I feel like the "lizard brain" thought-paradigm can actually be understood as communicating something true/useful/important... but it'll only make sense to peop

I feel like the "lizard brain" thought-paradigm can actually be understood as communicating something true/useful/important... but it'll only make sense to people with a good understanding of "speciated evolution": namely, evolutionary biologists themselves; and software engineers who've worked with programming languages that use prototypical inheritance. Outside of those two groups, the actual "intuition" for what the claim is saying, gets lost. The "lizard brain" claim, as far as I understand it, was never that you have a complete copy of a "lower" brain inside your brain. Nor even that you have specific structures within your brain whose implementation was evolutionarily conserved. Rather, what I understand the "lizard brain" claim as trying to communicate, is that you have one or more components of the architecture of your brain, where the APIs presented by those components to the rest of the brain, have been mostly conserved throughout evolution. The components themselves may have internally evolved, but the structural boundaries between those components and the rest of your brain have stayed stable in a way that allows biologists to recognize those same components in the architectures of brains in vastly different species. To put that in concrete terms: you and a mantis shrimp both have e.g. "an amygdala." The gene code for "an amygdala" may have differentiated between the shrimp and you, but there's still a conserved part of the brain's architectural plan that says "put an amygdala here." Now for the overwrought OOP analogy: If you imagine HumanBrain as an OOP class, then it's an OOP class that is a subclass about 800 layers of inheritance deep; with the root of the inheritance hierarchy being some prototypical bilateral-vertebrate nerve-cord class. In this inheritance hierarchy, each layer can introduce new "features" — components of the brain that have specific APIs; in other words, members of the class with known interface types, that other parts of the class can have their implementations — but not their own APIs — altered to work in terms of. Under this mental [heh] model, the "lizard brain" claim isn't about the LizardBrain level of the hierarchy itself; but rather is that one or more brain features seen in the HumanBrain class, are features that were introduced in or around the LizardBrain level of the inheritance hierarchy, and whose APIs have stayed stable ever since. (Also, if you're wondering if any real-world computer software has ever done 800-layer-deep inheritance hierarchies such that it starts to actually reflect this kind of speciated evolution: yes! The programming of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO was exactly like that. Why? Because, unlike a regular codebase, but like evolution, LambdaMOO was a gradual accretion of private objects "owned" by amateur coders, where each dev would implement the features they cared about by finding someone else's object with that feature, and forking it [i.e. prototype-inheriting from it] to suit their own needs. There was no common codebase that anyone could refactor, so it gradually came to resemble an actual biological process.)