"Human Nature": Posts towards a course on "Society, Culture and Biology"

One important point to draw out in a course on "Society, Culture and Biology" is the tension between beliefs in the 'immutable nature of man' and the equally profound view that 'humans are malleable creatures.' It seems that one source of distinction between both views derives from the question of authority. Among ancient philosophers and in natural theology circles it was commonplace to see an immutable nature. That view was contested in a variety of philosophical traditions, but especially by Rousseau and Marx. At issue, then, in the question of an evolutionary human nature, which on its face denotes a mutable but continuous biological nature, is whether humans have evolved to the point where they have emancipated themselves completely from their inherited past. Or whether, in contrast, humans remain deeply enmeshed biological creatures in large part determined by neolithic and paleolithic pasts. Comment if you have any thoughts!  

From Sherrington's "Man on his Nature"

"The seat of an immediate cause can be a saw or chisel; the seat of a final cause is in the brain - the brain may be regarded as, at least in man, the organ of final causes."

Medicine, Health, and History: A Blog by Paul E. Stepansky, Ph.D.

I've been reading Paul E. Stepansky's memoir about his father, The Last Family Doctor: Remembering My Father's Medicine. Over the next few days, I'm going to post notes from this moving book and also review it. It is beautiful, heartfelt, nostalgic, and yet also says something very profound about modern medicine in the United States. This book is one that all doctors and medical students should read. I discovered that Paul Stepansky has also started a blog. Here's a taste:

Three decades after Peabody’s lecture [Francis Peabody on “The Care of the Patient"], I began riding shotgun when my father, William Stepansky, made his daily round of house calls in rural southeastern Pennsylvania. Sometimes, especially with the older patients he visited regularly, I came into the house with him, where I was warmly welcomed, often with a glass of milk and home baked treats, as the doctor’s son and travelling companion. From my time on the road, I learned how my father’s clinical gaze met and absorbed the anxious gazes of family members. It became clear, over time, that his medical obligation was not only to the patient, but to the patient-as-member-of-a-family and to the family-as-medically-relevant-part-of-the-patient. In a lecture to the junior class of his alma mater, Jefferson Medical college, in 1965, he made this very point in differentiating the scope of the family physician’s clinical gaze from that of the pediatrician and internist. Unlike the latter, he observed, the family physician’s interventions occurred “within the special domain of the family,” and his treatment of the patient had to be continuously attentive to the “needs of family as an entity.” It was for this reason, he added, that “family medicine must teach more than the arithmetic sum of the contents of specialties” (my father’s emphasis). Here, in the mid-60s, my father posited a medical-interventional substratum to what would emerge a decade or so later, in the realm of psychotherapy, as family systems theory and “structural family therapy.” And then, 12 years before [George] Engels came on the scene, he offered his conception of “a solid intellectual approach to medicine”:

“To me this means relating the effects of the body systems one upon the other in health and disease through knowledge of the basic sciences – i.e., biochemistry and physiology – through some understanding of the social and environmental stresses on the patient, and finally through insight into the psychological influences of personality structure as it affects health and disease.”

Beautiful, crisp prose and thoughtful - and that's the case for his memoir too.

People...not Brains

In yet another chapter from mereological ethics.... I came across this thoughtful essay by Simon Rippon (hat-tip Andrew Sullivan). Rippon asks why it is that we claim that people with brain cancer (or some sort of brain disease) can be free from responsibility of the crimes they commit, while those with normal brains are not given the same benefit of the doubt. He writes:

But now consider what the brain is: it is, essentially, a biological machine; 100 billion nerve cells living in a chemical soup and firing electrical impulses at each other. And in years to come, as neuroscience improves and expands our knowledge of the brain, we may reach the stage where your lawyer will be able to explain any particular criminal misjudgement as a result of this-or-that chemical overdose or deficit, this-or-that badly routed synapse, the growth of this-or-that cell, or – perhaps – this-or-that quantum random occurrence. How will we respond to these future lawyers? What’s the difference between the idea that this-or-that bit of your brain (albeit perhaps a microscopic bit) made you irrational, and the idea that a large tumour made you irrational? A tumour is not some alien invader: it is a proliferation of your own cells. Is it, then, size that matters here? Surely not!

A number of responses seem in order: Firstly, the law is organized around the person, the victim, the crime and the needs of society. It is not organized around the brain and nervous system of individuals. Criminal misjudgment would still indicate that the person committed a criminal action. Regardless of the reasons that a person committed a crime, the crime would still have been committed and some action would still be required by the state. Arguing from a reductive view that the crime's causes were in the brain would in no way change the fact that a crime had occurred. Rippon appears to be speculating that reductive explanations could be offered as a means of mitigating responsibility for criminal action. The crime, however, was still committed. In other words, there are holistic determinants here that Rippon's reductionist speculation does not address. It is for reasons like this, thankfully, that intoxication rarely works as a defense in rape.

Book Review: Toby A. Appel, Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975 (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

In the mid-1960s, administrators within the Division of Biological and Medical Sciences (BSM) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) had become convinced that an interdisciplinary “big biology” program was needed. Such a program some felt would possess great rhetorical value in convincing Washington’s political leadership of the need to support biological research.

Among the advocates of this approach was Herman Lewis. Lewis believed that among the various potential big biology programs, "neurobiology” would prove the most sustainable. He argued that neurobiology: “will probably occupy the position in the last half of this decade [1960s] that molecular biology has had during the first half" (p. 255).

Others were less glib about neurobiology’s prospects. One argued that “establishing new programs in faddish areas” would cast the whole of the BMS in a bad light “by attracting "fund-chasing entrepreneurs" or setting up a "cult of high priests who tend to evaluate proposals not on the basis of whether good experimental procedures are proposed, but whether they meet current fashions and contain the popular catch words" (p. 255).

Yet despite such concerns, by the 1970s neurobiology had become a major area for targeted funding and among the early recipients of NSF largess was Frank O. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program at MIT. It was also in this era that federal dollars began flowing towards neuro and psychobiological research on “learning and memory,” because, as one BMS administrator put it: "There is probably no area which so completely permeates and influences the diverse aspects of our complex society as does the topic of learning. We are constantly learning, in school, at work, at home, and in our social relationships." (p. 256)

Such small vignettes appear throughout Toby A. Appel’s excellent and highly readable institutional history of the National Science Foundation’s support of biological research in the United States. Stories like these usefully remind us that often the ‘hot topics’ in science research are driven not by trends and discoveries in science but by the shifting sands of governmental agencies and patrons’ priorities. It is that story that Appel’s Shaping Biology records through ambitious and diligent historical scholarship that traces the early history of biology patronage within the NSF from its foundation in 1951 to the reorganization of the BMS in 1975. While there were many bodies in the US government that supported biological research, it is clear from Appel’s analysis that the NSF was special because it was the only agency that funded the entire spectrum of biology “from molecules to natural history museums." (p. 1)

"If World War II had not been a biologist's war...through the exploitation of biological warfare, World War III might well be."

Shaping Biology is a study with few rivals. As Appel makes clear, from NSF’s origins in Vannevar Bush’s famous call for governmental support of science, the NSF’s founders had hoped to unify the disparate fields of biology. Telling her story through changes that took place in molecular biology, plant biology, systematic biology, and ecology, Appel makes clear that the pursuit of unity would forever haunt the agenda of the BMS. Also haunting the NSF was the question of the ends of biological research. Rockefeller Foundation officers (who prior to the advent of government support of science had been biology’s largest benefactors) saw significant promise in the social application of biological knowledge. And while biology’s wartime contributions throughout 1939-1945 were in some sense disputed by medical scientists, there was also rather pessimistic recognition that: "If World War II had not been a biologist's war...through the exploitation of biological warfare, World War III might well be" (p. 17).

The Origins of Autism Research: A History

A few months ago the editors of Dissertation Reviews invited me to review an excellent dissertation by Dr Bonnie Evans. Evans completed her doctorate in the history of medicine at the University of Cambridge in 2010.  Her study is, I believe, an instant classic. She is bound to become the world expert on the history of autism. Her dissertation is highly original and theoretically sophisticated. Here's a taste of her work through my review (which is published here):

Using legal, institutional, intellectual sources, as well as patient records from the Maudsley to excavate her story, Evans convincingly demonstrates that transformations and formations outside and inside the strata of professional psychiatry and psychology ultimately made and unmade child patients, categorizing them in various generations as “backwards,” “mental defectives,” “subnormals,” “ineducables,” “psychotics,” “schizophrenics,” “autistics,” and “socially impaired,” She concludes that the increasing prominence of the autistic child derived from a confluence of epidemiological understandings about the social and mental abnormalities of children and laws concerned with those children’s protection and education. It was this meeting between law and epidemiology that ultimately constructed the autistic child into a demographic reality and made that child a prevalent, persistent subject. 

As a sidenote: Dissertation Reviews is a truly great resource for historians. They are definitely forward-looking technologically, and their web-design is aesthetically pleasing. They have just started a Science Studies Series, which is bound to be of great value to historians and sociologists of science, medicine and technology.

25% off "The Neurological Patient in History"

Promo Code: NEU12

Expires June 30, 2012

Melvin Kranzberg's six laws of technology

Melvin Kranzberg  (1986) "Technology and History: "Kranzberg's Laws"" Technology and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 544-560.

1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
2. Invention is the mother of necessity.
3. Technology comes in packages, big and small.
4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
6. Technology is a very human activity - and so is the history of technology.

So how many neurons do you have? Investigating the Origins of a Neuroscience Dogma

"Quantitative methods are tedious and some thought is necessary before the work is begun, for the mere collection of quantitative data has little interest unless it clarifies relationships that were previously obscure."

D. A. Sholl, The Organization of the Cerebral Cortex (London 1956), pp. 29-30

So how many neurons do we have? In their fascinating review (PDF here) published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, Roberto Lent et al pointed out that a number of dogmas had found their way into neuroscience and that the origins of some were hidden in mystery (my discussion of their review is here). One dogma they identified was the idea that humans have 100 billion neurons. As Lent et al observed, the origins of this dogma "in the literature is unknown" (1). Upon investigation, I think that I have uncovered at least one early source for this view. While the numbers are not as large as 100 billion, they are significantly large to be the origins of the claim. Moreover, in some instances, discussions of the number of neurons in the brain were also presented with other numbers, such as for instance the number of cells in the body. It could well be that over time, those numbers were conflated together - but this is, of course, mere historical conjecture.

In 1899, Helen Thompson published an article in the Journal of Comparative Neurology entitled: "The total number of functional neurons in the cerebral cortex of man (etc)." In her paper, Thompson presented work - chiefly in tables - that suggested that the "total number of functional nerve cells in the cerebral cortex of the adult man is, in round number, 9200 million" and that moreover that approximately 1.37% of that brain was functional nerve cells (p. 114).

Thompson noted in her introduction that the classic work on the subject was Karl Hammarberg's 1895 Studien uber Klinik und Pathologie der Idiotie, which permitted estimates as high as 3000 million cells until she published her study. In a note appended to her study, H. H. Donaldson remarked that these findings were difficult to interpret, especially as they pertained to race, gender, and "eminence". Donaldson offered the following data and comment:
 

We assume however, as the records in the Table are from persons having at least normal intelligence, that moderate variations in the number of dendritic branches belonging to the cortical cells and in the associated terminals represent the greatest differences to be expected. We therefore conclude that the largest part of the difference in weight, as exhibited in the Table, is to be referred to the axones, with their medullary sheaths; at the same time recognizing that variations in the mass of the axone are of no value in increasing the complexity of the central system. Accepting this conclusion, the differences in question can be explained in one of three ways. In the larger brain of any group, there is either a greater number of complete neurones, or, second, a more generous development of the axones alone, or, third, a possible combination of both of these conditions. In making a choice between these several explanations thus suggested, a guide may be found in the observation that, within a rather wide range of absolute weight, there is a re-markable constancy in the proportional weights of the several subdivisions (cerebrum, cerebellum and stem) of the encephalon. (p. 146)

Both Thompson and Donaldson's papers were of sufficent interest to warrant a "retrospect" - a type of abstracting service offered by academic journals - in the Journal of Mental Science (vol. 46; 1900; p. 565), where Havelock Ellis, a British psychologist and physician, described it a "valuable paper." In spite of such evidence of the paper's widespread reception, it is nevertheless doubtful that these papers were alone responsible for the origins of this dogma.

We might speculate that a more likely source was the writing of  C Judson Herrick, professor of neurology at the University of Chicago, where Thompson also worked. In his An Introduction to Neurology published in 1916, Herrick paraphrased Thompson's paper via a provocative metaphor, arguing that the problem for the neurologist was to "disentangle the inconceivably complex interrelations of the nerve-fibers which serve all the manifold functions of adjustment of internal and external relations." Herrick noted:

This is no simple task. If it were possible to find an educated man who knew nothing of electricity and had never had heard of a telegraph or telephone, and if this man were assigned the duty of making an investigation of the telegraph and telephone systems of a great city without any outside assistance whatever, and of preparing a report upon all the physical equipment with detailed maps of all stations and circuits and with an explanation of the method of operation of every part, his task would be simple compared with the problem of the neurologists. The human cerebral cortex alone contains some 9280 million nerve cells, most of which are provided with long nerve fibers which stretch away for great distances and branch in different directions, thus connecting each cell with many different centers. The total of possible nervous pathways is, therefore, inconceivably great. (p. 26)

C. Judson Herrick (1868-1960)

In his 1926 Brains of Rats and Men, Herrick enhanced this picture further: "Recently, in conversation with a mathematician, we were commenting on some of the stupendous numbers employed by the astronomers in measuring the distance of the stars. The unit of measure here is the light-year, that is, the distance traversed by light in a year - about six million million miles, or 6x10^12.... Such numbers stun the imagination of the the non-mathematical mind. But a little computation shows that the known complexity of the nervous connections of the human body present possibilities of associational combinations of the nerve cells among themselves that run into numbers of even greater orders of magnitude. (p. 3)" And why was this the case? Again Herrick acknowledged Thompson and Donaldson, but this time he cited a new value from Donaldson, who "estimates that there are about twelve thousand million nerve cells or neurons in the human brain" (p. 4).

If a million cortical nerve cells were connected one with another in groups of only two neurons each in all possible combinations, the number of different patterns of interneuronic connection thus provided would be expressed by 10^2783000. This, of course, is no the actual structure, as we shall see; but the illustration may serve to impress upon us the inconceivable complexity of the ninety-two hundred million nerve cells know to exist is the cerebral cortex (p. 5)

While it is doubtful that these claims were original to Hammarberg, Thompson, Donaldson, and Herrick alone, they were probably partially responsible for the origin of this dogma. It is perhaps useful to note the way in which evocative language was used to crystallize the huge numbers for readers. It was likely in that language, and by evoking languages of astronomy and populations, that those numbers increased generation-by-generation. Again this is but hypothesis. More diligent work is necessary before we can say with certainty that these claims connect to our contemporary ones. They are, nonetheless, a place to start.

Darwin's awesome thoughts on "Mesmerism": Posts towards a course on Society, Culture and Biology

Writing to William Darwin Fox, "one of his earliest correspondents (4)," Charles Darwin commented in December 1844:

With respect to mesmerism, the whole country resounds with wonderful facts or tales... I have just heard of a child, three or four years old (whose parents and self I well knew) mesmerised by his father, which is the first fact which has staggered me. I shall not believe fully till I see or hear from good evidence of animals (as has been stated is possible) not drugged, being put to stupor; of course the impossibility would not prove mesmerism false; but it is the only clear exerimentum crucis, and I am astonished it has not be systematically tried. If mesmerism was investigated, like a science, this could not have been left till the present day to be done satisfactorily, as it has been I believe left. Keep some cats yourself, and do get some mesmeriser to attempt it. One man told me he had succeeded, but his experiments were most vague, as was likely from a man who said cats were more easily done than other animals, because they were so electrical!

Francis Darwin ed. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, 2 volumes. (New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1959): i; p. 341 

More Neoliberalism: "Ad men use brain scanners to probe our emotional response"

What did they want?

Rupert Neate reports in The Guardian that "Neuromarketers are using MRI scanners and electrode caps to work out our hidden reactions to their adverts."

We put a cap on your head that measures your brain impulses," said AK Pradeep, a pioneer of neuromarketing science and chief executive of NeuroFocus, one of the biggest players in a booming industry. "We measure all parts of your brain continuously. Second by second, we measure how much attention you're paying. We get [to learn] what emotions you're experiencing and what memories you're memorising.

According to Neate:

Gemma Calvert, a former Oxford University neurologist who founded rival company Neurosense, said neuromarketing has "completely changed our understanding of the brain" and is now so advanced that she is "able to predict how customers will behave." 

"Shaping Biology": Notes to Toby A. Appel's Excellent Book

Toby A. Appel, Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975 (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

Toby A. Appel's study of American biological research and the National Science Foundation is an excellent institutional history. As I was reading it, I took fairly extensive notes from the work. These may well interest regular readers. Where appropriate, I provide a bit of context. Certain themes struck me as particularly salient for understanding the history of neurobiology and neuroscience.

Posts towards a course on "Society, Culture and Biology"

Evolutionary psychology; proteomics; genomics; neuroscience; sociobiology;  molecular biology; ethology; genetics; biology; physiology; zoology, botany - the twentieth-century biological sciences transformed multiple dimensions of human life. With many applications in industry, bio-medicine, agriculture, and technology, there were few domains of human life untouched by biology's footprint.

Yet to describe these topics without also recognizing their social, cultural, and political dimensions would be naive. And to ignore as well the way in which the human sciences - medicine, psychology, history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science - intermingled, translated, connected, extended and critiqued biological theories and facts across the nineteenth- and twentieth century would be a mistake too.

But what would a course analyzing the co-construction of the human and biological sciences accomplish? In what ways would it be useful for our postmodern society? Why would we need it? Would it simply be another boring, truncated chapter in the ideological script of triumphant science? Should it be a critical course that analyzes and evaluates in an almost Whiggish way "the good", "the bad", and "the ugly" of the human and biological sciences? Or should such a course seek, rather, to provide a contextualized, empirically-situated account that does not dwell in a large way upon the political questions such material raises?

Such questions cannot be simply answered. The history of biology is filled with noteworthy achievements. From Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to the contemporary discovery of the biological mechanisms underpinning the production of proteins, biology has transformed human understanding of our place in nature and also brought us closer to understanding the origins, variability and diversity of life on our planet. Yet, at the same time, such tragic legacies as forced sterilization in the United States, the Tuskegee syphilis study, Nazi racial hygiene policies, Lysenko-ism, and the frontal lobe lobotomy, reveal to us that biological knowledge sometimes converges frequently and sharply with dominant social and cultural values. Such instances remind us that on many occasions biology has served as a poorly-designed tool of power.

Science is a means of pursuing knowledge. Yet scientific knowledge has often been allegedly useful for determining social and politic ends. On many occasions scientific knowledge has been used to reinforce dominant ideologies, naturalize ascendant human institutions, and to justify claims of civilizational superiority. The biological sciences have not been alone in this project: biology, psychology, genetics, anthropology, sociology, economics, and even history have been prominently used for these ends. The consequences, both positive and negative, are deserving of deeper analysis, evaluation, and critique.But where to go from here?

Below are prospective topics: What's missing? Is the approach too traditional? How could it be more vanguard? Comments would be greatly appreciated.

North Carolina will Compensate Victims of Forced Sterilization

Our recent posts on the history of eugenics acquire some additional salience with this news. Among the shocking facts:

...a task force set up by North Carolina found that starting [in] the 1950s the state increasingly focussed its programme - which the task force dubbed a "eugenics" programme - on welfare recipients.  

What the neuro-humanities will look like...

The Economist 'demolishes' free will, and one can almost imagine what Jonathan Swift would say:

...we assign responsibility for desired public outcomes to decision-making units [in our brains] that communicate well internally and have internally shared interests in that outcome. So in general, it makes a lot of sense to make individuals responsible for themselves: modules inside one person's brain may be distinct but they're usually in very close communication and generally share a common interest. However, some brain modules don't communicate well and may conflict with each other. One module in your brain wants to be fit; a different one wants to drink that soda. Taking as a given for the moment that we have a public interest in people being fit, it may make sense to have social institutions work collectively with the modules in everyone's brains that want to be fit, rather than depending on each individual to resolve the contest between their get-fit module and their drink-soda module. The shift in thinking here isn't necessarily so different from the Freudian development of the idea of the subconscious mind. But like psychoanalysis, neuroscience's challenge to the idea that individuals are coherent subjects who make their decisions consciously and can be held responsible for them tends to shift the way one thinks about society and politics. In many cases, it's not only unfair to hold individuals accountable for the actions of the modules in their heads, it's also completely counterproductive, while solutions pursued at either a neuropsychological-pharmacological level or at a social level would be the effective ones.

Note also that the way the author confounds "will," "intent," and "accountability". Amazing.