Re: An anatomically comprehensive atlas of the adult human brain transcriptome Nature 489, 391–399 (20 September 2012) doi:10.1038/nature11405
See: “Human brains share consistent genetic blueprint and possess enormous biochemical complexity.” September 19th, 2012.
Excerpt: “Despite controlling a diversity of functions, ranging from visual perception to planning and problem-solving, the cortex is highly homogeneous relative to other brain regions. This suggests that the same basic functional elements are used throughout the cortex and that understanding how one area works in detail will uncover fundamentals that apply to the other areas, as well.”
My comment: It seems pertinent to offer this summary so that human ethologists, evolutionary psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and theorists from other disciplines might better understand the fact that no domain-specific modules exist, and that the concept of domain-specific mental modules lies outside the context of what is already known about adaptive evolution via ecological, social, neurogenic, and socio-cognitive niche construction.
There is nothing about the enormous biochemical complexity of the human brain that suggests its complexity could be reduced to a ridiculous theory in which domain specificity was adaptive in any species from microbe to man. For contrast, nutrient chemical-dependent and pheromone-dependent adaptive evolution ensure that the human brain evolved in accord with the epigenetic tweaking of immense gene networks in superorganisms that solve problems through the exchange and the selective cancellation and modification of signals.
These superorganisms can be microbes, invertebrates, or vertebrates as it is now clearer how an environmental drive evolved from that of food ingestion in unicellular organisms to that of socialization in insects with no random mutations required to link sensory cause directly to the intracellular signaling and stochastic gene expression that is required in species from microbes to man.
James V. Kohl detailedl how quantized energy-dependent microRNA biogenesis links the pheromone-controlled physiology of reproduction to biophysically constrained viral latency and healthy longevity. Links from what organisms eat to the enzyme-dependent metabolism of food also link metabolic networks to microRNA-mediated genetic networks in the context of RNA interference. Drug therapies alter RNA interference by altering cell type differentiation in all cells of all individuals of all species. For comparison, during the past 26 years, Kohl has detailed how the chemistry of protein folding is biophysically constrained at every level of biological organization by conserved molecular mechanisms.