why do they do the extra work to make neurotransmitters, convert electrical impulses into chemical then have neurotransmitters bind and then conversion into electrical again? Couldn’t they just connect with each other like other cells form a tissue as the reticulate theory suggested? Are there any advantages to this extra effort or is it just another lack of efficiency?
In: Biology
You’re asking why evolution did something the way it did, and you’re probably never going to have an answer to that.
Evolution is the culmination of millions of years of *what worked*. Thousands of generations of putting things together in different ways, breaking them apart and doing it differently. What was deemed valuable was kept while anything that didn’t withstand the brutal test of natural selection was discarded from the gene pool.
Reticulate theory was one attempt to explain something based on incomplete knowledge, but the best we had at that time. There are countless things that we can think of that don’t make sense evolutionarily, but the bottom line is that evolution doesn’t have a reason. Only what works, and what doesn’t. Our brains developed that way because that’s what worked.
A few thousand years down the line, our brains might look completely different as evolution still continues.
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