Did The Brain Evolve, or Was It Created?
Did the brain evolve, or was it created?
“The human brain is staggeringly complex and the product of millions of years of evolution”—YourGenome.org
“We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV). The ability to develop thoughts and learn has to have come from God. The brain, where thoughts are developed, is far too complex to have evolved without design. Recent discoveries continue to give evidence of this.
“Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections.
A neuron extends an axon to make contact with other neurons. A team of more than 100 scientists recorded the cellular activity and mapped the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain.
The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring . . .
. . . a team of more than 100 scientists . . . by recording the cellular activity and mapping the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain — less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video.
“This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Dr. Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimeter of brain . . .
. . . a neuron sends a spike of voltage down a long arm, called an axon. Each axon makes contact with tiny branches, or dendrites, of neighboring neurons. Some neurons excite their neighbors into firing voltage spikes of their own. Some quiet other neurons.
Human thought somehow emerges from this mix of excitation and inhibition. But how that happens has remained a tremendous mystery, largely because scientists have been able to study only a few neurons at a time.
One type of cell mapped by the scientists, called a Martinotti cell, sends out inhibitory signals that dampen the activity of other neurons in the brain.
In recent decades, technological advances have allowed scientists to start mapping brains in their entirety. In 1986, British researchers published the circuitry of a tiny worm, made up of 302 neurons. In subsequent years, researchers charted bigger brains, such as the 140,000 neurons in the brain of a fly.
The researchers zeroed in on a portion of the mouse brain that receives signals from the eyes and reconstructs what the animal sees. In the first stage of the research, the team recorded the activity of neurons in that region as it showed a mouse videos of different landscapes.
The researchers then dissected the mouse brain and doused the cubic millimeter with hardening chemicals. Then they shaved off 28,000 slices from the block of tissue, capturing an image of each one. Computers were trained to recognize the outlines of cells in each slice and link the slices together into three-dimensional shapes. All told, the team charted 200,000 neurons and other types of brain cells, along with 523 million neural connections.”—“An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible”, New York Times, April 9, 2025
This new information helps us to answer the question, “Did the brain evolve, or was it created?”
“The brain is the most complicated object in the universe. It contains more than 89 billion neurons, each connected to around 7,000 other neurons that send between ten and 100 signals every second. The development of AI was based on the brain and the concept of neurons working together.”—-The Conversation, February 7, 2024
After considering these recent discoveries, we’re better equipped to answer the question, “Did the brain evolve, or was it created?”
“I will give thanks to you because I have been so amazingly and miraculously made. Your works are miraculous, and my soul is fully aware of this” (Psalm 139:14 GWT). The longer researchers study the brain, the more amazing their discoveries become. With each new discovery, they are simply proving that the brain could not have evolved. It had to have been created by God.
2 thoughts on “Did The Brain Evolve, or Was It Created?”
BA1: Did the brain evolve, or was it created?
GW1: It evolved. It was not created.
BA1: “The human brain is staggeringly complex and the product of millions of years of evolution”—YourGenome.org
GW1: True
BA1: “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV).
GW1: That’s not even a relevant verse.
BA1: The ability to develop thoughts and learn has to have come from God.
GW1: False. God doesn’t exist, and this has been proven.
BA1: The brain, where thoughts are developed, is far too complex to have evolved without design.
GW1: False. It did evolve.
BA1: Recent discoveries continue to give evidence of this. “Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections.
GW1: The mouse and human brains both evolved.
BA1: A neuron extends an axon to make contact with other neurons. A team of more than 100 scientists recorded the cellular activity and mapped the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain.
GW1: True
BA1: The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring . . .
GW1: True
BA1: . . . a team of more than 100 scientists . . . by recording the cellular activity and mapping the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain — less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video.
“This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Dr. Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimeter of brain . . . . . . a neuron sends a spike of voltage down a long arm, called an axon. Each axon makes contact with tiny branches, or dendrites, of neighboring neurons. Some neurons excite their neighbors into firing voltage spikes of their own. Some quiet other neurons.
GW1: True
BA1: Human thought somehow emerges from this mix of excitation and inhibition. But how that happens has remained a tremendous mystery, largely because scientists have been able to study only a few neurons at a time.
GW1: Mostly true, partly false. Scientists have been able to study thousands of neurons at a time.
BA1: One type of cell mapped by the scientists, called a Martinotti cell, sends out inhibitory signals that dampen the activity of other neurons in the brain.
In recent decades, technological advances have allowed scientists to start mapping brains in their entirety. In 1986, British researchers published the circuitry of a tiny worm, made up of 302 neurons. In subsequent years, researchers charted bigger brains, such as the 140,000 neurons in the brain of a fly.
The researchers zeroed in on a portion of the mouse brain that receives signals from the eyes and reconstructs what the animal sees. In the first stage of the research, the team recorded the activity of neurons in that region as it showed a mouse videos of different landscapes.
The researchers then dissected the mouse brain and doused the cubic millimeter with hardening chemicals. Then they shaved off 28,000 slices from the block of tissue, capturing an image of each one. Computers were trained to recognize the outlines of cells in each slice and link the slices together into three-dimensional shapes. All told, the team charted 200,000 neurons and other types of brain cells, along with 523 million neural connections.”—“An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible”, New York Times, April 9, 2025
GW1: This report sounds correct to me.
BA1: This new information helps us to answer the question, “Did the brain evolve, or was it created?”
GW1: Not very much.
BA1: “The brain is the most complicated object in the universe.
GW1: As far as we know now.
BA1: It contains more than 89 billion neurons, each connected to around 7,000 other neurons that send between ten and 100 signals every second. The development of AI was based on the brain and the concept of neurons working together.”—-The Conversation, February 7, 2024
GW1: Seems correct.
BA1: After considering these recent discoveries, we’re better equipped to answer the question, “Did the brain evolve, or was it created?”
GW1: It evolved.
BA1: “I will give thanks to you because I have been so amazingly and miraculously made. Your works are miraculous, and my soul is fully aware of this” (Psalm 139:14 GWT).
GW1: This is just the belief of an ancient theist. But we now know that God does not exist. This has been proven.
BA1: The longer researchers study the brain, the more amazing their discoveries become.
GW1: Yep.
BA1: With each new discovery, they are simply proving that the brain could not have evolved. It had to have been created by God.
GW1: False. The brain evolved. God does not exist. This has been proven.
BA1: With each new discovery, they are simply proving that the brain could not have evolved. It had to have been created by God.
GW1: False. The brain evolved. God does not exist. This has been proven.
BA—No, there is zero evidence of brain evolution.
The following from an article in “The Guardian” tells about renowned scientist Richard Lwontin and his thoughts about the brain:
Lewontin was on fantastic curmudgeonly form at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston on Sunday in a session on the evolution of human cognition. His campaign against pan-selectionism was in evidence. “Evolution is not the evolution of traits but the evolution of organisms,” he said.
But he had an even more sobering message, summed up in the title of his talk – “Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition”. He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.
The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can’t be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.
Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. “I don’t have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means,” Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?
He is even sceptical that palaeoanthropologists can be sure which species walked upright and which dragged their knuckles. Upright posture is crucial for freeing up the hands to do other useful things.
He is also not convinced that we can use current selective forces to infer what natural selection was doing to our ancestors. He used the example of the butterfly wing. The smallest wings provide no lift at all and so could not have been selected originally for flight. One idea is that they started off as structures to regulate body temperature and were later adapted by natural selection for lift. Maybe something like that happened for human brain size.
All in all, despite thousands of scientific papers and countless National Geographic front covers, we have not made much progress in understanding how our most complicated and mysterious organ came about.
“We are in very serious difficulties in trying to reconstruct the evolution of cognition,” said Lewontin. “I’m not even sure what we mean by the problem.”