Natural selection of mammalian brain components

The debate about whether the brain and accompanying cognitive architecture were designed by natural selection or by some other process originated with Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. Today, this debate is no longer about vitalism verses mechanism, as it was for Wallace and Darwin, rather it is between the adaptationist and developmental constraints accounts of internal brain organization. New work by de Winter and Oxnard rules out the possibility that developmental constraints are the sole explanation for mammalian brain evolution. Moreover, it appears that the internal organization of the mammalian brain is adapted to specific ecological and ethological niches.