QBI Seminar: Deep Time and Modern Brains
Event Details
- Date:
- Wednesday, 09 September 2015 - Wednesday, 09 September 2015
- Time:
- 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
- Room:
- QBI Level 7 Auditorium
- UQ Location:
- Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Ms Deirdre Wilson
- Phone:
- 66300
- Email:
- d.wilson5@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Queensland Brain Institute
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Professor Nicholas Strausfeld FRS,
Regents Professor, Department of Neuroscience, University of Arizona, USA
Title: Deep Time and Modern Brains
Abstract:
Have circuits that mediate comparable behaviors in an insect and a mouse evolved independently by convergence or do they derive from a common ancestral circuit and therefore genealogically correspond? Simplistically, what parts of our own brains might be shared by the brains of beetles?
Hennigian cladistics has been put to good use in resolving evolutionary trends in brain organization across taxa – particularly arthropods – but propositions arising from cladistics about the origins of neural systems are difficult to substantiate. Recently, however, some predictions have been upheld from observations of fossil brains and sensory systems that belong to stem taxa from the lower Cambrian. Such evidence suggests that eyes typical of modern arthropods as well as visual systems supporting predatory behaviors were already in place 520 million years ago. Neural systems, which today characterize the three major groups of arthropods, had also appeared and have since been maintained throughout evolutionary history.
The divergence of certain protostomes and deuterostomes from a common ancestor is likely to have occurred more than 550 million years ago, at least 30 million years before the formation of the first animal fossils. Thus, because of the lack of fossil evidence, other avenues are used to consider possible brain homologies across phyla: these avenues include comparative anatomy, gene expression, pathology and development. Although the last common ancestor of protostomes and deuterostomes is likely to have had a simple morphology, cumulative evidence suggest that its brain was likely to have possessed the ground pattern organization of circuits that we, beetles, and even flatworms indeed possess, and which are required for processes such as allocentric memory and behavioral choice.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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