Cortical Evolution in Primates: What Primates Are, What Primates Were, and Why the Cortex Changed

Cortical Evolution in Primates provides a stand-alone resource for neuroscience graduate students and established neuroscientists who have an interest in cortical evolution and primates. Discussions of both cortical evolution and primates often rely on terms and concepts unfamiliar to many neuroscientists, but such readers will have no need to look elsewhere to understand the text or figures in this book.

As well as reviewing the pertinent terminology and taxonomy, Wise explores the palaeontology, adaptations, and paleoecology of primates. Through summarizing a neglected source of data, fossil primates, the book harnesses the power of comparative neuroanatomy to examine how cortical maps changed during private evolution, including nine proposals on why the cortex changed. Together, these topics inform a full understanding of cortical evolution in primates. Wise concludes that the cortex expanded more recently than most neuroscientists suspect, and it happened many times. Furthermore, cortical expansion occurred independently in several major primate lineages, as ancestral primates adapted to the ecosystems of their time and place. Natural selection favored the expansion of cortical areas with neural representations that provided a selective advantage to ancestral primates in those times and those places.

Steven P. Wise

Steven P. Wise received a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from Washington University (St. Louis) in Biology (Neural Science). After a brief period of postdoctoral study, he had a 30-year career in neurophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he headed the Laboratory of Neurophysiology.