Marsh’s law of brain growth and the idea of biological progress in evolution

Abstract

The use of an evolutionary law should be a function of its heuristic value in the composition of phylogenetic sequences. This was one of the characteristics of the law of brain growth proposed by O. C. Marsh (1831-1899), which often led to the conclusion that there is a tendency for bodily complexity to increase during the evolutionary process. Several criticisms were then made, often based on the impossibility that a trend could operate in the evolutionary process that had natural selection as its mechanism, which in turn is based on the proposal of random variation. Nevertheless, Marsh’s law remains being used due to its explanatory, and to a certain extent, predictive potential.