Arts in Review -- Television Review: How Mammalian Minds Evolved

“Evolution: Brain Power

 

Series begins Wednesday, 9 p.m., PBS

 

The 1925 "monkey trial" of John Scopes, in which the Tennessee teacher was prosecuted for teaching Darwinism, has been aptly described as a faceoff between fundamentalist religion and evolutionary science. But many of the offended parties found something more basic at work, the "accusation" that they were descended from monkeys -- "Not even from American monkeys," said the prosecution's William Jennings Bryan, "but Old World monkeys."

 

How about dolphins? Less hair. Echolocation. Beach vacations.

 

What we actually get from "Evolution: Brain Power" is a link between ourselves and every other brain-powered creature on Earth, with an emphasis on dolphins. As we are told, their brains are among the largest in relation to body weight; the surface area equals our own; and they plan, strategize, collaborate, coordinate and have a system of communication very much like language. "They're what human beings might have been had we returned to the sea," as one researcher puts it. How we all got here -- being conscious, analytical and, most significantly, empathetic -- involves a narrative that has lasted billions of years.

 

The show, the first in a five-part series, is considerably brisker than that. In a kind of epilogue, narrator Mercer Boffey does a fine job of summing up the subject -- "an evolutionary journey which began with the first tentative steps toward sensing a world bathed in light, produced the first neurons and primitive brains supercharged by myelin [a protein-rich insulator-accelerator of electrical impulses] to finally form the mammalian neocortex. And in a few select lineages this gave rise to problem-solving, cooperative and deeply emotional brains." In humans. And, more specifically here, dolphins.

 

This "NOVA" presentation -- which gets complicated, as a reader might intuit -- does its best to maintain both accessibility and its thesis, which is that all brains stem from a common source, namely simple cells that became reactive to light as early as the Archean Eon of 3 billion years ago.

 

By sensing the sun (there is a heavenly "let there be light" image in the early part of the show, for those who wish to see it as such), the single-cell organism could sense the cycles of the Earth. Which was something short of thought, but certainly dictated its cousin, behavior. Thus began the lengthy trial-and-error process of brain development.

 

How different species developed and why life on Earth diversified from those single-cell organisms is often surprising and consistently engaging.

 

The emergence of myelin is given particular emphasis, being compared by cell biologist Robin Franklin to the "invention of microprocessors in computing." It enables the speedy transfer of thought; brains without myelin have developed, he says, "but the best you can do is the octopus, which is quite sophisticated, but still hasn't written Shakespeare's sonnets, or sent a man to the Moon."

 

Similarly, the development of the neocortex, which is exclusively mammalian and, according to Lori Marino of the Whale Sanctuary Project, provides for "self-awareness, social cognition, some form of memory, problem solving."

 

Other species have made enormous adjustments in problem-solving. But not like us higher mammals, some of which have even become quite adept at problem-creation.” [1]

 

1. Arts in Review -- Television Review: How Mammalian Minds Evolved. Anderson, John.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 Oct 2026: A13.