Natural Selection in the Brain

This chapter explores the possibility that natural selection takes place in the brain. We review the theoretical and experimental evidence for selectionist and competitive dynamics within the brain. We propose that in order to explain human problem-solving, selectionist mechanisms demand extension to encompass the full Darwinian dynamic that arises from introducing replication of neuronal units of selection. The algorithmic advantages of replication of representations that occur in natural selection are not immediately obvious to the neuroscientist when compared with the kind of search normally proposed by instrumental learning models, i.e. stochastic hill-climbing. Indeed, the notion of replicator dynamics in the brain remains controversial and unproven. It starts from early thoughts on the evolution of ideas, and extends to behaviourist notions of selection of state-action pairs, memetics, synaptic replicators, and hexagonal cortical replicators. Related but distinct concepts include neural selectionism, and synfire chains. Our contribution here is to introduce three possible neuronal units of selection and show how they relate to each other. First, we introduce the Adams synapse that can replicate (by quantal budding) and mutate by attaching to nearby postsynaptic neurons rather than to the current postsynaptic neuron. More generally, we show that Oja’s formulation of Hebbian learning is isomorphic to Eigen’s replicator equations, meaning that Hebbian learning can be thought of as a special case of natural selection. Second, we introduce a synaptic group replicator, a pattern of synaptic connectivity that can be copied to other neuronal groups. Third, we introduce an activity replicator that is a pattern of bistable neuronal activities that can be copied between vectors of neurons. This last type of replicator is not composed of the first two kinds, but may be dependent upon them. We suggest how these replicators may take part in diverse aspects of cognition such as causal inference, human problem solving, and memory.

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