This is the first of two distinct, but interrelated books which seeks to offer an alternative evolutionary scenario to our current standard Neo-Darwinian model by way of a scientifically-guided thought experiment. Book One is based upon the accumulative research spanning the past 200 years of a diverse range of highly respected scientists who have offered distinctively different pieces of the evolutionary puzzle and these are assessed in the light of our most current understanding of biological complexity and Book Two applies these alternative and rather novel, but scientifically supported evolutionary scenarios to what we currently know regarding the ancient environmental and fossil record. The need for a radical rethink of biological and evolutionary complexity and a solution to the many problems embedded in our current Neo-Darwinian model, became clearly apparent as a result of delving deeply (and unintentionally I might add) into the vast and often ideologically invested topic of biological evolution and discovering, according to the opinions of an increasingly alarming number of well-credentialed scientists, that an alterna...

Professor Denis Noble (Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of Computational Physiology) sums up the situation quite succinctly in the following: PHYSIOLOGY IS ROCKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF BIOLOGY In this article, I will show that all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved. Moreover, they have been disproved in ways that raise the tantalizing prospect of a totally new synthesis;... Noble (2013, Introduction) As the author took a rather broad and interdisciplinary approach with an emphasis on the historical context, she quickly came to the realisation that this ‘tantalising new synthesis’ is actually not that new. For instance, our more modern and recent insights into biological complexity are actually lending increasing support to some of the oldest and particularly to some of the most historically obscured alternative views of evolutionary complexity....

Table of Contents PREFACE Why I’m not qualified to write this book, but reasons to read it anyway INTRODUCTION EVOLUTION BY OTHER MEANS...? CHAPTER ONE D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 – 1948) EVOLUTIONARY SCALING LAWS OF LIFE The Matryoshka Principle CHAPTER TWO Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) THE TURING ENIGMA Morphogenesis and the other coding system of life CHAPTER THREE Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith Turing (Born 1931) THE POSSIBLE ORIGINS OF NATURE’S FIRST CRYSTALINE (QUANTUM) COMPUTERS CHAPTER FOUR Karl Ernst Von Baer (1792-1876) EMBRYOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT MIRRORS DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPECIES ON DIFFERENT SCALES CHAPTER FIVE Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) THE ORIGINAL NATURAL EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF DESCENT – BY EPIGENETIC MODIFICATION CHAPTER SIX Hugo De Vries (1848 – 1935) LEAPS of EVOLUTIONARY NOVELTY – via HYBRIDATION? CHAPTER SEVEN Carl Woese (1928 –2012) THE WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW.HGT) LITTLE HYBRIDS GET EVERYWHERE CHAPTER EIGHT Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) MICRO MERGERS AND SYMBIOSIS CHAPTER NINE Donald Irving Williamson (1922- 2016) HYBRID-METAMORPHOSIS? CHAPTER TEN Barbara McClin...

“I like the idea of mental synthesis very much ... I quite agree that language evolved in a way that facilitates synthesis and transmission of the synthesized mental image. ... I don't think there can be much doubt, purely conceptually, that language was a late arrival. Whatever mutation provided the key to it would have had no selectional advantage at all, and would have just been a useless “organ,” if it could not have linked up to pre-existing thought systems.” —NOAM CHOMSKY, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, MIT “Boston University’s Andrey Vyshedskiy brings a neuroscientist’s perspective to the discussion of human mental history in On the Origin of the Human Mind.” —Scientific American Mind (July 2009) “I found the Mental Synthesis theory stimulating and provocative. The author puts forward an explanation for the evolution of the human mind based on predator detection that led to increased visual mental analysis which set the stage for visual mental syntheses. The author presents an impressive array of recent research on the brain with up to date references that are highly relevant to his case and the origin of mi...

Introduction While studying the neuroscience of consciousness, I was struck with certain facts about mental imagery that seemed to shed some light on the process of the evolution of the human mind. The origin of the human mind remains one of the greatest mysteries of all times. The last 150 years, since Charles Darwin proposed that species evolve under the influence of natural selection (Darwin C, 1859), have been marked by great discoveries. Molecular biology described the genetic principles underlying species evolution and identified specific changes in the human genome since our lineage split off from the chimpanzee line about six million years ago (Somel M, 2013). Great paleontological discoveries have filled that span of six million years of human evolution with a number of intermediate species that display both human- and ape-like characteristics. However, the discussion of the evolution of the human intellect and specific forces that shaped the underlying brain evolution is as vigorous today as it was in Darwin’s times. At the center of the predicament about the origin of the human mind lies the question of human uniqu...

Introduction 1 Part 1. Neuroscience of imagination 5 Chapter 1. Object encoding in the brain 6 Chapter 2. Neuronal synchronization 26 Chapter 3. Imagining new objects 32 Chapter 4. External manifestations of mental synthesis 39 Chapter 5. Humans versus animals 80 Chapter 6: Overall Discussion of Part 1 108 Part 2. Evolution of the Human Mind 135 Chapter 7. Introduction: a quick guide to paleoanthropology 136 Chapter 8. Cognitive evolution through the prism of paleontological evidence 160 Chapter 9. Evolutionary pressure drives better predator detection 191 Chapter 10. Overall Discussion of Part 2 219 Part 3. The “last” mutation 254 Chapter 11. The role of the prefrontal cortex in the process of mental synthesis 256 Chapter 12. Evolution of the prefrontal cortex 277 Conclusions 327 A wish list of experiments 339 Appendix 367 Acknowledgments 400 Bibliography 401 Illustrations credits 428 About the author 430 ...