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"Evidence of brain evolution can be seen in various fields of biology, such as paleontology, ethology, behavioral biology, cognitive psychology, molecular biology and genetics."

"Everyone wants wisdom and wealth. Nevertheless, our health often gives out before we achieve them. To lengthen our lives, and improve our minds, in the future we will need to change our our bodies and brains. To that end, we first must consider how normal Darwinian evolution brought us to where we are. Then we must imagine ways in which future replacements for worn body parts might solve most problems of failing health. We must then invent strategies to augment our brains and gain greater wisdom. Eventually we will entirely replace our brains -- using nanotechnology. Once delivered from the limitations of biology, we will be able to decide the length of our lives--with the option of immortality-- and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well." Scientific American, Oct, 1994

Metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of our unique cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities. Research published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology adds weight to the theory that schizophrenia is a costly by-product of human brain evolution.

Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness

These examples of experimental evolution with robots verify the power of evolution by mutation, recombination, and natural selection. In all cases, robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behaviour because their genomes had random values. However, a few hundreds of generations of random mutations and selective reproduction were sufficient to promote the evolution of efficient behaviours in a wide range of environmental conditions. The ability of robots to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate is particularly remarkable given that they had deliberately simple genotypes directly mapped into the connection weights of neural networks comprising only a few dozen neurons. PLoS Biology

"..We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens--a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal ... a creature capable of steering our own evolution..."