Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous.. Psalm 139:14
Your workmanship is marvelous.. Psalm 139:14
"Researchers at Max Planck, Rockefeller, and Duke Universities 
examined
the connections in brain tissue from the visual cortex, the first stop
for information coming in from the retina.
A news item from Max Planck, “No cable spaghetti in the brain,” describes the cabling nightmare:
"Nerve cells in the human brain are densely interconnected and form a seemingly impenetrable meshwork. A cubic millimeter of brain tissue contains several kilometers of wires. A fraction of this wiring might be governed by random mechanisms, because random networks could at least theoretically process information very well. Let us consider the visual system: In the retina, several million nerve cells provide information for more than 100 Million cells in the visual cortex. The
visual cortex is one of the first regions of the brain to process
visual information. In this brain area, various features as spatial orientation, color and size of visual stimuli are processed and represented."
But they did not find randomness. They found a well-organized structure like a library.
"The way information is sent may be comparable to a library, in which books can easier found if they are sorted not only alphabetically by title, but also by genre and by author. In a library, books are spread to different shelves, but typically not randomly. Similarly, various facets of visual perception are represented separately in the visual cortex."
Most neurons in the visual cortex behave similarly to their
neighbors. Exceptions are “pinwheels” — singular points “around which
the preferred orientations of the cells are arranged as the winglets of a
pinwheel.” They looked to see if the number and orientation of these
pinwheels was random. It was not; the observations do not fit the random
hypothesis.
Q: How Would This Evolve by a Darwinian Process?
The visual cortex does not “see” the outside world. If you were a
neuron, operating in the dark inside brain tissue, you would only sense
chemical signals coming and going.
Q: How would neurons ever “know” how to
“self-organize” in such a way that their representations of incoming
signals would form a 576 megapixel motion picture that corresponds to the external world?
No mutation or series of mutations would lead to a 100-million-volume sorted library." EN&V