitive homology does not reuse the same neural elements, then it might be better to think of Broca’s region as two distinct homologous structures each supporting its own cognitive homology.

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Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledge helpful comments and criticism from members of audiences at the Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, Carleton University, and the University of Ottawa.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Vincent Bergeron

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Bergeron, V. Carving the mind at its homologous joints. Biol Philos 36, 36 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-021-09812-3

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