Putting the soul back into science
By Mark Vernon on Thursday, July 22 2010, 16:26 - Science - Permalink
The brain looks much more like the medium through which mental activity ripples, rather than the source of that mental activity itself. Natural selection can't really account for the differences between us and our evolutionary cousins, as for all the advantages that might be gained from having, say, a big brain, the disadvantages - such as that it kills mothers and infants during labour - should have prevented it. It's often celebrated that we share 98% of our genes with those said cousins, and a remarkably large percentage with sea urchins and mice to boot, only that's a problem for genetics, as there's not enough 'code' to account for the massive, manifest differences between them and us.
These are some of the mysteries that recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have deepened, and which James Le Fanu explores in Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. Only, Le Fanu seeks to question that word 'advance'. Since, for all that a narrative of progress dominates the reporting of discoveries, the truth is that they have mostly served to highlight that we know less than we thought we did. Contemporary science is marked by an inverse relationship between knowledge and understanding - though perhaps only physicists acknowledge as much, with their talk of dark matter, energy and flow. Hence, expectations about what the complete human genome, or real-time scans of the brain, might deliver have fallen away.
It's clearly a book with an agenda, not just to celebrate the centrality of wonder in science - which many scientists would presumably retort never went away. But also to highlight the centrality of the non-material facts of human experience over which reductionist materialism stumbles. The vivid and liberating experience of consciousness also suggests, to Le Fanu, the need for the language of the soul, and of a natural sympathy not enmity between science and religion. Further, the apparently information rich operations of genes, and the syntactical nature of language, raises the possibility of a God-like intelligence, required as a kind of top-down, causative factor - he moots, sensibly towards the end.
As I've argued before, I don't think divine allusions serve scientific explanations well. And more generally, I did wonder whether Le Fanu overstates his case in his desire to score against his opponents. For example, the inexplicable nature of gravity, as it was to Newton - the force that bizarrely acts at a distance - is cited on a number of occasions as a paradigmatic case of the mystery of natural things. Only, General Relativity doesn't see gravity as such, but rather as an implicit feature of spacetime. You could say that just replaces one mystery with another, but I think it's important to say so. Alternatively, Le Fanu lambasts neo-Darwinism for the simplicity of its big idea - Dennett's 'universal acid' - because it is actually woefully inadequate when it comes to describing how, say, we shifted from walking on all fours to two: there are too many intermediary steps required with no obvious adaptive advantage. But then he also mocks the complexity of evolutionary mathematics as obscurantist. I felt you can't have it both ways.
What's exciting about the book, though, is the sense it leaves that we might be on the verge of a paradigm change in the biological sciences. To my mind, reductionist materialism has pretty clearly almost exhausted its explanatory powers in these fields, though it's had a great run. (That's something physicists have long had to contemplate.) We might live to see a new science emerge.
Comments
A frequent mistake - oft made by scientists as much as anyone else - is to think of the genetic program as being equivalent to a computer program at the level of the code instead of the level of the instructions. The program code for (say) a word processor and for (say) a telephone autodialler will have nothing much in common at this level, and this is what we seem to intuitively expect for DNA too - hence the "surprise" that 98% of chimp DNA is the same as human and so forth.
But if you look at the level of the instructions, the word processor, telephone autodialler etc. all use more or less the same instructions. Another metaphor that gets at the same idea is the difference between the words in a book and the letters in the book. We expect huge variation in the words, but we know there isn't huge variation in the letters used.
This is how it is with DNA: the instructions were in place in the Cambrian, and a lot of key genes (such as those for dopamine and its derivatives) have not changed since. As a result, we should scarcely be surprised that the main body of genes doesn't change that much from organism to organism.
All the best!
That's a very useful distinction, thanks. I wonder whether you think it dissolves 'the problem'.
The element that Le Fanu drives at is the dissimilarities between us and other animals - not just physiological but psychological too, and then by extension, cultural. So at the physiological level he points out that similarities - four limbs, same hormones etc - belie enormous differences, from shape of pelvis to size and structure of the brain. Then there's the psychology, such as, say, the very complex business of understanding and using language, which appears to be inherited, if Chomsky is right. And yet, on both counts, there's little or no apparent reflection of those dissimilarities in the genetic material that's transmitted.