Ecological constraints on the origin of neurones

The basic functional characteristics of spiking neurones are remarkably similar throughout the animal kingdom. Their core design and function features were presumably established very early in their evolutionary history. Identifying the selection pressures that drove animals to evolve spiking neurones could help us interpret their design and function today. This paper provides a quantitative argument, based on ecology, that animals evolved neurones after they started eating each other, about 550 million years ago. We consider neurones as devices that aid an animal's foraging performance, but incur an energetic cost. We introduce an idealised stochastic model ecosystem of animals and their food, and obtain an analytic expression for the probability that an animal with a neurone will fix in a neurone-less population. Analysis of the fixation probability reveals two key results. First, a neurone will never fix if an animal forages low-value food at high density, even if that neurone incurs no cost. Second, a neurone will fix with high probability if an animal is foraging high-value food at low density, even if that neurone is expensive. These observations indicate that the transition from neurone-less to neurone-armed animals can be facilitated by a transition from filter-feeding or substrate grazing to episodic feeding strategies such as animal-on-animal predation (macrophagy).