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 * This space is for sharing notes on the Deacon reading for Week 2 of Language and Species.**

An investigation into techniques used to identify similar brain areas in humans and non-human primates, especially those that might have been important for language.

It's difficult to identify homologies in brains because connections can be non-local.

It's crucial to take into account the relationship between size and shape and functions (allometry) of the human brain when studying its evolution.

The human brain is disproportionately sized, while the brain of a monkey is much smaller.

This size difference leads to interior differences within the brain, which are important in the study of the ancestral traits and homologies.

Determining which region of a monkey's brain is homologous to Broca's area in a human's brain has been difficult (and controversial) due to the differences in size and structure between the two.

Cataloging homologies between human and primate brains is a study in nueroinformatics limited by the currency of evolution. The allometric disparity between human and primate brains is resultant of multifarious evolutionary deviations borne from a common ancestor. These deviations have panned out (in terms of monkey vs. human development) in wildly different ways. In turn, the neurobiology of extant primates does not supply researchers a replicated link between a common human-primate ancestry and the biological potential (for language) of that ancestor.