Circuits

Circuits in the Brain

The brain of a human contains a network of organized and interconnected nerve cells that is so vast, it cannot even conceive of the number. This fully organized network consists of cells communicating with other cells in order to create thought, love, emotions, touch, regulate an incomprehensibly complex body, perceive through the senses and perform uncounted other functions. 

Each of these nerve cells is electrical. Each has a particular purpose and each has been microscopically placed into its own particular position in this vast network for a purpose.

The regulation of these connections is so precise that the cells contain timing devices to cause electrical impulses to reach their destination at exactly the right moment.

The number of organized, timed and hard-wired connections in just the cerebral cortex is in the trillions and the number of connections serviced by each one can be as many as 100,000.

The cerebral cortex includes a population of billions of neurons, each making thousands of synaptic contacts with its neighbors.

Eugene M. Izhikevich, Joseph A. Gally and Ger ald M. Edelm, Spike-timing Dynamics of Neuronal Groups, Oxford Journals Life Sciences & Medicine Cerebral Cortex Volume 14, Issue 8 Pp. 933-944 (2004)

Purkinje cells located in the cerebellum each receive 100,000 separate and distinct inputs from other cells, each receiving 100,000 separate electrical codes.

See S. Raymon y Cajal, Histologie du Systeme Nerveux de l'Homme et des Vertegres. Paris: Maloine, 1909-1911; reprinted, Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1972.

The number of these organized electrical connections in the entire brain is immense.

The human brain is stuffed with approximately 100 billion neurons. Each one of these neurons can have 10,000 to 100,000 synaptic connections on it formed from other neurons. Every one of these countless connections must be attached precisely between the correct neurons in the brain to form functional
circuits. The sheer number of wires, called axons, that are required to connect 100 billion neurons into functional circuits is imponderable.

R. Douglas Fields, The New Brain, Psychology Today (web edition), 20111. See www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201106/brain-wiring. R. Douglas Fields, Ph.D., is the Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development and the author of The
Other Brain
.

In order to conceive of this vast number one must consider a concrete example:

"The number of connections in the human brain is approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000. Imagine an immense forest that stretches over half the United States, a single forest that covers one million square miles.  Each square mile contains 10,000 trees and each tree contains 100,000 leaves.  Imagine the vast number of trees in such a forest.  The number of organized electrical connections in your brain is approximately equal to the number of leaves on those trees."

Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler & Adler, 1985), p 330. Michael Denton gained a medical degree from Bristol University in 1969 and a PhD from King’s College, London University in 1974. He was senior research fellow in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand from 1990 – 2005. He later was a scientific reseacher in the field of genetic eye diseases. He has spoken worldwide on genetics, evolution and the anthropic argument for design. Denton's current interests include defending the "anti Darwinian evolutionary position" and the design hypothesis formulated in his book Nature’s Destiny.Denton is an agnostic. Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Denton.

One recent study showed the amount of molecular sized wiring that is necessary for these connections is 176,000 kilometers or 109,361 miles of wiring.

... the total length of axons in the human brain of a 20- year old male is 176,000 km! For readers less familiar with the metric system, that's long enough to wrap around the equator of the earth four and a half times. This measurement includes only the brain "wires" that are coated with electrical insulation, called myelin. The researchers didn't attempt to measure the bare axons as well.

R. Douglas Fields, The New Brain, Psychology Today (web edition), 2011. See www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201106/brain-wiring. R. Douglas Fields, Ph.D., is the Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development and the author of The
Other Brain
.

Of course, they are organized and they operate at lightning speed:

"Using the criterion of joules per operation, the brain is about 7 or 8 orders of magnitude more power efficient than the best of the silicon chips. A direct consequence of their energy efficiency is that brains can perform many more operations per second than even the newest supercomputers. The fastest digital computers are capable of around 109 operations per second; the brain of the common housefly, for example, performs about 1011 operations per second when merely resting."

Churchland, Patricia S. and Sejnowski, Terrence J., The Computational Brain (MIT Press, 1992) p. 9.

This creates an impossible problem for evolution. There are 1,051,200,000,000,000 minutes in 2 billion years and there are 1,000,000,000,000,000 connections in the brain. In order to evolve that many connections, evolution must produce by sheer accident approximately one organized, perfected, in place and fully functional connection every minute for 2 billion years*, which is the amount of time that evolutionary science claims for the existence of all life. Since all of the connections are interrelated, each new neuron must somehow anticipate the arrival of new neurons with regard to timing, function and essentially all that it does, because they all work together as one whole. Evolution is grossly in adequate to account for this complexity, because evolution accounts for intelligence by alleging small incremental changes in intellect over the course of generations, not in hours or minutes.

And this calculation assumes that each one of the new neurons and new connections is perfected, organized and in place ab initio. If one applies the real theory of evolution and assumes that these developing neurons are initially imperfect and improved by fortunate accidents over time, then the rate of change and rate of evolution must increase exponentially in order to account for what is observed. Under those circumstances, evolution must now require new imperfect neurons and connections at hundreds or perhaps thousands per hour, or millions per generation.

And even if such a rate of evolving changes could be shown (and it can't), one is still left with the impossible hurdle of showing how the neurons of a brain accidentally created the non-physical code necessary to communicate between themselves.

There are billions of Purkinje cells in a brain. Just imagine what a task it would be to organize and connect billions of Purkinje cells together for the purpose of creating organized thought, reason, emotion and all of the other mental elements of the human creation.

Recent discoveries have shown that one of the sub-networks in the brain is an extremely accurate time-keeping mechanism, or, if you will, a clock.

"An MIT team led by Institute Professor Ann Graybiel has found groups of neurons in the primate brain that code time with extreme precision. 'All you do is time stamp everything, and then recalling events is easy: you go back and look through your time stamps until you see which ones are correlated with the event,' she says. 'That kind of precise timing control is critical for everyday tasks such as driving a car or playing the piano, as well as keeping track of past events. The discovery, reported in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to new treatments for diseases ..."

Quoted from Science Daily see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/ 2009/10/091019162921.htm

Evolutionary science has no idea how brains work or how evolution can account for them.

Yet, it explains their existence away by defaulting to millions of unobserved extremely fortunate random mutations and survival of the fittest. So, somehow with the help of a "blind watchmaker" (see the quote below), 109,361 miles of molecular wiring grew inside a space the size of a cantaloupe and organized itself into a network that contains as many perfectly timed connections as the leaves on the trees in a forest that is half the size of the United States (or all of continental Europe). This is a living computer that is capable of computing at a speed of trillions of cycles per second to produce thought, reason, emotion, consciousness and all of the other senses. It is able to write the memories of a lifetime into the arrangement of quadrillions of phosphorylised molecules on the surface of cells and index them to make them accessible to a retreival mechanism that is commenced and operated by means of thought (see [memory]). And then, so as to utilize all of the assets within this brain, the random mutations and environmental stresses devised a non-physical code consisting of pure logic for the sole purpose of memorializing the formulas of 20,000 essential human proteins (which they had also created). Then, so that these immensely complex formulas would not be lost, they inscribed them upon a molecule which they distributed to all cells. See [DNA]. But since the formulas are useless in purely written form, they also devised a reader that can read the code. And simultaneously, they created a production device that could receive the interpreted code, gather the atoms specified in the instructions in the correct order and assemble the proteins. This production would, of course, have to be controlled so they also devised a method of chemical messaging to make certain that the proteins were produced in the proper amounts and at the proper time. Darwinists believe that all of this was created by millions of unobserved random beneficial mutations and environmental pressures.

God or no God, that explanation is absurd.

The only logical explanation is that the brain was designed by a Designer of absolutely magnificent and supreme intellect. But evidence for that explanation is ignored by evolutionists.

"The theory still remains that accidental changes over millions of years has somehow produced a larger brain to survive and be fit. No one can explain exactly how this occurred."

Thompson, Richard F., Localization of the Essential Memory Trace Circuit for a Learned Response, Brain Structure, Learning, and Memory, Ed. Davis, Joel L., Newburgh, Robert W. and Wegman, Edward J. (Westview Press; Frederick A. Pareger, 1988), p. 69.

By refusing to even consider the existence of a Creator, evolution limits itself by its own ab initio theological conclusion.

"[Evolution is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." D.M.S.Watson, "Adaptation," Nature, Vol. 123 (1929), p. 233.

Evolutionist Richard Dawkins admits that evolutionists would teach evolution even if there were no evidence for it at all. This position is the quintessential antithisis of both reason and the scientific method :

"Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory ... we would still be justified in preferring it over rival theories [creationism]" Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (NY Norton, 1986), 287, emphasis in the original.

Evolution simply does not consider rival theories (such as special creation) because no matter what the evidence shows, such arguments do not agree with evolution's theological position regarding the non-existence of a Creator. Rival theories are not theologically correct and they are ignored. If there is such a thing as a blind watchmaker, he is certainly a Darwinist.

There are no blind watchmakers, Mr. Dawkins.

Mr. Dawkins and others reject the concept of God because they do not know God. They do not know God because they do not wish to. But God does exist and He does make Himself known to those who want to know Him. Perhaps everyone should at least give it a try and find out if there is a God. No religion, no churches, no holy robes, no nothing, just you and Him. If He is there and you sincerely ask, He will make Himself known to you. It is pretty simple really, but you will never know until you try. See Believe in God.