The Head in Evolution

An Artist's Investigation

Being a sculptor, I have studied heads as functional objects and evolution as a creative system. What I have found is surprising, especially in the context of the contemporary scientific view. I have used my visual training to identify a series of image fallacies that have subverted scientific evolutionary theory.

The configuration of heads and necks are a compromise and very bad design. Having a head puts us all in mortal danger which is why we wear helmets. Necks, the primary target when one vertebrate tries to kill another, are even worse.

The culprit in this fiasco is the slow rate of nerve transmission. This resulted when the very earliest multicellular animals articulated the chemical communications being used to regulate their bodies into a system of awareness. Slow nerve transmission requires that the sensory organs be in front and be plugged directly into the brain. The head enters the environment first to gather information and to be a monitoring port for food, water, and air.

A set of fixed design protocols developed when vertebrates first came onto land. When animals change their habits, as when our ancestors stood up, then bone, blood, and muscle will conform to these protocols. The difference between our heads and the heads of our ancestors and ape relatives is dictated by these protocols reacting to our change of posture, and not by Natural Selection. This provides evidence that the genetic system reads and responds to its creature's condition during its lifetime.

Our personal genetic system has continuously created one organism after another for the last three and a half billion years. During that immense time it has always been able to build an organism that carried it through to next generation. In doing so, it has gained astonishing complexity and computational abilities as it learns and self-programs. We are simply its current vehicle built to carry it along to its only goal, which is to continue.