Christopher Cherniak

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Christopher Cherniak is a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland who has made significant theoretical contributions to neuroscience and written some short fiction (including The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution, which appeared in the anthology The Mind's I).

Cherniak claims that we have the best of all possible brains, and has been cited by such philosophers as Noam Chomsky. Indeed, many nativists are interested in Cherniak's claims, and for good reason.

Cherniak reports that the nervous system of the hermaphroditic nematode C. elegans, with 302 neurons, is optimized with respect to the placement of certain nervous system components. "Components" may be entities on different levels of organizations, such as the brain (cephalization being the instance of optimization to the absolute physical limits), ganglia, neurons, and so on. The components that Cherniak examines in C. elegans is the latter two. Both, he finds, using computational complexity theory, are positioned optimally within C. elegans body. The significance of this concerns the fact that such component placement optimization problems are exponential, and thus there are an inscrutible number of possible arrangements for 302 neurons. Consequently, the placement of neurons within C. elegans must not have been selected for by Nature, but occurred some other way.

Cherniak has similar claims about the structure of axonal and dendritic arbors--both are optimized with respect to volume. Cherniak posits a fluid mechanical mechanism for this observed tree structure patterns, which are highly isomorphic to the patterns of water drainage systems.