It was a successful pop-sci book when it came out, but its conclusions continue to be met with a lot of skepticism today.

Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago.

This is pretty fuzzy and woo woo

> they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions

...in a specific region, in a specific time period, immediately before the economic and then societal crash of the eastern Mediterranean that changed culture in the region forever.

The hypothesis breaks down pretty hard when you realize he just kind of handwaves away people in the rest of the world not having any kind of abrupt cut-over in the styles of recorded literature that forms the backbone of his arguments.

It might explain ADHD.

I'd imagine the science from the 80s is very dated now, no matter how good the book is.

Thanks! I've changed the link above to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv... from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-09-human-brain.html.

It's a crude analogy, but I would say the hindbrain is more like the system management co-processor or controller that tends to low-level hardware features.

The forebrain is the main processor. It does all the stuff you think of from OS to application, and has some ability to monitor and even interfere in the system management co-processor.

Whether either of these things have interesting internal structure and functional decomposition is left unaddressed. This observation about the progenitor cells is a bit like seeing the BOM that says they come from different suppliers.

I think it's also a bit of guesswork to try to reason out the evolutionary history. I.e. was either unit "in the market" longer and useful on its own, versus essentially complementary parts that just happen to have a divided supply chain! Intuition about evolutionary processes and life makes it really easy to assume the hindbrain is an older, legacy system that existed independently or with other long-lost companion units.

Maybe more like the baseband modem in a phone?

I think more like file explorer!

Just for context: parent comment was posted when the submission title was "Human brain is two separate organs, research finds". We've since changed it.

(Perhaps the updated title is less objectionable?)

Argument from authority. Elaborate or nobody cares.