Neurotheology Review - Essay Example

Neurotheology Review Did the human brain develop over eons with the express purpose of seeking ‘the truth’? Is there a Creator involved in directing this evolution? Does evolution even happen? A poll conducted in 2001 by the National Geographic (the figures have not changed over the last two decades) yielded the following results: No less than 45% of the American people interviewed believed that “God created human beings in pretty much the present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Evolution according to them played no role in shaping us. One of the challenges of biology is to answer these questions. For it is evident that man has been trying to explain the world around him for almost as long as he appeared on earth. We do not know whether there exist other species with similar proclivity, but with humans this need is evident. Despite warnings of dire consequences, Adam did pluck the fruit of knowledge didn’t he? At one level questions were of metaphysical nature and on the other they involved scientific knowledge. Earliest scientific study was mainly in the areas of Physical Science, questioning the nature of matter, energy and motion. The Greek philosophers applied their minds to these questions using logic alone in a dialectical reasoning. Aristotle made an attempt at compiling all that was known then. He wrote an entire treatise catalogueing hundreds of living animals. Following this tradition Biology was confined to making detailed observations about plants and animals right uptil the 17th century. As the data grew a need was felt to work out an effective system of classification. A Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus formulated the system of binomial nomenclature (naming a living organism using two different names, one of its genus and the other of its species). For example, Homo sapiens is the biological name for the modern man. This was an important step in systematising biological knowledge. Even in its most rudimentary stage it was recognized that living beings were distinctly different from the rest of the physical world. One group of scientists proposed that there was some kind of ‘vital force’ acting within them that accounted for this distinction while others argued that living things were reducible to physical and chemical laws. Their theory was called the ‘mechanistic’ theory. The advocates of the ‘vital force’ theory declared that certain aspects of living organisms could not be explained with science and in fact science should not even attempt to meddle with the study of life. Early Greek thinkers, Hippocratus, Galen etc held the view that the body mind and soul were inseparable. Rene Descartes in early seventeenth century brought in the duality of the mind (soul) and body. This settled an issue that the scientifically inclined were facing vis a vis the Christian Church which decreed that scientific study of the human body was against the will of God. Now the body was a separate entity, scientists could study it as long as they kept the soul out of their reckoning. For obvious reasons the human body, particularly mortality fascinated man the most. Different cultures developed different philosophies about what happens to man after he dies. The ancient Egyptians made elaborate arrangements for the supposed ‘afterlife’ of the deceased (we got the fantastic monuments as a fallout). The Hindus burnt their dead at the funeral pyre with great many rituals. Meanwhile human anatomy was being studied overtly and sometimes surreptitiously since most religions frowned upon scientists as since they seemed to challenge the authority of the scripts. In late 16th century, Andreas Vesalius published a book named On the Fabric of the Human Body where he attempted to draw vessels, bones and muscles of the human body. The drawings were by no means perfect but it was a clear step in making accurate observation. By this time Scientific investigation had come to be, what we know it as, a systematic body of study that uses extensive observation and experimentation. However the limiting factor in our sense perception, in our inability to perceive things too large or too small, often slowed the progress of science. Invention of more sophisticated tools to make better observation, measurements as well as carry out more complex experiments has more than once hastened the pace. Galileo had discovered that by using a pair of lenses of the correct focal length small objects could be magnified. But he was not really interested in small objects for he had trained his eyes on the distant and very large celestial bodies. So he focussed his attention on designing telescopes. It was left to one Robert Hook to further the magnifying instrument, the microscope. This was completely in line with his work as an organiser of experiments for the Royal society of Science fellows. With his redesigned microscope he fell upon examining things of all kinds. Details were revealed that were hitherto beyond the scope of the naked eye. Meanwhile Leeuwenhoek managed to make a microscope of much higher magnification by grounding a glass into an almost spherical lens. With this he managed to look at bacteria, organisms that were completely unknown to man. An entire new world of microorganisms opened upon to further intrigue biologists. What are theories in science? These are, well, just theories that seem to fit the description of our world or our universe. We generally accept these theories as facts and these hold sway over our beliefs till such time they are either falsified or a more plausible theory comes our way. Pasteur’s falsified the theory of sponateous generation by his conclusive demonstration that living beings cannot originate from non-living things. In other words ‘life begets life’. Thereafter the study of Biology has focussed on the enigma of what constitutes ‘life’. Schlieden and Schwann proposed that the cell is the structural and functional unit of life where all the activities that define ‘life’ were located. The idea that we humans are organized along the same design as other organisms was both startling as well as humbling. Meanwhile geologists had been attempting maps of the different layers of rocks. As they dug away to reach the depths of the earth, they came across remains of plants and animals that were very different from the ones that roam the earth today. This combined with the evidence of the age of the rocks made biologists realize that the earth was very old and secondly that it had been inhabited by very different creatures in the remote past. Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) and Lamarck suggested that living things of the past came to like today’s by a series of slow changes. This concept of evolution was the paradigm within which Charles Darwin set out to explain adaptation. He set sail on H.M.S Beagle that navigated the coasts of South America, Africa and Australia. He read two books during his voyage that seemed to trigger off a line of thought in his mind. The first one was Charles Lyell’s newly published Principles of Geology where the author dismissed the theory upheld by the stalwarts like Richard Owen, a pre-eminent biologist of that era,that explained the extinction of species in the distant past by postulating a series of disasters, the most recent of which was the flood described in the Bible. Species that survived these catastrophes were thought to have repopulated the world. He advocated that “slow, steady, cumulative changes brought upon by natural forces were responsible for the course of the earth’s history. Darwin applied the same logic to living organisms. He also read Thomas Malthus on population, in which Malthus showed that human populations cannot go on increasing endlessly as they would be limited by food and other resources. Darwin drew up the first line of argument; living organisms reproduce in numbers far greater than what ultimately survive into adulthood. This sets up a stiff competition between different individuals. His most detailed study was with the flora and fauna of the Galapagos island off the coast of South America. He noted that in that island there was a higher than usual diversification among the tortoises, mockingbird and most notably, finches (when compared to the diversification among the same types on the mainland). The study of finches with their diversified beaks gave him the idea that all the niches offered in a geographical unit get filled in by slightly different variants of the same organism. The natural question that arose in his mind was, “why should remote islands contain such diversity?” His answer was that isolation, plus time plus adaptation to local conditions leads to the origin of species. Only the most suitably adapted will be able to survive, the process he called natural selection. This seemed more logical to him than to surmise that these species had been created and placed in the Galapagos individually. (Quammen, 2004) The question of adaptation has given rise to a number of points of view. The mechanists viewed this as an outcome of the process of cause and effect, mechanical causality. While Darwin himself argued it teleologically, framing the central question in this, that of ‘purpose’. He argued that certain animals go to great lengths to develop secondary characteristics (like the peacock’s tail) in order to gain sexual selection advantage. In other words individuals with a more elaborate manifestation of this characteristic are likely to find mating partners more readily. i.e. all characteristics of an organism has a purpose albeit an adaptive one. The teleology involved was not very far removed from the way religions embrace teleology to explain ‘God’s design’. However it is important to keep in mind in what precise sense the system of teleology is drawn in here. Lyman argues it is in the ‘transcendental’ sense proposed by Kant, i.e. we need to remain conscious of the fact that it is more about our way of judging the world rather than about the world itself. “I am proposing a Kantian transcendental unity among the teleological systems of religions and that of naturalism. In the latter however, conclusions are testable and the “purpose” is a posteriori. The purpose does not imply purposeful causation.” (Page, 2006) Perhaps it is pertinent here to go over some reactions to Darwin’s theory of evolution. “Many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution “nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system.” The late Srila Prabhupada, of the Hare Krishna movement, explained that God created “the 8,400,000 species of life from the very beginning”, in order to establish multiple tiers of reincarnation for rising souls. Although souls ascend, the species themselves don’t change, he insisted dismissing “Darwin’s nonsensical theory.” (Quammen, 2004) A well known name today, Gregor Mendel is credited with discovering the fundamentals of genetics. Unfortunately his findings were published in an obscure journal and went unnoticed by Darwin and other contemporary biologists. Even though Mendel was unaware of the exact nature of the genetic material, he accurately predicted how inherited traits were passed on from one generation to the next. Almost 100 years later, in 1952, Rosalind Franklin managed to take an X-ray diffraction photograph of the chromosomal material inside the nucleus of the cell. Based on this within a year James Watson and Francis Crick fully elucidated the double helical model of the DNA. Even before the exact chemical structure of the DNA was found Barbara McClintock had been quietly researching on what came to be called “jumping genes”. Working on the pigmentation of the corn kernel, she found that there are some genes that controlled the genes that actually were responsible to the colour of the kernels. These controlling genes were not stationary but could move up and down on the chromosome. The significance of her work which was completed in the fifties, was understood only after the work of two nobel-prize winning French scientists Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob in 1961 established that the genetic material was indeed the DNA. What did all these rapidly advancing knowledge of the way the cell functions and how it is controlled imply? The implications were many. 1. Genetics provided direct evidence for evolution. 2. Molecular biology made rapid progress and many finer details of the exact cell functioning elucidated. Their application in medical science is obvious. 3. However there were some details that did not fit very neatly inot the existing paradigm, for instance, it was discovered in 1977 much of the messenger RNA that directly copies from th3e DNA the code for certain proteins in the cell, is broken up into smaller pieces out of which one lot is kept aside (introns) and the other lot (exons) is rejoined in a process called splicing. In other words not all of the DNA was coding for for any protein at all! This DNA was called junk DNA In fact it was estimated that nearly 99% DNA in our body does not actually code for anything or are not therefore genes in the true sense. Since the entire process of splicing is highly energy-consumptive, and the cell likes to conserve energy at all cost, wouldn’t it have been simpler to do away with the ‘junk’ parts of the DNA and pass on only the ‘real’ genes? Teleologic argument would again raise the question of “why” here. If natural selection has not wiped out such a wasteful process, it must have a purpose. The answer came a little later, “ Splicing allows a single gene to be organized in many ways to form different gene products, magnifying the value of the information transfer from DNA.” (Page, TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGY: WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE?, 2006) We carry our genes from birth and so this also implied that all our future physiology is already determined. Criticism raged against this, as it was established that the role of the environment could not be discounted. A compromise was struck-------- a nature-nurture combination was agreed upon as the factors shaping our biology. There has been some shift in the paradigm of how the mind relates to the body and vice-versa. Oakley Ray argues that “Our physiology and biochemistry are not separate and distinct from the rest of our life and our experiences. The mind ___a manifest functioning of the brain ____and the other body systems interact in ways critical for health, illness and well-being.” This mind-body approach incorporates ideas, belief systems and hopes as well as biochemistry, physiology and anatomy. Belief systems provide a baseline upon which other variables act and have their effects. (Ray, 2004). Richard Davidson has been researching on the biology of joy, found “that happiness isn’t a vague, ineffable feeling :it’s a physical state of the brain, one that you can induce deliberately.” His team also found that peoplewho rate in the upper reaches of happiness on psychological tests develop about 50% more antibodies than average in response to flu vaccines.” (Michael D Lemonick, 2005) Down the ages, the role of diet in influencing our physiology, in most cultures was well known. The first thing that doctors prescribe is a suitable diet to settle the malfunctioning body. In Hindu thinking the role of environmental factors in shaping us, particularly our behavior, is very important. The scriptures spoke of the diet directly influencing our personality. In the Hindu tradition three distinct personality types were recognized, Satvik, Rajasik and Tamasik and there was a heirarchy involved. The Satvic at the top rung was a calm saintly person, in control of his impulses and was set apart in his higher intellectual engagement with the world. The Rajasik type was believed to be aggressive, quick tempered passionate and given to rigorous physical activities that worked his body rather than his mind. While the Tamasik at the bottom was lazy, indifferent to the world, his body and mind in a perpetual state of dormancy and ignorance. Their diets were in accordance with their personality. The Satvik showed a penchant for non-spicy, vegetarian food in moderate quantities that did nothing to excite the senses but only sustained the balanced physiology of the body. The Rajasik indulged in hot spicy food, craved for meat and was wont to overeat. The Tamasik similarly liked cold fermented, sour food. While these predispositions were embedded in the personality types, it was also known that it was possible to rise in the heirarchy by changing one’s diet (among many other things). In other words the food that we eat directly influences our consciousness. Gandhiji the Indian statesman experimented with his diet in the true scientific spirit. He reported that he could practice total abstinence from sex by simply sticking to a satvik vegetarian diet. As more research is pouring in from the field of neurosciences there is a growing need to integrate these in order to gain an understanding of the evolutionary drive and gene expression. In her paper “Atypical Epigenesis” Annette Karmiloff-Smith argues that “It is becoming increasingly clear that little in development is predetermined or permanently fixed. Rather, gene expression is activity dependent and epigenesist is probabilistic. So the study of genetic disorders needs to change from the still widely held view that developmental disorders can be accounted for in terms of intact versus impaired modules, to one which takes serious account of the fact that the infant cortex passes from an initial state of high regional interconnectivity to a subsequent state of increasing specialization and localization of function.” (Karmiloff-Smith, 2007) In other words, part A is all right, part B is impaired, therefore, the impairment in behavior is due to part B, (the modular approach) has to be revised in terms of the complex interactivity between parts A and B. The influence of our beliefs and our environment particularly cultural, cannot be denied. These influences are particularly pronounced in the developmental stages before the localization of functions in the brain is fixed. In groundbreaking work, Bruce Lipton, a former medical school professor and research scientist examines molecular mechanisms by which cells process information. His studies reveal that genes do not in fact control our behavior, instead genes are turned on and off by influences outside the cell. These influences include our perceptions and beliefs. The scientific method used in the study of biology has yeilded narrower and narrower views of organisms including human beings. Specialisation within the discipline grew. Findings from these fields added up to the total reality about the living world i.e. smaller parts made up the whole. While this is the way scientific enquiry is carried out, this ‘ adding up’ style may not yeild the complete picture. There is a distinct shift in the paradigm today as more and more scientists feel the need to look at life holistically, somewhat like in the Gaia hypothesis (Gaia is the greek goddess of the Earth) of Lovelock, in which he suggested that all the living things along with the oceans, air and land make up a system that can be likened to a giant organism. According to David Sloan Wilson, as cited by Michael Morewood, growth of religion is a part of our evolutionary process. “Religious groups act like organisms that are a product of natural selection by which they acquire properties that enable them to survive and reproduce in their environment.” (Morwood, 2002) Moral codes are developed that are beneficial to the whole group. So even though religion may not point to the reality as it exists, it contributes to making the earth a better place to live. The study of the mind had been the domain of the philosophers. The early philosophers including Plato, Aristotle right down to Descartes contemplated its nature and devised various theories. Until fairly recently, in the scientific vocabulary, psychology was simply a study of ‘mental diseases’. It was only in the 20th century it was recognized as a legitimate discipline and made rapid strides. Drawing from cognitive behavior studies, neurosciences, linguistics it attempts to explain human behavior. Connection of human behavior with the neural set up in the brain has been well established. A popular model of the brain is summarized in Steven Rose’s the 21st Century Brain “There are computer models in which various regions of the brain are analogized to disk memory in which both data and program instructions are stored, chip processors that manipulate the information and modify the programs and input-output circuits for connections to the rest of the body. When it became clear that much mental information is diffusely located rather than concentrated at discrete spots the brain as hologram was substituted for brain as electronic computer.” (Lewontin, 2005) Buttressing this stand was Daniel Dennett’s argument that both the computer and the human mind lack intentionality. The intentionality of the computer, he proposed, is dependent upon the programmer who designed the computer, in a similar way, natural selection dictates the intentionality of the human mind. This view has come under severe criticism. Even though the neurosciences have succeeded in mapping certain details of the computational capabilitiy of the brain, this does not add up to an explanation for what it is ‘to think’. In Brain-wise: Studies in Neurophylosophy, Patricia Smith Churchland attacks those who uphold the computer model of the brain, the view that the mind is the software to the brain’s hardware. It may be conceded that the mental processes reside in the brain, however, neural activity itself seems to be ‘cognitively inscrutable’. (Noe, 2003) So we see that as predicted by Thomas Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientific progress has been through the advent of certain theories that change the old paradigms and new paradigms are created that focus and deflect the search in new directions. The theory of evolution was one such instance. It influenced our thinking not only in the field of biology but almost every other discipline like economics, sociology, history etc. Today we are positioned at the cross-roads when another major shift in paradigm seems to be underway. We are looking away from genetic determinism towards how our biology interacts with our social, cultural and religious belief systems to provide answers to the complexity of our lives. To put it another way, is it at all possible to study human biology ignoring inputs from these systems? Will it change our ‘worldview’? Worldviews are sets of beliefs and assumptions that describe reality. The term comes from the German Weltanschauung, meaning a view or perspective on the world or universe, “used to describe one’s total outlook on life, society and its institutions” While this idea had been around for quite some time discussions focused on defending one or another worldview as the exclusive way to gain truth. In the 19th century, Nietzsche highlighted that alternative worldviews can and indeed do coexist. “Nietzsche’s insight was that different worldviews have an independent validity and appeal for those who hold them, and that it is worthwhile to compare worldviews in other ways than merely to claim that a given one is exclusively true.” Of particular interest is how worldview affects cognition. Recent research suggests that “participants in East Asia exhibit ‘holistic’ cognition, characterized by paying a great deal of attention to the entire stimulus field and by the use dialectical reasoning; participants in the United States, on the other hand, exhibit ‘analytic’ cognition characterized by paying attention to isolated detail and by the use of Aristotelian-type logic. This suggests that something about culture forms cognition; this something may include culturally transmitted worldviews. Huntington in 1996 claimed that post-cold war international conflict will be less about political ideologies and more about what he called “clash of civilizations” that is “a conflict between cultures that differ in terms of worldviews. (Koltko-Rivera, 2004) The hype over self improvement literature is manifest everywhere today. These are rooted in the belief that we can control most of our behavior by simply changing the way we think, what we think. This is not even limited to our behavior, there is enough evidence to support that our mind plays a key role in combating the diseases like cancer, Alzeimer’s, etc. As far as our understanding of the mind-body relationship is concerned, scientists have managed to only scratch the surface. Research in this are holds the key to our future. Works Cited Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2007). Atypical epigenesis. Developmental Science DOI:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00568.x , 84-88. Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology , pp. 3-58. Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology , p. 3. Lewontin, R. (2005, March 12). Perspectives. The Lancet , p. 929. Michael D Lemonick, D. C. (2005, January 17). The Biology of Joy. Time . Morwood, M. (2002, October 4). Biologist looks at religions evolutionary value. National Catholic reporter , p. 40. Noe, A. (2003, June 19). Towards a biology of the mind. Nature , p. 805. Page, L. A. (2006, June). TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGY: WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE? Zygon , p. 428. Page, L. A. (2006, June). TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGY: WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE? Zygon , p. 429. Page, L. A. (2006, June). Teleology in Biology:Who could ask for anything more? Zygon , p. 428. Quammen, D. (2004, November). Was Darwin wrong? National Geographic , p. 26. Quammen, D. (2004, November). Was Darwin Wrong? National Georgraphic , p. 6. Ray, O. (2004, January). How the mind heals and hurts the body. pp. 29-39. Ray, O. (2004, January). How the mind heals and hurts the body. American Psychologist , pp. 29-39. Ray, O. (2004, January). How the Mind Hurts and Heals the Body. American Psychologist , p. 29. Read More