Shaping Up New Cerebral Codes in Functional Archipelagos. We are all familiar with what the French call l'esprit d'escalier , thinking of the right response only after leaving the party. A well-known feature of island biogeography is relative speed, as in the differentiation of Darwin's finches unbuffered by large continental gene pools. A second accelerating feature of islands is that a species can go extinct locally. Should disease or climate change then shrink this boomtime population, some of those rarer variants may prove to have the right combination of features to survive the bottleneck and repopulate the island.
Archipelagos allow for many parallel experiments.
In the present Darwin Machine model, insights from the periodic nature of the horizontal connectivity of the superficial pyramidal neurons are used to predict a triangular mosaic of synchronized neurons at 0.5 mm spacings. Like the unit pattern of mosaic wallpaper, the largest unique spatial pattern would be contained in a 0.5 mm hexagon - despite initial separations of the activated feature detectors that span much longer distances. This candidate seems worthy of the name Cerebral Code . Parcellation, as when rising sea level converts the hilltops of one large island into an archipelago, typically speeds evolution. When rising sea level converted part of the coastline of France into the island of Jersey, the red deer trapped there in the last interglaciation underwent a considerable dwarfing in only a few thousand years.