René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

Poor old René Descartes ¹ usually gets the blame for the dualism that dominated western thought (and to a large extent still does).
The error is not only in dualism, the idea that there is a separate spirit - or mind or soul -, which exists completely loose from the material of our brain. In some or other way we all do feel that way. An error that we all make you can hardly blame on Descartes.

The other error is to move too far in the other direction: the idea that biochemistry determines everything, while we can have no influence on it at all. The idea thus of ‘one-way traffic’ chemistry as the cause and never as the result; the human being becomes then a type of robot.

Notes

¹ Matt Ridley: Matt Ridley: Genome (1999, Contact).

Dualism

Dualism has been around a long time; for how long, we don’t know. In any case the concept existed among the ancient Greeks: Plato (400 B.C.) declared that the human body is ‘inhabited’ by a non-material entity, the soul. Since then western philosophers have discussed the problem of the antithesis “body-mind” (mind or spirit or soul). We will restrict ourselves to the West, but it is known that this concept existed and exists in other cultures, that there is an immaterial soul that does not die when the body dies, a separate entity (in ancient Egypt, Buddhism etc).

Descartes (about 1600 A.D.) formulated dualism, which had existed for very long. He called the spirit ‘ (the ‘thinking thing’). This existed separate from the body, even from the brain. The spirit could not live in the brain, because the spirit was free and the brain a material thing or a machine. A machine can only do one thing - that for which it was made - and can thus never be free.

In a certain sense Descartes put an end to true dualism, because he thought that the mind operates on the brain through the epiphysis (the pineal gland), an organ in the centre of the brain of which the function has never been clear (and is still not very clear; but we do know that melatonin is made here, the hormone that ensures our day and night rhythm). In his eyes there was clearly an interaction between the immaterial spirit and the material brain.

Materialism

De Lamettrie: L’homme machine (1748)

In the middle of the eighteenth century a curious book appeared in Leiden ² - without mentioning its author. The author was a French doctor and philosopher Julien Offray de Lamettrie, who wisely didn’t state his name because the contents raised enormous opposition. He would have been in danger if he were known to be the author.

He had gathered his extreme materialistic conviction of humans as a military doctor who took part in various campaigns and especially when he suffered a sever fever attack himself and experienced how bodily causes influenced the psyche.

Julien Offray de Lamettrie

Due to earlier opinions in this direction he had deserted France for the liberal Holland. In spite of this, this publication caused enormous scandals and the first edition was burned. When the authorship became known, De Lamettrie also had to leave Holland and found protection in Berlin under Frederick the Great, who admired his work, but was prepared to express his admiration only after the death of De Lamettrie.

As the title indicates De Lamettrie stated that the body functions as a machine. He said that the characteristics of humans depend on the brain and that the brain discharges thoughts just as the gallbladder discharges bile. The idea of a soul he regarded as a religious prejudice. Life is the result of organised material and not of a special soul. Material is not the inert stuff of Descartes but an active principle.

Until the end of the nineteenth century the work of De Lamettrie was regarded chiefly as heresy. Gradually however more knowledge became available which supported his ideas.

In the nineteenth century it gradually became clearer that various psychical phenomena had to be ascribed to the brain. As a result of this thinking about the relationship between the brain and the spirit swung over to the other extreme: people thought that by studying the shape of the skull they could decide whether someone was criminally disposed (Lombroso) or was very good at mathematics (to which we still owe our ‘mathematics or language bumps’). Someone who had a bump above his right ear exhibited destructive tendencies, but if the bump was in front of his ear, it showed a great ability to concentrate.

The nineteenth century was characterised by very accurate anatomical research in this field. Through autopsy of people who suffered from one or other aberration people could determine where the centres for various functions were located in the brain.

Thus Broca described a place where speech was formed and Wernicke found another centre for language and gradually various other functions were localised. We still speak of the centres of Broca and Wernicke. At the same time the opinion arose that large areas of the brain were useless. People who had severe brain damage could sometimes still have a good memory and function fairly normally. Even today it is said that we don’t use three-quarters (or even 90%) of the brain. But this has been overtaken by modern techniques. All the parts of our brain are active and have a task. Some parts can indeed take over another part’s function, especially if the damage occurred early in life.

Precisely the cases where serious brain damage had affected someone’s mind, had in the mean time made it clear that the human mind is certainly located in the brain.

The most famous example is that of Phineas Gage, who in an accident during his work received an iron bar through his head, and survived, but thereafter had become a completely different person.

² Le mettrie L’Homme machine, 1748

(I do not know if a modern English version exists)

A unique species

We humans see ourselves as a unique species, but in reality every species is unique (otherwise it would not be a separate species).

For most of us it is still so - in spite of Darwin - that the human may be physically related to animals, but that our consciousness, morality and the ‘immortal soul’ make the human being a really different being. This is the conviction of many people - religious or not, including many biologists.

The special characteristics pointed to are: learning, language, culture and especially consciousness.

It is evident that a capability to learn exists in all animals. Every animal must at least get to know its environment to be able to maintain itself. Even monocellular beings can learn something.

From research we know now that the other characteristics always seen as typically human also occur in animals:

-  the use of tools (in chimpanzees, but also observed in crows: bending steel wire to extract a piece of food from a hollow tube; and in herons: fishing with a small twig as a means of bait).

-  Language ability (animals also have symbolic rituals; some chimpanzees have learned sign-language; some parrots use their learned words in a contextual manner (a parrot, when his carer wanted to place him in his cage, said: “want to sit shoulder”).

-  Morality (apes who help and support handicapped mates, and also exhibit conciliatory behaviour. See Frans de Waal ³ ).

-  Lying and deceiving (in chimpanzees).

-  Culture (in the sense of behaviour that is socially transmitted and that differs from other groups of the same species. (Also see Frans de Waal).

-  Self-consciousness (difficult to determine, but in chimpanzees and dolphins strong indications have been found that they posses self-consciousness).

Evolution, just what do we mean?

For clarity: the central terms of evolution ‘struggle for life’ and ‘survival of the fittest’, have nothing to do with good or evil (as the so-called Social Darwinists thought). They concern only the chances of survival and the chance to pass one’s genes through to the next generation. Those who do not succeed (for example those who die young) do not contribute to the next generation. In as far as it is dependent on genetic characteristics this causes selection. Chance also plays a great role here, but over the long term and in large numbers it is the genes which determine which characteristics will appear in coming generations. Nowadays we speak of fitness: the better the fitness, the more likely the genes will be found in the next generations.

⁴ A. Heschl, The Intelligent Genome (SpringerVerlag, 1998).

Learning

In animals we often clearly distinguish between inherited (instinct) and acquired behaviour (although this distinction is becoming less clear). Inherited behaviour arose through a gene mutation that has been selected in earlier generations. By definition it can’t be changed.

An individual which is capable of learning (and every animal can do this to a certain degree, even the most primitive ones) has the possibility of exceeding its inherited behaviour (although within the limits of its learning ability). Learning gives flexibility; you could after all have learned something else. However this acquired behaviour is not passed on in the genes.

Learning is in effect: changing behaviour over time.

How does an animal know that it has to learn something?

Step 1:  it must recognise that there is something to be learned.

Step 2:  it must make a connection between stimuli 1 and 2 (for example the result of its reaction to a stimulus).

Step 3:  it must remember what must be remembered (and no irrelevant matters).

Learning is often seen as a passive process (storing information) but in reality it is the active execution of a programme that is already present.

Even the so-called “trial and error” learning presumably does not exist in a pure sense. An enlightening proof to show this:

In 1932 Krechevsky conducted this experiment: He placed rats in a maze as is a normal experiment to measure intelligence and learning capability and influences on these. This maze however has no solution, that is: the rats were always fed, whichever route they might follow; there was thus nothing to be learned. Surprising was that they appeared to learn as well as in a real maze. Each animal kept on following the shortest route it had walked. Every animal has as it were begun with its own hypothesis and this appeared to be validated. It remembered its own shortest route and kept true to this.

Other research intended to determine the role of rewards gave the same results: young squirrels learned just as well to open nuts when these contained nothing. Punishment and reward are quite unnecessary to learn something.

Everyone who has observed the learning of languages and other things by small children, knows that the learning process is a very active one and that children will learn a language whether the parents actively instruct them and reward them or not.

If learning was really a passive process and the environment had the power to tell the organism what it should do to benefit as soon as possible, the organism would make good use of this. All problems would be speedily solved.

The only conclusion can be that every learning system knows a-priori what it must learn. Learning is never coincidence or renewing.

It is a biological behaviour pattern that is appropriate and genetically determined.

Learning is different to acquiring something new.

Another experiment:

Garcia: in researching the effect of radioactivity on rats, this researcher discovered that the rats refused to drink water out of the normal bowls at the end of the experiment. He concluded that the animals associated that water with the nausea caused by the radiation they had experienced in the experiment. Later research confirmed this. Rats learn to refuse water or food if it makes them nauseous. If nausea is caused in combination with sound or light signals, they never learn the association.

Learning such an association is pre-programmed. What an animal or a human can learn is determined in the genome.

Not only the ability to learn, but also the necessary basic knowledge must be present in the genome:

• You must know in advance how to recognise the learning situation,
  
• The problem to be solved must already be known.
  
• You must also know in advance what the first step must be to solve the problem.
  
• When the first step has been taken, you must also know whether the result is the desired one.
  
• This also applies to the following steps: you must know what the expected, desired result is, and possibly change course if that is not the case.
  
• You must also know what the end-result should be to know that the whole process has been successful.

In brief: the organism already knows what it is going to learn.

This does not only apply to learning processes, which are recognised as such, but also to various experiences which we experience as highly personal: the knowledge to know what is happening, and what its relevance is to oneself, must be there in advance, therefore in the brain, that means it must have been present in the genome.

All the knowledge an individual possesses has been constructed in the brain, in the light of the environment, but determined by the genome.

When a baby ‘learns’ to grasp, crawl and walk etc, the child learns nothing; it is executing an inherited programme. No-one will have a problem with that. Even when it is learning its mother tongue, it is executing an inherited programme. Since Chomsky we know that all people have an inborn ‘language programme’: that all languages have certain basic rules which just are pre-programmed in the human genome. Because of this children learn their mother tongue so quickly and even pick up a second language easily. It also explains why they ‘correct’ certain deviations in their own language (deviations from the basic rules)(for example treating all verbs as weak verbs such as ‘think, thinked, in stead of ‘thought’). The fact that languages can be translated is the result of the ‘Universal Grammar’ of Chomsky.

Language

Learning languages goes easily and quickly as every child has been born with an inherited knowledge of the Universal Grammar (Chomsky). What is inborn is the basic knowledge for building sentences etc. What must be learned is how to fill in the variables of the actual mother tongue.

Chomsky is of the opinion that this is not biologically determined and that there are thus no boundaries to the human ability to learn.

Immunity as an example of a learning process

When regenerating after a wounding, the organism ‘knows’ exactly what it has to form (think of animals that can regenerate complete limbs). In the case of immunity the system also ‘knows’ what has to be formed. This is also a type of learning process that just like all learning processes is purposive and is based on knowledge already present (not consciously of course).

Learning processes can thus be compared to the development of immunity against disease - and justly so. The immune system ‘learns’ to recognise a certain virus or protein and attacks it at the next infection. But here also, it appears from recent research that no new ‘cognition’ arises. In mice it has been shown that all possible immunities already exist at birth - but in very small doses. There is thus no ‘acquired immunity’, as it is customarily called, but ‘adaptive immunity’: part of the system is selected during life and activated, but it had been there all along. We can compare learning processes to this.

Acquired knowledge

The cultural, social, scientific evolution of mankind should be, according to the hypothesis of Heschl, comparable to the evolution of the language of bees, the dams of beavers, the mounds of ants, etc. No-one has objections to seeing the results of evolution in these phenomena. For example, research has been done into the evolution of the language of bees, from which a credible model has been derived (based on the behaviour of related species that communicate in a somewhat simpler manner). That such competencies have evolved we find acceptable. Why not our own competencies?

All our knowledge has to be a priori present in our genome, or otherwise we would not be able to explain that we ‘ourselves’ know how to react to all sorts of unexpected situations such as a stone flying towards our heads.

There are all sorts of examples from which it appears that cognitive possibilities develop in children according to a fixed pattern: a child of three saw that someone had an object in a small box, and afterwards removes it. After a short while the child gets the box and expects to find the object still in it; a child of four knows exactly that it is no longer there. Such knowledge children possess from a certain moment. This happens during the development of the brain and does not have to be learned. Such tests are used to check if a child is developing normally. No-one has to explain to the child what has happened - at a certain stage it will know this by itself.

The material basis

The hypothesis of Heschl that all behaviour, including cognitive processes and learning processes, is genetically determined, seems to contradict the fact that all people have 99,9% the same DNA. Our mutual differences of 0,1% - not of the 30,000 genes, but of the 3 billion base-pairs, make up an enormous variation.

In which form behaviour and cognition (but also consciousness, memory, etc) have their material basis is not yet clear. Perhaps RNA plays a bigger role than the DNA, the actual genome.

In any case the quantity of information stored in the human DNA is very large. Just in our brains there is 200 million km of DNA!

Were the Romans less clever than we?

What is true for human culture must also be true for the development of science. Through mutations (all by chance!) and recombinations in each new generation, new individuals who differ cognitively, continually come into existence.

A new paradigm does not arise now and then due to somebody thinking up something entirely new, but due to some persons having been born with the cognitive basis of this paradigm in their genetical material. A real transfer of knowledge is not possible in this vision. People are born with certain cognitive possibilities. Of course the social environment in which they grow up and live, determines ultimately whether they can realise these possibilities.

Heschl compares this with the possibility of seeing colours; somebody who has been born colour-blind cannot learn to see in colour.

New developments in science are dependent on individuals who often get a new insight spontaneously (after they have been working in this direction for a long while):

‘All of a sudden I saw the light’.

“Eureka!” (Archimedes had found what he was after and knew exactly how important it was).

Who does not know the experience of reading or hearing of some explanation of a phenomenon and then having the feeling: yes of course, unconsciously I knew it all along; or the happiness at a new insight. That is not new, but a confirmation of what we knew already all along - unconsciously - or rather, what was already present in our genome.

When Darwin published ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859 he immediately had a number of supporters. These people had roughly the same cognitive basis as Darwin and recognised this paradigm as an explanation for very many facts. They had the necessary ‘cognition gene’. Only Darwin was also in the happy circumstance that he knew he had to collect the information to consciously understand and formulate it. Many others were not capable of this and also could not accept it (and many still don’t).

In this presentation scientific progress does not happen ‘by itself’. It is a condition that there are people who are genetically ‘predetermined’ to make new discoveries and that these people also get the chance through their environment and upbringing.

The development of human knowledge is thus the result of evolution in the ‘cognition genes’ (whatever these may be) - happenstance variations which arise now and then and in the correct context lead to new knowledge.

We can therefore not predict where this will lead!

That the Romans were intelligent but not capable of inventing a steam engine can thus be explained by the fact that they simply did not have the exact cognitive possibilities to invent electricity or nuclear weapons. They really were ‘born yesterday’!

30 000 genes

The recent discovery ⁶ that humans only possess about 30 000 genes seems to contradict the idea that not only our chemistry and our personalities to a large extent, but also our knowledge are stored in the genome. Apart from that there are also other scientist, who think we have some 700 000 to 800 000 ‘gene segments’ which possibly each possess a code (the 30 000 genes could possibly each be read in very different ways).

Other researchers are of the opinion that in DNA, besides or in addition to the 30 000 genes, there is a ‘meta-code’ which we do not understand yet, but in which also a sort of text is stored. Only about 5% of our DNA consists of genes, the rest is the puzzling ‘junk DNA’, which may not be ‘junk’ at all. (In the USA some people have already taken patents on the ‘junk DNA’ en the right to use them with future techniques.)

The universal grammar of Chomsky must also somehow be determined in the genome, as it could not depend on only a hand-full of genes. That this is indeed genetically determined is seen from the fact that there are families in which some members cannot learn certain grammatical rules. Recently a gene has been found which is abnormal in these people.

Besides the code for proteins (these are the genes with which biotechnologists work, for example the insulin gene which can be built into bacteria or yeasts, after which these produce human protein) it is found that many genes are involved in the development of the individual and thereby work in teams. These genes influence each other’s activity to a large degree.

⁶  This discovery came when Heschl had just completed the manuscript of his book. In an appendix he provides a provisional commentary.