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* Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398; Communicated by Lawrence A. Shepp, Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, October 19, 1999 (received for review September 9, 1999)
Hominid brain size increased dramatically in the face of
apparently severe associated evolutionary costs. This suggests that increasing brain size must have provided some sort of counterbalancing adaptive benefit. Several recent studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have indicated that a substantial correlation (mean r =
Neurobiology
Brain size does not predict general cognitive ability
within families
,
, Center for Functional
Imaging, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720;
§ Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720; and ¶ Department of Electronic
Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon,
Hong Kong, and Department of Linguistics, University of
California, Berkeley, CA 94720
0.4) exists between brain size and general
cognitive performance, consistent with the hypothesis that the payoff
for increasing brain size was greater general cognitive ability.
However, these studies confound between-family environmental influences
with direct genetic/biological influences. To address this problem, within-family (WF) sibling differences for several neuroanatomical measures were correlated to WF scores on a diverse battery of cognitive
tests in a sample of 36 sibling pairs. WF correlations between
neuroanatomy and general cognitive ability were essentially zero,
although moderate correlations were found between prefrontal volumes
and the Stroop test (known to involve prefrontal cortex). These
findings suggest that nongenetic influences play a role in brain
volume/cognitive ability associations. Actual direct genetic/biological associations may be quite small, and yet still may
be strong enough to account for hominid brain evolution.
To whom reprint requests should be addressed at:
Department of Anthropology, 325 University Museum, University of
Pennsylvania, 33rd and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398. E-mail: ptschoen{at}sas.upenn.edu.
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