The brain :Jack of all trades

 How Can a Woman Missing Her Olfactory Bulbs Still Smell?

Denyse O Leary

Even since neuroscientists started imaging the brain, they’ve been turning up cases where people are missing brain parts we would expect them to need in order to do something — but they are doing that very thing anyway. One example, written up in Live Science in 2019, concerns women who are missing their olfactory bulbs but can still smell.

Researchers have discovered a small group of people that seem to defy medical science: They can smell despite lacking “olfactory bulbs,” the region in the front of the brain that processes information about smells from the nose. It’s not clear how they are able to do this, but the findings suggest that the human brain may have a greater ability to adapt than previously thought.

YASEMIN SAPLAKOGLU, “WOMEN MISSING BRAIN’S OLFACTORY BULBS CAN STILL SMELL, PUZZLING SCIENTISTS,” LIVESCIENCE,NOVEMBER 6, 2019. THE PAPER IN NEURON IS OPEN ACCESS.

All the More Remarkable

The story is all the more remarkable when we consider that her sense of smell was especially good; that was why she had signed up for the Israeli researchers’ study. Deciding to pursue the matter, the researchers tested other women. On the ninth try, they found another left-handed woman who could smell without an olfactory bulb.

A researcher who was not involved in the study, Joel Mainland of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, was asked for comment:

The findings are “pretty counter to most of what the field thinks,” Mainland told Live Science. “I think it’s pretty critical that we figure out what’s happening.”

Yes. But that could take a while because there are a number of similar situations out there.

Last year, Medical Express reported on a woman who lacked a left temporal lobe, believed to be the language area of the brain:

EG told Fedorenko and her team that she only came to realize she had an unusual brain by accident—her brain was scanned in 1987 for an unrelated reason. Prior to the scan she had no idea she was different. By all accounts she behaved normally and had even earned an advanced degree. She also excelled in languages — she speaks fluent Russian — which is all the more surprising considering the left temporal lobe is the part of the brain most often associated with language processing.

Eager to learn more about the woman and her brain, the researchers accepted her into a study that involved capturing images of her brain using an fMRI machine while she was engaged in various activities, such as language processing and math. In so doing, they found no evidence of language processing happening in the left part of her brain; it was all happening in the right. They found that it was likely the woman had lost her left temporal lobe as a child, probably due to a stroke. The area where it had been had become filled with cerebrospinal fluid. To compensate, her brain had developed a language network in the right side of her brain that allowed her to communicate normally. The researchers also learned that EG had a sister who was missing her right temporal lobe, and who also had no symptoms of brain dysfunction — an indication, the researchers suggest, that there is a genetic component to the stroke and recovery process in the two women.

BOB YIRKA, “WOMAN WITH NO LEFT TEMPORAL LOBE DEVELOPED A LANGUAGE NETWORK IN THE RIGHT SIDE OF HER BRAIN,” MEDICAL XPRESS,APRIL 14, 2022 THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS.

It’s also come out that one in 4000 people lacks a corpus callosum. That’s the structure of neural fibers that transfers information between the brain’s two hemispheres. It would seem a pretty important part pf the brain yet 25 percent of those who lack it show no symptoms. The others suffer mild to severe cognitive disorders. But we may well wonder how people manage in this situation at all:

In a study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, neuroscientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) discovered that when the neuronal fibres that act as a bridge between the hemispheres are missing, the brain reorganises itself and creates an impressive number of connections inside each hemisphere. These create more intra-hemispheric connections than in a healthy brain, indicating that plasticity mechanisms are involved. It is thought that these mechanisms enable the brain to compensate for the losses by recreating connections to other brain regions using alternative neural pathways.

UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE, “A MALFORMATION ILLUSTRATES THE INCREDIBLE PLASTICITY OF THE BRAIN,” SCIENCEDAILY, OCTOBER 30, 2020. THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS.

Prior to Brain Imaging

Recall that, prior to brain imaging, so long as a person was functioning normally, no one had any reason to suppose that a key brain part might simply be missing. And, let’s say its absence was discovered at autopsy. Who is to say that the absence of that part didn’t play some role in bringing about the person’s death? So it was only in recent decades that researchers discovered people of normal abilities with absent brain parts. That’s probably why we hear expressions like “seem to defy medical science” and “incredible plasticity” from the science media now.

Neuroplasticity is perhaps best understood as the human mind reaching out past physical gaps and barriers in any number of inventive ways. And it raises a question: If the mind is merely what the brain does, as many materialist pundits claim, what is the mind when the brain … doesn’t? At times, the mind appears to be picking up where the brain left off. 

Michael Egnor and I are looking forward to tackling topics like that in The Human Soul (Worthy, 2025).

Stateless monopolies vs. democracy?

 

Against censorship?

 

Tom Sowell educates re:education

 

The fossil record continues to set Darwinism straight.

 Fossil Friday: Eozoön, the Dawn Animal Fallen from Grace

Gunter Bechly

In the late 1850s the Canadian geologist William Logan, who as director of the Geological Survey of Canada mapped the geology of the country and authored the monumental Geology of Canada, discovered striped rocks from Precambrian limestone of eastern Canada, which he believed to be fossils of early life forms. He announced the discovery 1864 at a conference in Great Britain (Logan 1864, 1865), which immediately attracted tremendous interest and strong support by the British protistologist William Benjamin Carpenter. Famous geologist Charles Lyell commented that this represents “one of the greatest geological discoveries of my time” (Lyell 1864). Logan sent samples to his Canadian colleague John William Dawson (1865), who described the material as giant fossil protists, which he named Eozoön canadense, the dawn animal from Canada (also see Dana 1865). Dawson called it “one of the brightest gems in the scientific crown of the Geological Survey of Canada,” because at this time it was the earliest known evidence for life on Earth and “created a sensation in the geological community” (Adelman 2007).

Meet the Eozoönists

Most contemporary scientists did not doubt that Eozoön is a genuine fossil organism, with the exceptions of geologist William King and chemist Thomas Rowney from Queen’s College. These two skeptics, who did not believe in a biological origin of Eozoön, published a critique just a year after the original description and initiated one of the greatest scientific controversies of the 19th century. The supporters of the authenticity of the fossils, led by Dawson and Carpenter (1865), were called the Eozoönists, and both sides heavily relied on the scientific authority of their proponents and disputed the credibility of their opponents (Adelman 2007, O’Connor 2023). German naturalist Otto Hahn (1876) supported the critical view of King and Rowney with a paper refuting the fossil status of Eozoön. Other critics were the British protistologist Henry Carter (1874a, 1874b, 1874c) and the German zoologist Karl Möbius (1878), who both disputed any relationship with known protists, as well as the British geologist Henry Johnston-Lavis, who described very similar structures from volcanic marble shot out of Mount Vesuvius in Italy (Johnston Lavis & Gregory 1894), which were clearly of inorganic origin and therefore considered by many as final nail in the coffin of Eozoön. Nevertheless, the controversy persisted, and as late as 1947 Eozoön was endorsed as a first life form in a high school biology textbook (Moon et al. 1947). Since the 1950s other supposed evidence for Precambrian life began to accumulate (Schopf 2000), so that Eozoön simply lost its crucial importance for a solution to Darwin’s most vexing problem of a “missing Precambrian history of life” (also see Stephen C. Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt).

The Rise and Fall of Eozoön

Several papers in the past decades reviewed the scientific history of the rise and fall of Eozoön (O’Brien 1970, Schopf 2000, Adelman 2007, Wilson 2011, Dolan 2023, O’Connor 2023). Dolan (2023) recently showed that Eozoön “was never indisputably proven to be inorganic. Rather Eozoön simply faded away after its most ardent defenders died … To paraphrase a quote attributed to Mark Twain, the rumor of the death of Eozoön, announced with some authority at least three times, was each time, an exaggeration. King and Rowney believed that they had disproved the organic nature of Eozoön in 1866. Some 13 years later, Mobius clearly felt he had to show that Eozoön was not a fossil forminifera, as did Johnston-Lavis when he announced his discovery of Eozoön structures in volcanic ejecta in 1894.” 

Of course, there was a deeper reason why most scientists of Darwin’s era preferred to strongly defend Eozoön. This reason was clearly formulated by O’Brien (1970) in his review of the case:

… every aspect of nineteenth-century paleontology was scrutinized for its bearing on evolution …

There were two chief reasons for the persistence of the dispute. Most obvious and most important was the inability of early paleontology to settle the matter. The second reason, seldom stated by the disputants, was the significance of Eozoön in the larger issue of derivation of species. For, were Eozoön proved to be organic, evolutionists would be confronted with the most impressive of all gaps in the paleontological record, a gap that would give pause to even the most ardent evolutionist. On the other hand, if this gap were successfully explained or overcome by the finding of subsequent forms related to Eozoön, the evolutionists could rejoice in having found, at the earliest date of known animal life, the simplest form of life, a form reasonably akin to the “one primordial form” of Darwin’s speculation. In short, there was something at stake for both sides in the greater scientific controversy.

Darwin himself was interested in Eozoön and its promise for his position. He introduced Eozoön into the fourth edition of The Origin of Species: “After reading Dr. Carpenter’s description of this remarkable fossil, it is impossible to feel any doubt regarding its organic nature.” Darwin cited Eozoön in his famous tenth chapter, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record,” as an indication that gaps in the paleontological record were being filled, and that as the origins of life were pushed back, natural selection became a more reasonable mechanism of evolution (Darwin 1866: 371).

Defending Eozoön 

Dawson very early defended the biological nature of Eozoön (Dawson 1865b), continued until the end of his life (Dawson 1901), and was never convinced by any of the conflicting evidence presented by his critics. He even published two books on Life’s Dawn on Earth (Dawson 1876, 1897), in which he claimed Eozoön to be the starting point of creation. Indeed, Dawson was an ardent anti-Darwinist and did not believe in the quickly spreading theory of evolution. Thus, he was not amused at all that Darwinists jumped on his discovery and embraced it as support for their theory. He wrote (Dawson 1876: 227):

There is no link whatever in geological fact to connect Eozoön with the Mollusks, Radiates, or Crustaceans of the succeeding [rock record] … these stand before us as distinct creations. [A] gap … yawns in our imperfect geological record. Of actual facts [with which to fill this gap], therefore, we have none; and those evolutionists who have regarded the dawn-animal as an evidence in their favour, have been obliged to have recourse to supposition and assumption

In other words, Dawson thought that the “discovery of his ‘dawn animal’ had exposed the greatest missing link in the entire fossil record, a gap so enormous that it served to unmask the myth of evolution’s claimed continuity” (Schopf 2000, Wilson 2011). What an irony, which also shows how very differently the same fossil evidence can be interpreted by distinguished scientists.

In modern paleontology it is still a very common phenomenon that fossils are over-interpreted by the scientists and over-hyped in the media as undeniable and unequivocal proof for Darwinian evolution. Whenever you come across press releases that boldly claim a new fossil rewrites the history of life, represents a long-sought transitional form or missing link, or proves the gradual evolution of certain organs and body plans, all alarm bells should ring. This is usually a clear sign that the scientists have gone far beyond an objective description of the empirical evidence and are driven by the desire to support evolutionist hypotheses. Apparently, since the time of Darwin and Dawson, some things have not changed much.

References

Adelman J 2007. Eozoön: debunking the dawn animal. Endeavor 31(3), 94–98. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2007.07.002

Carter HF 1874a. On the structure called Eozoon canadense in the Laurentian limestone of Canada. Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Ser. 4) 13(75), 189–193. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00222937408680843

Carter HF 1874b. On the structure called Eozoon canadense in the Laurentian limestone of Canada. Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Ser. 4) 13(77), 376–378. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00222937408680882

Carter HF 1874c. Eozoon canadense not a foraminifer or calcareous rhizopod secretion. American Journal of Science and Arts (Ser. 3) 7, 437–438. 

Dana JD 1865. On the History of Eozoön Canadense. American Journal of Science s2-40(120), 344–362. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2475/ajs.s2-40.120.344

Darwin CR 1866. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, London (UK), p. 371. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=F385&viewtype=text

Dawson JW 1865. On the Structure of Certain Organic Remains in the Laurentian Limestones of Canada. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 21(1–2), 51–59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.JGS.1865.021.01-02.12

Dawson JW 1876. Life’s Dawn on Earth Being the History of the Oldest Known Fossil Remains and Their relations to geological time and the development of the Animal Kingdom. Hodder & Stoughton, London (UK), 239 pp.

Dawson JW 1897. Relics of Primeval Life: Beginning of Life in the Dawn of Geological Age. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York (NY), 336 pp. 

Dawson JW 1901. Fifty years of Work in Canada Being Autobiographical Notes by Sir William Dawson, C.M.G., LL.D., F.R.S. Etc. Etc. Ballantyne, Hanson, & Co., London (UK), 308 pp.

Dawson JW & Carpenter WB 1865. Notes on Fossils recently obtained from the Laurentian Rocks of Canada, and on objections to the organic nature of Eozoon. 367–366. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 23, 257–265. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.JGS.1867.023.01-02.40 

Dolan JR 2023. The saga of the false fossil foram Eozoon. European Journal of Protistology 87(2):125955, 38 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejop.2022.125955

Hahn O 1876. Is there such a thing as Eozoon canadense? A microgeological investigation. The Annals and Magazine of Natural History 17(100), 265–282. https://archive.org/details/biostor-92657 (English translation of German article: Hahn O 1876. Giebt es ein Eozoon canadense? Eine mikrogeologische Untersuchung von Otto Hahn in Reutlingen. Jahreshefte des Vereins für vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg 32, 132–155. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=A487&viewtype=text)

Johnston-Lavis HJ & Gregory JW 1894. Eozoonal structure of the ejected blocks of Monte Somma. The Scientific Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society (Ser. 2) 5, 259–286.

Logan WE 1864. On organic remains in the Laurentian Rocks of Canada. American Journal of Science and Arts 37, 272–273.

Logan WE 1865. On the Occurrence of Organic Remains in the Laurentian Rocks of Canada. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 21, 45–50. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.JGS.1865.021.01-02.11

Lyell C 1864. Extracts from the Address of the President Sir Charles Lyell, D.C.L., F.R.S. Canadian Naturalist and Geologist 1, 389–403.

Meyer SC 2013. Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. HarperOne, New York (NY), viii+498 pp. https://darwinsdoubt.com

Möbius K 1878. Der Bau des Eozoon canadense nach eigenen Unterschungen verglichen mit dem Bau der Foraminifera. Paleontographica 25(5-6), 175–194. https://www.schweizerbart.de/papers/palae/detail/25/59572/Der_Bau_des_Eozoon_c

Moon TJ, Mann PB & Otto JH 1947. Modern Biology. Henry Holt and Company, New York (NY), 664 pp. 

O’Brien CF 1970. Eozoön Canadense: “The Dawn Animal of Canada”. Isis 61(2), 206–223. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/350620

O’Connor A 2023. Canadian Pseudo-fossil: This specimen was once thought to represent the earliest life on Earth. National Museum of Ireland website. https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Collection/Documentation-Discoveries/Artefact/A-Canadian-Pseudo-fossil/4272e35f-065a-4605-9be0-90a3404eada2

Schopf JW 2000. Solution to Darwin’s dilemma: Discovery of the missing Precambrian record of life. PNAS 97(13), 6947–6953. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.97.13.6947

Wilson M 2011. Wooster’s “Fossil” of the Week: The most famous pseudofossil ever (Proterozoic of Canada). Wooster Geologists May 8, 2011. https://woostergeologists.scotblogs.wooster.edu/2011/05/08/wooster’s-fossil-of-the-week-the-most-famous-pseudofossil-ever-proterozoic-of-canada/