This is a potentially controversial issue, since there is no consensus yet on the evolution of the brain, beyond a very coarse-grained chronology. Broadly speaking, neocortical areas are new, hence the term “neo-cortex”. But among cortical areas, there is still some disagreement about which areas emerged most recently in primates.
Based on what we know about development in the womb, along with structural findings, my labmates, who are neuroanatomists, suggest that the “eulaminate” areas — the ones that have sharply defined layers — may be the most recent, evolutionarily, compared to the “agranular” and “dysgranular” cortices, which have less sharply defined layers. These less sharply defined areas are also labeled as “limbic”.
“Although both organisms and machines operate towards the attainment of particular ends that is, both are purposive systems the former are intrinsically purposive whereas the latter are extrinsically purposive. A machine is extrinsically purposive in the sense that it works towards an end that is external to itself; that is, it does not serve its own interests but those of its maker or user. An organism, on the other hand, is intrinsically purposive in the sense that its activities are directed towards the maintenance of its own organization; that is, it acts on its own behalf.”
In this section the author explains how the software/hardware idea found its way into developmental biology.
“The situation changed considerably in the mid-twentieth century with the advent of modern computing and the introduction of the conceptual distinction between software and hardware. This theoretical innovation enabled the construction of a new kind of machine, the computer, which contains algorithmic sequences of coded instructions or programs that are executed by a central processing unit. In a computer, the software is totally independent from the hardware that runs it. A program can be transferred from one computer and run in another. Moreover, the execution of a program is always carried out in exactly the same fashion, regardless of the number of times it is run and of the hardware that runs it. The computer is thus a machine with Cartesian and Laplacian overtones. It is Cartesian because the software/hardware distinction echoes the soul/body dualism: the computer has an immaterial ‘soul’ (the software) that governs the operations of a material ‘body’ (the hardware). And it is Laplacian because the execution of a program is completely deterministic and fully predictable, at least in principle. These and other features made the computer a very attractive theoretical model for those concerned with elucidating the role of genes in development in the early days of molecular biology.”
I was asked the question “From a scientific point of view, how are our tastes created?” Here’s my answer.
“There’s no accounting for taste!”
Typically we explain taste — in food, music, movies, art — in terms of culture, upbringing, and sheer chance. In recent years there have been several attempts to explain taste from biological perspectives: either neuroscience or evolutionary psychology. In my opinion these types of explanations are vague enough to always sound true, but they rarely contain enough detail to account for the specific tastes of individuals or groups. Still, there’s much food for thought in these scientific proto-theories of taste and aesthetics.
[An early aesthete?]
Let’s look at the evolutionary approach first. An evolutionary explanation of taste assumes that human preferences arise from natural selection. We like salt and sugar and fat, according to this logic, because it was beneficial for our ancestors to seek out foods with these tastes. We like landscape scenes involving greenery and water bodies because such landscapes were promising environments for our wandering ancestors. This line of thinking is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go that far. After all, there are plenty of people who don’t much care for deep-fried salty-sweet foods. And many people who take art seriously quickly tire of clichéd landscape paintings.
[Are you a homo sapien? They you must love this. 😉 ]
Evolutionary psychology can provide broad explanations for why humans as a species tend to like certain things more than others, but it really provides us with no map for navigating differencesin taste between individuals and groups. (These obvious, glaring limitations of evolutionary psychology have not prevented the emergence of a cottage industry of pop science books that explain everything humans do as consequences of the incidents and accidents that befell our progenitor apes on the savannahs of Africa.)
Explanations involving the neural and cognitive sciences get closer to what we are really after — an explanation of differences in taste — but not by much. Neuroscientific explanations are essentially half way between cultural theories and evolutionary theories. We like things because the ‘pleasure centers’ in our brains ‘light up’ when we encounter them. And the pleasure centers are shaped by experience (on the time scale of a person’s life), and by natural selection (on the time scale of the species). Whatever we inherit because of natural selection is presumably common to all humans, so differences in taste must be traced to differences in experience, which become manifest in the brain as differences in neural connectivity and activity. If your parents played the Beatles for you as a child, and conveyed their pleasure to you, then associative learning might cause the synapses in your brain that link sound patterns with emotional reactions to be gradually modified, so that playing ‘Hey Jude’ now triggers a cascade of neural events that generate the subjective feeling of enjoyment.
[What’s not to love about the Beatles?]
But there is so much more to the story of enjoyment. Not everyone likes their parents’ music. In English-speaking countries there is a decades-old stereotype of the teenager who seeks out music to piss off his or her parents. And many of us have a friend who insists on listening to music that no one else seems to have heard of. What is the neural basis of this fascinating phenomenon?
We must now enter extremely speculative territory. One of the most thought-provoking ‘theories’ of aesthetics that I have come across was proposed by a machine learning researcher named Jürgen Schmidhuber. He has a provocative way of summing up his theory: Interestingness is the first derivative of beauty.
What he means is that we are not simply drawn to things that are beautiful or pleasurable. We are also drawn to things that are interesting: things that somehow intrigue us and capture our attention. These things, according to Schmidhuber, entice us with the possibility of enhancing our categories of experience. In his framework, humans and animals are constantly seeking to understand the environment, and in order to do this, they must be drawn to the edge of what they already know. Experiences that are already fully understood offer no opportunity for new learning. Experiences that are completely beyond comprehension are similarly useless. But experiences that are in the sweet spot of interestingness are not boringly familiar — but they are not bafflingly alien either. By seeking out experiences in this ‘border territory’, we expand our horizons, gaining a new understanding of the world.
For example, I’m a Beatles fan, but I don’t listen to the Beatles that often. I am, however, intrigued by music that is ‘Beatlesque’: such music can lead me in new directions, and also reflect back on the Beatles, giving me a deeper appreciation of their music.
The basic intuition of this theory is well-supported by research in animals and humans. Animals all have some baseline level of curiosity. Lab rats will thoroughly investigate a new object introduced into their cages. Novelty seems to have a gravitational pull for organisms.
But again, there are differences even in this tendency. Some people are perfectly content to eat the same foods over and over again, or listen to the same songs or artists. At the other extreme we find the freaks, the hipsters, the critics, the obsessives, and all the assorted avant garde seekers of “the Shock of the New”.
Linking back to evolutionary speculation, all we can really say is that even the desire for novelty is a variable trait in human populations. (Actually it’s multiple traits: I am far more adventurous when it comes to music than food.) Perhaps a healthy society needs its ‘conservatives’ and its ‘progressives’ in the domain of taste and aesthetic experience. Group selection — natural selection operating on tribes, societies and cultures — is still somewhat controversial in mainstream evolutionary biology, so to go any further in our theories of taste we have to be willing to wander on the wild fringes of scientific thought…
… those fringes are, after all, where everything interesting happens! 🙂
Neurologism 
