Smarter than the average worm (Image: Wim Van Egmond/Getty)
THE hallmark of the human brain – the thing that sets us apart from all other animals and is presumed to be the source of our intellectual superiority – can be traced back 600 million years to the ancestor of a primitive worm.
The discovery comes from a study of how genes are switched on and off inside brain cells. It suggests that the ancestor of the ragworm already possessed the seed of what would become the cortex. There…
