Richard Dawkins is the world’s most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world’s most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely “gene survival machines,” he asserted in the book.
Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as “The Blind Watchmaker,” “Unweaving the Rainbow” and “Climbing Mount Improbable.” His recent work, “The Ancestor’s Tale,” traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.
Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right’s Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn’t shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, “You, sir, are an ignorant bigot.”
Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. Earlier this year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British television to make a documentary about the destructive role of religion in modern history, tentatively titled “The Root of All Evil.”
I met Dawkins in late March at the Atheist Alliance International annual conference in Los Angeles, where he presented the alliance’s top honor, the Richard Dawkins Prize, to magicians Penn and Teller. During our conversation in my hotel room, Dawkins was as gracious as he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp white shirt and soft blazer.
Once again, evolution is under attack. Are there any questions at all about its validity?
It’s often said that because evolution happened in the past, and we didn’t see it happen, there is no direct evidence for it. That, of course, is nonsense. It’s rather like a detective coming on the scene of a crime, obviously after the crime has been committed, and working out what must have happened by looking at the clues that remain. In the story of evolution, the clues are a billionfold.
There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you’d expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” They’ve never been found. Nothing like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But all the fossils that have been found are in the right place. Of course there are plenty of gaps in the fossil record. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why shouldn’t there be? We’re lucky to have fossils at all. But no fossils have been found in the wrong place, such as to disprove the fact of evolution. Evolution is a fact.
Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?
It comes, I’m sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won’t find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.
My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it’s slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.
But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don’t despair, these things pass.
You delve into agnosticism in “The Ancestor’s Tale.” How does it differ from atheism?
It’s said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that you can’t disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it. There’s an infinite number of things that you can’t disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don’t pay any heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do exist.
Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?
Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
Those who embrace “intelligent design” — the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by nature alone — say evolution isn’t incompatible with the existence of God.
There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain — but it is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.
So why do we insist on believing in God?
From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.
Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
You’ve said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.
What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we’re quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn’t dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.
You are working on a new book tentatively called “The God Delusion.” Can you explain it?
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the “imaginary friend” and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word “delusion” also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.
What are its negative connotations?
A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
But you don’t do that if you just know your holy book is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that his incompatible scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to torture and execution, to crusades and jihads, to holy wars and purges and pogroms, to the Inquisition and the burning of witches.
What are the dark sides of religion today?
Terrorism in the Middle East, militant Zionism, 9/11, the Northern Ireland “troubles,” genocide, which turns out to be “credicide” in Yugoslavia, the subversion of American science education, oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Roman Catholic Church, which thinks you can’t be a valid priest without testicles.
Fifty years ago, philosophers like Bertrand Russell felt that the religious worldview would fade as science and reason emerged. Why hasn’t it?
That trend toward enlightenment has indeed continued in Europe and Britain. It just has not continued in the U.S., and not in the Islamic world. We’re seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning theocracy in the U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in the Islamic world. They are fighting the same battle: Christian on one side, Muslim on the other. The very large numbers of people in the United States and in Europe who don’t subscribe to that worldview are caught in the middle.
Actually, holy alliance would be a better phrase. Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional “next world” is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.
Does religion contribute to the violence of Islamic extremists? Christian extremists?
Of course it does. From the cradle, they are brought up to revere martyrs and to believe they have a fast track to heaven. With their mother’s milk they imbibe hatred of heretics, apostates and followers of rival faiths.
I don’t wish to suggest it is doctrinal disputes that are motivating the individual soldiers who are doing the killing. What I do suggest is that in places like Northern Ireland, religion was the only available label by which people could indulge in the human weakness for us-or-them wars. When a Protestant murders a Catholic or a Catholic murders a Protestant, they’re not playing out doctrinal disagreements about transubstantiation.
What is going on is more like a vendetta. It was one of their lot’s grandfathers who killed one of our lot’s grandfathers, and so we’re getting our revenge. The “their lot” and “our lot” is only defined by religion. In other parts of the world it might be defined by color, or by language, but in so many parts of the world it isn’t, it’s defined by religion. That’s true of the conflicts among Croats and the Serbs and Bosnians — that’s all about religion as labels.
The grotesque massacres in India at the time of partition were between Hindus and Muslims. There was nothing else to distinguish them, they were racially the same. They only identified themselves as “us” and the others as “them” by the fact that some of them were Hindus and some of them were Muslims. That’s what the Kashmir dispute is all about. So, yes, I would defend the view that religion is an extremely potent label for hostility. That has always been true and it continues to be true to this day.
How would we be better off without religion?
We’d all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We’d be free to exult in the privilege — the remarkable good fortune — that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion’s morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.
Are there environmental costs of a religious worldview?
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists. But there are certain religious points of view where it is not. In those apocalyptic religions, people actually believe that because they read some dopey prophesy in the book of Revelation, the world is going to come to an end some time soon. People who believe that say, “We don’t need to bother about conserving forests or anything else because the end of the world is coming anyway.” A few decades ago one would simply have laughed at that. Today you can’t laugh. These people are in power.
Unlike other accounts of the evolution of life, “The Ancestor’s Tale” starts at the present and works back. Why did you decide to tell the story in reverse?
The most important reason is that if you tell the evolution story forwards and end up with humans, as it’s humanly normal to do so because people are interested in themselves, it makes it look as though the whole of evolution were somehow aimed at humanity, which of course it wasn’t. One could aim anywhere, like at kangaroos, butterflies or frogs. We’re all contemporary culmination points, for the moment, in evolution.
If you go backward, however, no matter where you start in this huge tree of life, you always converge at the same point, which is the origin of life. So that was the main reason for structuring the book the way I did. It gave me a natural goal to head toward — the origin of life — no matter where I started from. Then I could legitimately start with humans, which people are interested in.
People like to trace their ancestry. One of the most common types of Web sites, after ones about sex, is one’s family history. When people trace the ancestry of that name, they normally stop at a few hundred years. I wanted to go back 4,000 million years.
The idea of going back towards a particular goal called to my mind the notion of pilgrimage as a kind of literary device. So I very vaguely modeled the book on Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” where the pilgrims start off as a band of human pilgrims walking backward to discover our ancestors. We are successively joined by other pilgrims — the chimpanzee pilgrims at 5 million years, then the gorilla pilgrims, then the orangutan pilgrims. Starting with humans, there are only about 39 such rendezvous points as you go back in time. It’s a rather surprising fact. Rendezvous 39 is where we meet the bacteria pilgrims.
The idea that evolution could be “random” seems to frighten people. Is it random?
This is a spectacular misunderstanding. If it was random, then of course it couldn’t possibly have given rise to the fantastically complicated and elegant forms that we see. Natural selection is the important force that drives evolution. Natural selection is about as non-random a force as you could possibly imagine. It can’t work unless there is some sort of variation upon which to work. And the source of variation is mutation. Mutation is random only in the sense that it is not directed specifically toward improvement. It is natural selection that directs evolution toward improvement. Mutation is random in that it’s not directed toward improvement.
The idea that evolution itself is a random process is a most extraordinary travesty. I wonder if it’s deliberately put about maliciously or whether these people honestly believe such a preposterous absurdity. Of course evolution isn’t random. It is driven by natural selection, which is a highly non-random force.
Is there an emotional side to the intellectual enterprise of exploring the story of life on Earth?
Yes, I strongly feel that. When you meet a scientist who calls himself or herself religious, you’ll often find that that’s what they mean. You often find that by “religious” they do not mean anything supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to the natural world that you’ve described. Einstein had it very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word “God” to describe it, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that feeling, I have that feeling, you’ll find it in the writings of many scientists. It’s a kind of quasi-religious feeling. And there are those who wish to call it religious and who therefore are annoyed when a scientist calls himself an atheist. They think, “No, you believe in this transcendental feeling, you can’t be an atheist.” That’s a confusion of language.
Some scientists say that removing religion or God from their life would leave it meaningless, that it’s God that gives meaning to life.
“Unweaving the Rainbow” specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades — before we die forever — in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could tell him today. That’s the kind of privileged century in which we live. That’s what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite, and that it’s the only life I’ve got, makes me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to have been born.
Humans may not be products of an intelligent designer but given genetic technologies, our descendants will be. What does this mean about the future of evolution?
It’s an interesting thought that in some remote time in the future, people may look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as a watershed in evolution — the time when evolution stopped being an undirected force and became a design force. Already, for the past few centuries, maybe even millennia, agriculturalists have in a sense designed the evolution of domestic animals like pigs and cows and chickens. That’s increasing and we’re getting more technologically clever at that by manipulating not just the selection part of evolution but also the mutation part. That will be very different; one of the great features of biological evolution up to now is that there is no foresight.
In general, evolution is a blind process. That’s why I called my book “The Blind Watchmaker.” Evolution never looks to the future. It never governs what happens now on the basis on what will happen in the future in the way that human design undoubtedly does. But now it is possible to breed a new kind of pig, or chicken, which has such and such qualities. We may even have to pass that pig through a stage where it is actually less good at whatever we want to produce — making long bacon racks or something — but we can persist because we know it’ll be worth it in the long run. That never happened in natural evolution; there was never a “let’s temporarily get worse in order to get better, let’s go down into the valley in order to get over to the other side and up onto the opposite mountain.” So yes, I think it well may be that we’re living in a time when evolution is suddenly starting to become intelligently designed.
Language matters. And we are lucky that some people will go to the mat over a few words. In Austin, Texas, this week, scientists and creationists battled over whether to include the words “strengths and weaknesses” in the state’s official statement about evolution. The words would influence how evolution is taught in Texas classrooms and would be immortalized in Lone Star textbooks. As the largest textbook market in the country, the decision could pressure other high school textbook publishers to conform to Texas standards.
Dan McLeroy, the Texas State Board of Education chairman, a dentist and self-described creationist, led the charge to mandate teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of evolution. After three days of high-pitched argument on both sides, the 15-member board, by a vote of 8-7, rejected the language, relieving textbook authors and publishers of the pressure to insert what opponents called “junk science” into their pages. But in a compromise that alarms and dismays many science education advocates, the board did adopt language that attempts to cast a shadow of doubt over the validity of the central evolutionary concepts of natural selection and common ancestry.
Proponents of the theory of intelligent design, and other brands of neo-creationism, argue that evolution is inadequate to the job of explaining the diversity and history of life on earth. If they can cast doubts about evolution’s validity, they have a chance to fill the authority vacuum with the tenets of creationism. But since late 2005, when a federal judge in Dover, Pa., ruled that intelligent design was a form of creationism, and that its introduction into public high school curricula was unconstitutional, advocates of teaching neo-creationism have been forced to seek other ways into public science classrooms. Enter the “strengths and weaknesses” strategy, crafted by the Seattle-based, pro-intelligent-design think thank, Discovery Institute.
Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, Calif.-based organization dedicated to protecting the integrity of science education in the public schools, says that once McLeroy and his allies failed to pass the “strengths and weakness” language, “they had a fallback position, which was to continue amending the standards to achieve through the back door what they couldn’t achieve upfront.”
And they succeeded. Casey Luskin, a Discovery Institute lawyer, and its guy on the Austin scene, was psyched by the outcome. “These are the strongest standards in the country now,” he says. “The language adapted requires students to have critical thinking about all of science, including evolution, and it urges them to look at all sides of the issue.”
One amendment calls for students to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record.” The key words are “sudden appearance” and “stasis.” McLeroy argues that “the sudden appearance” of forms in the Cambrian period, when there was a rapid multiplication and diversification of species, and the persistence of forms over long periods of time (stasis) are evidence against evolution. And thus for creationism.
In 2012, when the board next selects textbooks, anti-evolution members will be able to argue against books that don’t sufficiently “evaluate scientific explanations” concerning stasis or so-called sudden appearance. Another amendment requires that teachers and textbooks include language to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanation concerning the complexity of the cell.” Arguing for the “irreducible complexity” of cells is another key creationist theme.
Each of the amendments singles out an old creationist argument, strips it of its overtly ideological language, and requires teachers and textbook publishers to adopt it. In other words, says Joshua Rosenau of NCSE, if the books don’t at least pay lip service to criticizing natural selection, they risk not being adopted.
However, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that neither periods of rapid evolution, nor the persistence of forms that have adapted successful ways of surviving for long periods of time, poses any threat to the theory of evolution. Yes, cells are complex, but so are the explanatory tools of modern evolutionary theory. Over the history of the debate, critics of evolution have invariably said something or other was too complex for Darwin’s theory to explain. Yet scientists have consistently pointed out that two of the critics’ favorite examples, the human eye and the bacterial flagellum, have been illuminated by and explained in terms of natural selection.
“The theory of evolution has no weaknesses,” says Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University. There are many unanswered questions about how organisms evolve and diversify, and what drives them to do so, but Charles Darwin’s 150-year-old insights that all life on earth descended from one or a few simple common ancestors, and that natural selection explains how they did, remain solid foundations of modern biology. As the late, great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky is famous for saying, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Not that science makes sense to a creationist like McLeroy. “Scientific consensus means nothing,” he tells Salon. “All it takes is one fact to overthrow consensus. Evolution has a status that it simply doesn’t deserve. People say it’s vital to understanding biology. But it’s genetics that’s the foundation for biology. A biologist once said that nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. Well, that’s not true. You go into the top biology labs, and it makes no difference if evolution is true or false to what they’re doing and studying. It makes no difference.”
It makes all the difference in the world, says Miller, who notes the irony of McLeroy quoting Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Adds Miller: McLeroy’s “fundamental misunderstanding of the way genetics and evolution have produced a unified science of biology is nothing short of breathtaking.”
For a decade or so, brain studies have seemed on the brink of answering questions about the nature of consciousness, the self, thought and experience. But they never do, argues University of California at Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, because these things are not found solely in the brain itself.
In his new book, “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness,” Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick wrote, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” While Noë credits Crick for drawing popular and scientific attention to the question of consciousness, he thinks Crick’s conclusions are dead wrong and dangerous.
Noe’s conversational style is gentle, attentive and easygoing. But, in true philosopher fashion, he also picks his words deliberately, as if stepping off the path of right thinking would result in some tragic plummet into the abyss of illogic.
In San Francisco there’s a brain gym where members exercise their brains with “neurobic” software. A sign outside the place reads: “You Are Your Brain!” It has become almost a mainstream notion now. But the subtitle of your book begins “Why you are not your brain.” What’s wrong with the “You are your brain” view?
It’s one thing to say you wouldn’t be you if not for your brain, that your brain is critical to what you are. But I could say that about your upbringing and your culture, too. It’s another thing entirely to say that you are your brain.
I don’t reject the idea that the brain is necessary for consciousness; but I do reject the argument that it is sufficient. That’s just a fancy, contemporary version of the old philosophical idea that our true selves are interior, cut off from the outside world, only accidentally situated in the world. The view I’m attacking claims that neural activity is enough to explain consciousness, that you could have consciousness in a petri dish. It supposes that consciousness happens inside the brain the way digestion occurs inside the GI tract. But consciousness is not like digestion; it doesn’t happen inside of us. It is something we do, something we achieve. It’s more like dance than it is like digestion.
Even if we had a perfect way of observing exactly what a brain was doing, we would never be able to understand how it made us have the kinds of experiences we do. The experiences just aren’t happening inside our skulls. Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of its engine. It’s bad philosophy masquerading as science.
Maybe I’m naive but it seems kind of obvious that the brain is the mechanism that — in the context of a person’s life and environment — gives rise to consciousness. That’s not to say it is the same as consciousness, but that it is the mechanism from which consciousness emerges.
The brain is necessary for consciousness. Of course! Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn’t “give rise” to driving; driving isn’t something that happens inside the engine. The engine contributes to the car’s ability to drive. Consciousness is more like driving than our philosophical tradition leads us to expect. To be conscious is to have a world. The fact is, you and I don’t have what it takes to make a world on our own. We find the world, we don’t make it in our brains.
The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience. But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion. It’s a prejudice. Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world.
In fact, neuroscience is probably not in the best position to answer questions of consciousness and mind and experience. When we look for who and what we are in the brain alone, we lose the phenomena that interest us most.
Imagine that we find the Holy Grail of neurobiology, the patterns of neural activation that correlate perfectly with different events in our mental lives. We would still never understand or make sense of why those correlations exist. There is no intrinsic relationship between the experience and the neural substrates of the experience. We always need to look at what factors bring the two together. The environment, other people, our needs and desires — all these things exist outside the brain and have to be seen as essential parts of our selves and consciousness. So we aren’t just our brains, we’re not locked inside our craniums; we extend beyond our skulls, beyond our skin, into the world we occupy.
Francis Crick did us a major service by taking seriously and publicizing the problem of consciousness. But in the journal Nature he wrote, “Scientists need no longer stand by listening to the tedious arguments of philosophers perpetually disagreeing with each other. The problem of consciousness is now a scientific problem.”
I say, “Bravo!” Consciousness is a scientific problem! But Crick framed the problem in terms of an unquestioned set of philosophical dogmas; namely that the key to consciousness will be found in the brain, that that’s literally where experience and thought take place. My book is not anti-science; it’s a challenge to science to get serious. It’s deluded to think we’re free of philosophy.
Is your battle a turf war between philosophy and neuroscience?
Not at all. I think these are scientific questions. I want to help science take them over. But I think science is in philosophically troubled waters here and it’s just not ready yet to go it alone.
You’re arguing that all we’ll learn about by studying the brain is the brain. We’ll never learn from the brain what love is? Or what religion is? Or consciousness?
Right. And that the radically reductionist view is not only unfounded, but it’s also ugly. And dangerous.
Dangerous, how?
There are practical dangers, like raising expectations too high for specific scientific programs. The motivation for proceeding along some line, or justification for funding it, may be based on the assumption that it will find the place where consciousness is happening.
Second, the question of consciousness is a problem for all of us — not just for science. We all want to know how to understand humans and think about ourselves. And claiming that neuroscience is going to explain us to ourselves is false advertising. It’s important that we not believe it.
But the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn’t just misleading and wrong, it’s ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns of his own skull and the world is just a sort of shared figment. Everything is made interior, private, rational and computational. That may not pose a practical danger, but it presents a kind of spiritual danger.
In that view, each of us is an island of intellect, alone. When you think of us as just interior neurological mechanisms, you see us as alienated from the world around us. The world shows up for us as bits of information that we decipher, like linguistic relics of an ancient culture that we have to interpret. Like when Mr. Spock says, “What is this strange kissing custom?” The danger is alienation, plain and simple. We’re strangers in a strange land.
I find this a very sad and ugly picture of our circumstance. Now contrast that view with a sense of ourselves as engaged in the flow, responsive to the things going on around us, part of the world. It’s a very different picture.
The late David Brower, conservationist and founder of Friends of the Earth, said that a California condor is only 5 percent feathers and blood and 95 percent its environment.
Exactly.
There’s a kind of temporal lobe epilepsy that causes people to experience deeply religious feelings. Couldn’t the relevance of that association tell us something about, say, the roots or essence of religious experience?
I’m pessimistic. A lot is context; things always happen in a setting. Imagine how you feel after a run. Out of breath, rapid heartbeat, sweaty? Now imagine you just woke up feeling like that. It would be terrifying. But after a run it makes sense and it feels good. Meaning is not intrinsic, it’s relational. It’s only in context that an intense feeling means one thing or the other. Again, we need to look outside neuroscience to understand what that significance is.
If someone had a seizure that caused a sensation like they imagine they might have if they were meeting God, that would be very confusing. But it would be a mistake to conclude from that that religious experience is only a brain state.
I’m not a religious person. And putting aside the fact I don’t believe in God, I don’t think the impulse of religion can be thought of as a kind of biological feature of us, or that there’s something about our brains that makes us apt for that. I think of religions as communal and as literary traditions, both things existing outside the brain. I don’t think of religious belief as something we can understand individualistically. When someone says they believe in God, you’ve got to understand the practices, customs, backgrounds and social realities that are part of that. None of it is going to reduce to anything individual inside of that person’s brain.
People like Sam Harris, who worry about the irrationality of religious customs and practices, are right to be concerned. I agree that religion can be dangerous. But I don’t think neuroscience is the way to understand it at all.
Why are so many smart people these days looking at the brain as the key to understanding consciousness? Is it just irrational exuberance about the new imaging techniques and other technological advances that give us peeks inside the functioning brain?
Yes, but there’s something else, too. For a long time now, going back at least to Descartes and Galileo, we’ve liked to be told that things are not what they seem. When we go to a magic show, there’s a feeling of delicious pleasure when the wool has been pulled over our eyes. Similarly, to be told that the love you feel is actually just a chemical reaction, or that your depression is just a malfunctioning of your brain, is surprising and in some paradoxical way satisfying. There’s a modern pleasure in the unmasking of our everyday experience. We feel like we’re seeing behind the curtain, seeing how the trick is done.
It validates our suspicion that the world is different than it looks?
Yes. Galileo said that the apple in your hand is colorless, odorless and flavorless. That color and so on are effects that the apple has on you, comparable to the sensation of the prick of a pin. The flavor of the apple, he said, is no more in the apple than the prickliness is in the pin. The taste and the prickliness are in you. Galileo thought we were radically deceived by the world around us. The contemporary neuroscientists simply extend this even further — this idea that the world is a kind of grand illusion that the brain creates.
Sure, it’s an important fact that the perception of colors depends on the physics of light and the nature of the nervous system. If our physiology were different, our ability to detect colors would be different. But none of that speaks to the unreality of color, any more than saying that I can’t see anything in my room if I turn the lights off speaks to the unreality of my desk. We’ve almost made a fetish of this desire to be told that things are not what they seem. We get a thrill from the paradox.
OK, if our brains aren’t going to explain thought and consciousness, then how should we study these things?
Consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context. And to really understand it, you’d have to study it that way.
Suppose we ask ourselves: What makes certain patterns of neural activity visual? What I have proposed — building on work with collaborators — is that to answer that question, we need to look to the behavioral and environmental context. I think we can make progress toward explaining the character of experience, but only by looking at the way the neural activity arises in and indeed enables a certain kind of dynamic exchange with the world.
Seeing is a certain way of relating to the world around you; the brain plays a critical role in supporting that relation. It’s not revealing something about the cells themselves — or the way they are firing — that does the explanatory work. Rather, it’s understanding the way the cells participate in a larger interaction with the world that will shed light on what it is to see. This is a whole new way of approaching the problem. The “it’s all in your brain” approach doesn’t work. If we expand our idea of the machinery of mind to include the body and the world, whole new ways of thinking about and explaining consciousness come into view.
The study of consciousness should be a cross-disciplinary field: behavioral science, math, linguistics, robotics, artificial intelligence and philosophy — these all make contributions. Brain studies, too. But you can’t reduce the study of human life to the study of things happening inside a person’s brain. You have to look at a person’s active life in its context.
Evolutionary biology is one good example of the way to proceed. We don’t look at an organism as a collection of cells or molecules or atoms. We look at it as a creature with interests and needs. We take an ecological approach that has the organism as an actor facing problems and struggling to survive and reproduce. We view all of that as the natural backdrop against which to carry on our investigations. I think it’s that organism-centered approach, where you look at the animal in its environmental situation, that’s the appropriate way to approach and study consciousness and the human mind.
Now, neuroscience can look for meaningful correlations between what’s going on in the brain and experience, or the ways brain functions contribute to our ability to have the kinds of experience we have. It makes sense to use brain-imaging techniques like fMRI that way. Studying the brain is part of the picture, but only a limited part. The important point is not to think we’re somehow catching the mind in action by stop-motion photography; that’s not what we’re doing with fMRI at all.
What role do you think the brain does play in consciousness?
Instead of asking how the brain makes us conscious, we should ask, How does the brain support the kind of involvement with the world in which our consciousness consists? This is what the best neuroscientists do. The brain is not the author of our experience. If we want to understand the role of the brain, we should ask, How does the brain enable us to interact with and keep track of the world as we do? What makes a certain pattern of brain activity a conscious perceptual experience has nothing to do with the cells themselves, or with the way they are firing, but rather with the way the cells’ activity is responsive to and helps us regulate our engagement with the world around us. There’s a lot to learn about the way the brain does this and this work is important.
At the end of your book you say that we occupy “Home sweet home.” What do you mean by that?
The dominant view in neuroscience today represents us as if we were strangers in an alien environment. It says that we go about gathering information, building up representations, performing calculations and making choices based on that data. But in reality, when we get up in the morning we put our feet on the floor and start to walk. We take the floor for granted and the world supports us, houses us, facilitates us and enables us to carry on whatever our tasks might be. That kind of fluency, that kind of flow, is, I think, a fundamental feature of our lives. Our fitting into the world is not an illusion created by our brains, it’s a fundamental truth about our nature. That’s what I mean by home sweet home.
Two years ago, Pennsylvania federal Judge John Jones III handed down a stunning decision that many said would take down the intelligent design movement. But American creationism doesn’t die. It just adapts.
Decades earlier, when the courts deemed creation science — proto intelligent design — a religious view and not constitutionally teachable as science in public schools, it adapted by cutting God off its letterhead and calling itself “intelligent design.” The argument for I.D., and for “scientific creation theory” before it, is that evolution isn’t up to the task of accounting for life. Given biology’s complexity, and natural selection’s inability to explain it, I.D. thinking goes, life must be designed by a, well, designer. I.D.ers skirted any mention of God, hoping to avoid getting snagged on the First Amendment’s prohibition against promoting religion by arguing that I.D. was just a young and outlying science.
In the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Judge Jones ruled that if you want to teach intelligent design in science class, first you have to show that it is a distinct species from its earlier, creationist form, not just a modified type. You’ve got to show us the science part, he said. Besides, Jones declared, your intelligent designer is obviously God.
The six-week trial — the focus of a Nova documentary, “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” airing Nov. 13 — addressed a host of heady questions. What is science and how does it work? Can evolution account for the diversity of life we see on earth? What is religion? Can science say anything about the existence of a creator and still be science? It also examined the motivations of a local school board that tried to smuggle creationism into its high school biology curriculum. The judge’s decision — that I.D. was not science and that the school board was trying to promote its members’ own religious views — was followed by a short period of shock from the I.D. community.
But like bacteria adapting to antibiotics, creationism has slimmed down once again, this time shedding even a mention of an intelligent designer. A new textbook put out by the Discovery Institute, the Seattle think tank that promotes I.D., doesn’t even have the words “intelligent design” in its index. Instead of pushing I.D. explicitly, “Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and Against Darwinism,” promoted as a high school- or college-level biology text, “teaches the controversy.” Teach the controversy is the new mantra of the I.D. movement.
“We want to teach more about evolution,” says Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin, “not less.” The “more” they want to teach, of course, is what they see as evolution’s shortcomings, leaving an ecological niche that will then be filled by intelligent design.
But not all creationists have embraced the strategy. Many responded to the Dover trial by coming out of I.D.’s big tent, which once gave shelter to young earth creationists, old earthers, academics interested in I.D.’s hypotheses, and anyone who wanted to promote a Christian-compatible view of science. Judge Jones’ decision was like a lightning strike on the big top, sending many of the constituents running home through the rain. Creationist groups like Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and Reasons to Believe are now attacking I.D. for not having the guts to call its designer God or to be explicit about such key questions as the age of the world. (Answers in Genesis’ answer: about 6,000 years.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, the I.D.ers have adopted a persecution complex. “After Dover,” Luskin says, “there’s been an increase in the boldness of Darwinists who persecute I.D. proponents: researchers, teachers and students. The debate in the academy has intensified radically,” he says. “It’s just a lot more political.” He points to Guillermo Gonzalez, a physicist at Iowa State who failed to get tenure, allegedly because he is an advocate of I.D., and Richard Sternberg, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health who was “attacked” for publishing an article by Stephen Meyer, a proponent of intelligent design, in a peer-review journal Sternberg edited.
Evolutionary biologists respond that hiring a biologist who doesn’t accept evolution is like hiring a mathematician who doesn’t accept multiplication. That oversimplifies, but for better or worse, the battle has intensified and come out more into the open.
Recently, long retired chemist Homer Jacobson retracted a paper titled “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life,” which he’d published in the journal American Scientist 52 years ago. Upon Googling himself, the 84-year-old Jacobson found that his old paper was often cited by creationists as evidence of the implausibility of life emerging from the prebiotic soup found on early Earth. Jacobson noticed some errors in his paper (it was a half-century old!) and, in order to keep neo-creationists from engaging in “malignant denunciations of Darwin,” he wrote a letter of retraction to the journal. Retraction of a scientific paper is rare, and doing it for political reasons is rarer still. The act provoked accusations of “historical revisionism” from Discovery Institute senior fellow William Dembski.
Following the Dover decision, some I.D.ers became more timid, or at least more evasive. John Angus Campbell, a Discovery Institute fellow and coauthor of a book about teaching I.D. in the schools, ran for a school board seat in Mason County, Wash., last week. During his campaign, he intentionally left his middle name out of his election materials and failed to mention his affiliation with the Discovery Institute. The camouflage strategy worked and he was elected.
I.D. will also be striking back in “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” a pro-I.D. documentary, to be released in February. Featuring conservative writer and political commentator Ben Stein, it portrays I.D. proponents as a group of iconoclastic firebrand scientists with the guts to go after the dogmatic Darwinists who have, the I.D.ers say, grown lazy and corrupt sitting atop a monopolistic theory with zero tolerance for dissent, within or outside of their ranks.
Stein told the New York Times that Darwin may well have been onto something with his theory of evolution, but that it is isn’t up to explaining the origins and diversity of life on its own. Plus, he thinks Darwinism leads to racism and genocide. If Stein had his way, he said, the documentary would have been called “From Darwin to Hitler.”
No, the battle between creationism and evolution is hardly over. The true believers in intelligent design and other forms of creationism aren’t about to lay down their worldview for a federal judge or anyone else. And polls show that about half of America is on their side. “Evolution remains under attack,” says Eugenie Scott, an anthropologist and a director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching evolution in public schools. “If creationists have their way, teachers will eventually just stop teaching evolution. It’ll just be too much trouble. And generations of students will continue to grow up ignorant of basic scientific realities.”
A young woman sat on the subway and sobbed. Her mascara-stained cheeks were wet and blotchy. Her eyes were red. Her shoulders shook. She was hopeless, completely forlorn. When I got off the train, I stood on the platform, paralyzed by emotions. Hers. I’d taken them with me. I stood there, tears streaming down my cheeks. But I had no death in the family. No breakup. No terminal diagnosis. And I didn’t even know her or why she cried. But the emotional pain, her pain, now my pain, was as real as day.
Recent research in neurobiology would explain my response as the automatic reaction of a kind of brain cells known as mirror neurons. On Nov. 4, neuroscientists announced that mirror neurons had for the first time been directly identified in humans. Previously their existence had only been inferred from primate research and the observation of human brains through fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging).
Enthusiasm among scientists has been spreading as growing evidence suggests that “mirrors” may explain the roots of human empathy and altruism as well as provide insight into such disorders as autism and even schizophrenia. But that’s not all. In the past few years, dozens of studies have linked mirror neurons to the emergence of language, abstract reasoning and even self-awareness or consciousness. “The self and the other are just two sides of the same coin. To understand myself, I must recognize myself in other people,” says Marco Iacoboni.
Sound like Marin County, Calif., Buddhism? Maybe so. But it’s also SoCal neurobiology. Iacoboni is a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, where he directs the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. “We are hard-wired to feel what others experience as if it were happening to us,” he says. Down the road in San Diego, Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, offers, “We used to say, metaphorically, that ‘I can feel another’s pain.’ But now we know that my mirror neurons can literally feel your pain.”
Iacoboni’s “hard-wiring” is a network of ordinary-looking neurons distributed throughout the brain. Unlike other kinds of brain cells, such as motor neurons, which control muscles, mirror neurons fire both when a person is in action, and when he or she observes someone else engaged in the same action. Before the discovery of mirror neurons, cognitive scientists assumed that we gained access to the feelings of others by theorizing about them. Now we know that a direct experience is responsible for much of what we thought was computation, speculation, memory or inference. Through my mirror neurons, the young woman cries in the same part of my brain where I do.
Not all scientists believe that mirror neurons represent “a great leap forward,” as Ramachandran has written. Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at U.C. Berkeley’s Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, flatly labels mirror neurons a myth. But her voice is drowned out by an academic chorus of mirror hosannahs.
If Ramachandran, Iacoboni and hundreds of other neuroscientists now poring over mirror neurons are correct, directly sharing the experience of others is a key to who and what we are, how our brains and minds evolved, and how they develop from childhood. Compassion and empathy, feeling the experience of another, is not just something we’re capable of, it is woven into the fabric we are cut from. “Mirror neurons dissolve the barrier between you and someone else,” says Ramachandran. He calls them “Gandhi neurons.”
Along with dozens of studies in neuroscience journals, mirror neurons have also taken a place in the folk psychology battle over how to frame human nature. Alan Greenspan and the rugged individualists may love Ayn Rand’s libertarian vision of each person alone against the world, but another set prefers to think of humans as inextricably tied to one another, creating codependent realities and sharing inter-subjective space.
In fact, the problem of altruism has vexed biologists since Darwin. Why do people sacrifice their own self-interest, sometimes even their lives, in order to help others? Genes for such behavior should be selected against quickly and definitively. But if mirror neuron theorists are right, the advantages of directly understanding others may be so great that it blows the evolutionary cost of occasional self-sacrifice out of the water. What’s selected for might be the ability to imitate others, and to understand and feel what they are feeling. Self-sacrifice and altruism might be mere byproducts of mirroring and not themselves adaptive in a way selected for by evolution. In any case, “we are good,” says Iacoboni, “because our biology drives us to be good.”
Like many of science’s great accomplishments, mirror neurons were discovered by accident. In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team at the University of Parma were studying motor neurons in the frontal cortex of macaques and had attached tiny electrodes to individual cells in the monkeys so they could watch how very specific hand movements were initiated in the brain. When a wired-up monkey picked up a peanut, the neuron fired. But to Rizzolatti’s surprise, the same motor neuron also fired when a perfectly still monkey was watching a lab assistant pick up the peanut.
Why would a motor neuron fire when there was no motor action? They not only fired when the macaques tore a piece of paper and saw a piece of paper torn by another macaque, but also when the monkeys merely heard the sound of paper being torn, without any visual stimulus at all. Many tests and retests later revealed the whole new class of brain cells, mirror neurons, located in the parts of the macaques’ brain that process both sensory information and kindle emotions.
When Rizzolatti’s work was published in Experimental Brain Research in 1992, the neuroscience community went ape looking for evidence of mirror neurons in other primates, notably humans. Because they couldn’t go fishing with electrodes in human brains, scientists had to search with other, less invasive tools. The fMRI revolution in neuroscience was under way, allowing scientists to observe accurate, high-resolution, three-dimensional images of brain activity in real time. Neurobiologists looked for mirrorlike brain activity in the same areas where the systems had been found in macaques. And they found evidence of them in far greater numbers and more elaborate formulations than in macaques or any other primates. “Humans are heavily wired with mirrors,” says Ramachandran.
Only recently, though, have scientists identified individual mirror neurons in humans. Iacoboni’s team at UCLA collaborated with Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon who was implanting electrodes into epileptic patients in an effort to find the origins of their seizures so they could be surgically treated. Once those electrodes were in place, and after patients gave permission, it was possible for Iacoboni to test individual human neurons for mirroring. He found mirror neurons in several parts of the human brain.
Evidence of the clinical importance of mirror neurons comes from the study of psychological disorders. Both Iacoboni and Ramachandran are looking at links to autism, which may result from a breakdown or suppression of the mirror system. People who suffer from autism are less empathic, worse at reading the emotional states of others, and less emotionally connected to those around them. Functional MRIs show they also appear to have significantly less mirror neuron activity, says Iacoboni. Strengthening mirror activity in autistic kids, through imitation and other simple exercise, seems to help them, says Iacoboni.
The evolutionary roots of human mirror neuron systems reach back millions of years, says Michael Arbib, director of the USC Brain Project, and author of “From Action to Language via the Mirror System.” The evolution of language appears to be connected to the mirror-neuron-rich area of the brain associated with movements of the hands, he says, while the evolution of our empathic mirroring capabilities seems to be associated with regions of the brain governing movements in the face.
Early mirroring must have enhanced our ancestors’ ability to learn by imitation — one primate can “practice” using tools in its head simply by watching another. These new capacities eventually led to the kind of “metaphorical” exercises employed in abstraction of all kinds, including the development of symbolic systems like language, says Ramachandran, whose lab at UCSD is currently investigating the connection between mirror neurons and the human ability to employ metaphor.
“Not just literary metaphors,” says Ramachandran in his deep, dramatic East Indian British accent, “but abstractions of all kinds. Once you understand the cross-modal computations that mirror neurons are doing, you can see why human beings are so good at all kinds of abstraction.”
A map, for example, is a kind of powerful metaphor for the terrain it is depicting. Using maps — and only humans can — requires cross-modal computation and abstraction. Imagine our forebears making a simple map in the dirt to help them plan a hunt; the twigs stand for hunters, the pebbles stand for prey, two lines for the river banks. The ability to understand how a twig can be a person — and in what ways it can’t — also boils down to mirror neuron systems, says Ramachandran.
Other primates engage in “cross-modal abstraction,” or metaphor, says Ramachandran, but humans are distinct even from the most speculative and metaphorical apes. Some millions of years ago, he says, the part of the mammalian brain in the left inferior parietal lobule mushroomed. This mirror-neuron-rich area, called the angular gyrus, which sits at the crossroads of the brain’s vision, hearing and touch centers, is far more developed in humans than in other primates. “And when the angular gyrus is damaged,” Ramachandran says, “people experience metaphor blindness.”
Being able to make abstractions, to go from recognition of a vertical limb, say, to the abstract notion of verticality, and then to assign it a word, “verticality,” or a mathematical symbol, conveys a clear evolutionary advantage that can be parlayed not only into better tree climbing, but also into making ladders, and elevators, and rocket ships, says Ramachandran.
Mirror neurons had an inconspicuous start, says Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and the author of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” and other books about evolution. “All evolutionary innovation begins with a mistake,” he says. Some genetic mutation may have led to a misfiring set of neurons that enhanced hand-eye coordination. This “programming bug,” as Dennett calls it, must have conveyed an advantage amplified by natural selection. And once simple mirror-neuron networks were established, he says, “they may well have played a big role in the evolution of empathy, and imitation, and social understanding.”
Ramachandran goes further, explaining that mirror neurons help us understand the evolution of the self, the mysterious narrator that provides continuity in each of our life stories. The self, which Ramachandran calls the Holy Grail of neuroscience, may be an evolutionary innovation adopted not first to give each person a conscious foreman, but as a way to model others. In this theory, the self started as a kind of little program — fed with data from the mirror system — for understanding other people, a kind of algorithm for generating a mini-you in me. Once it evolved, this program swung around and began to apply its algorithmic investigations also to its host, the brain in which it resided. Self-consciousness was born.
“It was almost certainly a two-way street,” Ramachandran adds, “with self-awareness and other-awareness enriching each other in an auto-catalytic cascade that culminated in the fully human sense of self. You say you are being ‘self-conscious’ when you really mean being conscious of someone else being conscious of you.”
To U.C. Berkeley critic Gopnik, the significance of mirror neurons “is blown way out of proportion.” She says their power to explain consciousness, language and empathy “is just a metaphor.” As a psychologist, Gopnik views behavior at a different resolution than the neurologists do. She bristles at the idea that science can find hard-wired explanations in the brain for complex behaviors. “You never get single neurons calculating anything,” she says. “What you’ve got are these enormous suites and interactions and computation among many different levels of neurons all calculating different things. And also changing what they calculate even from moment to moment.”
Even something as seemingly mundane as recognizing the edge of an object requires huge numbers of interacting neurons, Gopnik says. In the 1960s, perceptual psychologists thought they had found a kind of neuron that detected edges. There was a lot of hullabaloo over the discovery of so-called edge neurons. “But the truth turned out to be much more complex,” says Gopnik. “The idea that a kind of neuron alone could explain empathy or behavior or self-consciousness simply makes no sense.
“It’s just as likely that those neurons are mirroring because people are imitating each other and feeling empathy, not the other way around,” says Gopnik. Yet she is sympathetic to some of the conclusions of the mirror neuron researchers; her own work in developmental psychology also stresses what she calls the “distinctive human capacity to link the self to others,” as a key trait of evolution and something essentially human. But she is impatient with “the giant illogical leaps” that she says neurologists sometimes take in reaching overly broad conclusions. “Scientists have always been susceptible to the temptation of thinking that they’ve solved the secrets of the universe,” she says. “And neurologists are no different.”
Dennett agrees that it is rash to draw profound conclusions about the role of mirror neurons so soon. “Some mirror neuron enthusiasts are saying that these are some kind of magic bullet, a giant leap by evolution that made language and empathy possible. I think that is much too strong.”
Ramachandran and Dennett, who are friends, disagree on this point. Ramachandran thinks that mirror neurons will indeed bring about a revolution in the way we see the brain and the way we see ourselves and our relationship to one another. “Mirror neurons will do for psychology what the discovery of DNA did for biology,” he wrote several years ago.
Whether mirror neurons bring about a paradigm shift in our conception of ourselves remains to be seen. In the meantime, there seems to be near consensus that we are exquisitely tuned to one another’s experience and that mirror neurons help us to experience each other viscerally and directly. While that may explain the direct emotional impact the crying woman on the train had on me, it doesn’t explain why I did nothing to help her. We may be fundamentally interconnected, but we are individuals too. If the crying woman had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, I might have felt her emotional pain, but I wouldn’t have grown her tumor. So perhaps, as Gopnik says, the leap that connects the co-firing of neurons to the human condition is only metaphorical after all.
But then, Ramachandran points out, a good mirror-neuron-enabled metaphor is one of the most powerful things a human can have. Or share.
