---
title: "Cephalization"
description: "James Dwight Dana's 1852 \"law,\" in Moynihan's account: evolution moves \"headward,\" toward \"centralization and intensification of the organism's energies in an increasingly hefty brain,\" culminating in an \"Era of Mind\" — the theory from which the Psychozoic Era took its name."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cephalization"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/cephalization"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Cephalization

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cephalization), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

James Dwight Dana's 1852 "law," in Moynihan's account: evolution moves "headward," toward "centralization and intensification of the organism's energies in an increasingly hefty brain," culminating in an "Era of Mind" — the theory from which the *Psychozoic Era* took its name. Moynihan reads it as self-compliment dressed as law, and as the root of the nineteenth-century habit of seeing the planet itself "cephalizing": Ernst Kapp (1877) on telegraph wires as nerve fibres, the world "growing its own nervous system," later Teilhard's Earth becoming "cephalized, or ensouled" — the lineage the Noosphere inherited. Useful as the name for the inevitabilist, headward reading of intelligence that the program's "agency preceded subjectivity" and multi-scale framing reject. *What Is Intelligence?* uses the word in its plain neurobiological sense (the first knot of neurons at the front end of the animal).

## Appears in

- [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) (2025-09-23)
- [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra) (2025-05-10)
- [Planetary Sapience & Planetary Stupidity: a Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/babynoosphere) (2025-05-10)
- [Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain) (2024-11-19)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._