ABSTRACT
Sitting on top of the evolutionary process is the human brain. Its vast complexity, its capacity for complex problem solving, for inventiveness, for everything we know and appreciate about human cognition represents the finest achievement of the wondrous blind processes of selection that have gone on for millions of years. Many scientists have approached trying to gain clues to the understanding of the human brain’s special mechanisms of action by studying other species. Fair game for this enterprise includes comparisons between bugs and beasts of all types and kinds. Everything from our genetic mechanisms to the capacity to sleep, to feel, to remember, to transmit retinal information to visual cortex and a myriad of other processes have all been enlightened by careful animal experimentation over the years. Some have even seen in these studies so many similarities in neural structures that proposals are commonly put forward that animals have perceptual and cognitive process much like our own — indeed, a consciousness much like our own. Such views are usually qualified by the assertion that whatever differences do exist in conscious processes between species can be easily explained by the greater size of the human brain. Somehow having more neural cells is thought to produce a greater computational capacity that in turn yields that special quality of human conscious experience.
