Chapter 5 - Three Grand Challenges of Human Biology

Abstract

Human biology in the 21st century faces three major research frontiers: ontogenetic decoding, the brain-mind puzzle, and the ape-to-human transformation. Humans are a very distinct and unique kind of animal. The evolution from ancestral primates to humans implied important anatomical changes, such as bipedal gait and a large brain. The ape-to-human transformation at the cultural level amounted to a fundamental revolution. Humans have symbolic language, art, ethics, religion, technology, and complex social organization. In recent decades neurobiology has developed as a very exciting discipline. Much has been learned about how light, sound, temperature, and other impressions received by our sense organs are transmitted through the nerves to the brain and how neurons and groups of neurons interact in the brain. But how these physical phenomena become mental experiences remains a mystery.