Janus (41 page)

 

The Cambridge mathematician, Adrian Dobbs, commenting on the extract I
have quoted, went straight to the heart of the matter:

 

This is a very interesting passage. It evokes the picture of either
the mind or the brain as containing an assemblage of selective
filters, designed to cut out unwanted signals on neighbouring
frequencies, some of which get through in a distorted form, just as
in ordinary radio reception. [41]

 

Cyril Burt, former Professor of Psychology, University College, London,
took up the same idea:

 

Our sense organs and our brain operate as an intricate kind of
filter which limits and directs the mind's clairvoyant powers,
so that under normal conditions attention is concentrated on just
those objects or situations that are of biological importance for
the survival of the organism and its species . . . As a rule, it
would seem, the mind rejects ideas coming from another mind as the
body rejects grafts coming from another body. [42]

 

At this stage, the reader may have experienced a feeling of déjà vu,
because earlier on I discussed some other 'filter-theories' related to
the mechanisms of perception and the process of evolution. In fact, the
hypothesis that there is a filtering apparatus which protects us against
'unwanted' ESP signals is merely an extrapolation from what we know about
normal, sensory perception. We remember William James's famous 'blooming,
buzzing multitude of sensations' which are constantly bombarding our
sensory receptors, and particularly the eyes and ears. Our minds would
be engulfed by chaos if we were to attend to each of these millions of
stimuli impinging on them. Thus the central nervous system, and the brain,
have to function as a multilevelled hierarchy of scanning, filtering and
classifying devices 'which eliminate a large proportion of the sensory
input as irrelevant "noise", and assemble the relevant information into
coherent patterns before it is presented to consciousness'. By analogy,
a similar filtering apparatus might protect our rational minds against
the 'blooming, buzzing multitude' of messages, images, intuitions and
coincidental happenings in the 'psycho-magnetic field' surrounding us.

 

 

We can draw a further analogy between the filtering hierarchies which
protect the mind from irrelevant stimuli of sensory or extrasensory
origin, and the genetic micro-hierarchies which protect the hereditary
blueprint in the chromosomes against biochemical intrusions and harmful
mutations which otherwise would play havoc with the stability and continuity
of the species (see above,
pp. 200 ff
).
Moreover, I also felt emboldened to suggest the existence of
a Lamarckian micro-hierarchy of selective filters, which prevents
acquired characteristics from interfering with the hereditary endowment
-- except for those select few which respond to some vital need of the
species, resulting from persistent pressures of the environment over
many generations, until they seep through the filter and become part of
the hereditary endowment of the human embryo, like the thick skin on its
soles. This is undeniably an acquired characteristic which has become
hereditary -- yet in conformity with the prevailing dogma we are asked
to believe that it happened by pure chance.

 

 

In fact, the Lamarckians, as we have seen, found themselves in the same
type of predicament as the parapsychologists: they were unable to produce
a repeatable laboratory experiment. Even apparently clear-cut cases
of Lamarckian inheritance were open to different interpretations,
to polemics pursued with quasi-theological passions, and as a last
resort, to accusations of fraud. Moreover, the Lamarckians were unable
to provide a physiological explanation for the inheritance of acquired
characteristics -- just as the parapsychologists are unable to produce
a physical explanation of ESP phenomena.

 

 

This curious parallel seems to have gone unnoticed by both Lamarckians
and parapsychologists; I have found no mention of it in the literature of
either school. Yet it seems to me relevant, because both heresies show up
the shortcomings of scientific orthodoxies, without being able to offer
a comprehensive alternative beyond Johannsen's 'great central mystery'
or Grassé's 'It seems possible that confronted by these problems, biology
is reduced to helplessness and must hand over to metaphysics.' [43]

 

 

 

 

 

XIV

 

 

A GLANCE THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

 

 

 

1

 

 

Approaching the end of this journey, it might be useful to look back at
the
Prologue
, in which I discussed the sudden
rise of the human neocortex, and its growth at a speed without precedent
in the history of evolution. We have seen that one of the consequences
of this explosive process was the chronic conflict between the new brain
which endowed man with his reasoning powers, and the archaic old brain,
governed by instinct and emotion. The outcome was a mentally unbalanced
species, with a built-in paranoid streak, mercilessly revealed by its
past and present history.

 

 

But the brain explosion in the late Pleistocene also led to other
consequences -- less dramatic, but no less far-reaching -- which remain
to be discussed.

 

 

The crucial point is, that in creating the human brain, evolution has
wildly overshot the mark.

 

An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its
possessor . . . Natural selection could only have endowed the
savage with a brain a little superior to that of the ape, whereas
he possesses one very little inferior to that of the average member
of our learned societies . . . [1]

 

This was written by no less an authority than Alfred Russell Wallace,
who co-fathered (if the expression is permitted) with Darwin the theory of
evolution by natural selection.* Darwin instantly realized the potentially
disastrous implications of the argument, and wrote to Wallace. 'I hope
you have not murdered completely your own and my child.'
^[2]
But he had no satisfactory answer to Wallace's criticism, and his
disciples swept it under the carpet.

 

* The first public unveiling of the theory was a joint communication
to the Linnean Society by Darwin and Wallace in 1858.

 

Why was that criticism so important? There were two reasons. The first
is merely of historical interest, in that Wallace's objection demolishes
one of the cornerstones of the Darwinian edifice. Evolution in Darwinian
and neo-Darwinian theory must proceed in very small steps, each of which
confers some minimal selective advantage on the mutated organism --
otherwise the whole conception makes no sense, as Darwin himself kept
reiterating. But the rapid evolution of the human cerebrum, which some
anthropologists have compared to a 'tumorous overgrowth'
^[3]
,
could by no stretch of the imagination be fitted into this theory. Hence
Darwin's agonized response, and the subsequent conspiracy of silence.

 

 

The second, and by far the more important, aspect of Wallace's criticism,
he himself does not seem to have fully realized. He emphasized that the
'instrument' -- the human brain -- had been 'developed in advance of the
needs of its possessor'.
^[4]
But the evolution of the human
brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is also the
only example of evolution
providing a species with an organ which it
does not know how to use
; a luxury organ, which will take its owner
thousands of years to learn to put to proper use -- if he ever does.

 

 

The archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest representative of
homo sapiens -- Cro-Magnon man who enters the scene a hundred thousand
years ago or earlier -- was already endowed with a brain which in size
and shape is indistinguishable from ours. But, however paradoxical it
sounds, he hardly made any use of that luxury organ. He remained an
illiterate cave-dweller and, for millennium after millennium, went on
manufacturing spears, bows and arrows of the same primitive type, while
the organ which was to take man to the moon was already there, ready for
use, inside his skull. Thus the evolution of the brain overshot the mark
by a time factor of astronomical magnitude. This paradox is not easy to
grasp; in
The Ghost in the Machine
I tried to illustrate it by a bit
of science fiction which I called 'the parable of the unsolicited gift':

 

There was once a poor, illiterate shopkeeper in an Arab bazaar,
called Ali, who, not being very good at doing sums, was always
cheated by his customers -- instead of cheating them, as it should
be. So he prayed every night to Allah for the present of an abacus
-- that venerable contraption for adding and subtracting by pushing
beads along wires. But some malicious djin forwarded his prayers to
the wrong branch of the heavenly Mail Order Department, and so one
morning, arriving at the bazaar, Ali found his stall transformed
into a multi-storey, steel-framed building, housing the latest
I.B.M. computer with instrument panels covering all the walls,
with thousands of fluorescent oscillators, dials, magic eyes, et
cetera; and an instruction book of several hundred pages -- which,
being illiterate, he could not read. However, after days of useless
fiddling with this or that dial, he flew into a rage and started
kicking a shiny, delicate panel. The shocks disturbed one of the
machine's millions of electronic circuits, and after a while Ali
discovered to his delight that if he kicked that panel, say, three
times and afterwards five times, one of the dials showed the figure
eight. He thanked Allah for having sent him such a pretty abacus,
and continued to use the machine to add up two and three -- happily
unaware that it was capable of deriving Einstein's equations in a
jiffy, or predicting the orbits of planets and stars thousands of
years ahead.
Ali's children, then his grandchildren, inherited the machine
and the secret of kicking the same panel; but it took hundreds
of generations until they learned to use it even for the purpose
of simple multiplication. We ourselves are Ali's descendants, and
though we have discovered many other ways of putting the machine to
work, we have still only learned to utilise a very small fraction
of the potentials of its millions of circuits. For the unsolicited
gift is of course the human brain. As for the instruction book, it
is lost -- if it ever existed. Plato maintains that it did once --
but that is hearsay. [5]

 

When biologists talk of 'mental evolution' superseding biological
evolution as a specific characteristic in man and absent in animals,
they generally fail to see the crux of the problem. For the learning
potential in animals is inevitably limited by the fact that they, unlike
man, make full use -- or nearly full use -- of all organs of their native
equipment, including their brains. The capabilities of the computers
inside the reptilian or lower mammalian skull are exploited almost to
the full and thus leave no scope for cumulative learning and 'mental
evolution'. Only in the case of homo sapiens has evolution anticipated
his needs by a time factor of such magnitude that he is only beginning
to utilize some of the unexploited, unexplored potentials of the brain's
estimated ten thousand million neurons and their virtually inexhaustible
synaptic cross-connections. The history of science, philosophy and art
is, from this point of view, the slow process of the mind learning by
experience to actualize the brain's potentials. The new frontiers to be
conquered are in the convolutions of the cortex.

 

 

The reasons why this process of
learning to use our brains
was so slow,
spasmodic and beset with reverses, can be summed up in a simple formula:
the old brain got in the way of, or acted as a brake on, the new. The only
periods in European history in which there was a truly cumulative growth
of scientific knowledge were the three great centuries of Greece before
the Macedonian conquest, and the four centuries from the Renaissance to
the present. The organ to generate that knowledge was there inside the
skulls of men all the time during the dark interregnum of two thousand
years; but it was not allowed to generate that knowledge. For most of
the time of recorded human history, and the much longer stretches of
pre-history, the marvellous potentialities of the unsolicited gift
were only allowed to manifest themselves in the service of archaic,
emotion-based beliefs, saturated with taboos; in the magically motivated
paintings of the Dordogne caves; in the translation of archetypal
imagery into the language of mythology; in the religious art of Asia
and the Christian Middle Ages. The task of reason was to act as
ancilla
fidei
, the hand-maid of faith -- whether it was the faith of sorcerers
and medicine men, theologians, scholastics, dialectical materialists,
devotees of Chairman Mao or King Mbo-Mba. The fault was not in our stars,
but in the horse and crocodile which we carry inside our skulls.

 

 

 

2

 

 

The historical consequences of man's split personality have been discussed
at length in earlier chapters; my purpose in bringing the subject up once
more is to point out a quite different consequence of this condition,
which raises basic philosophical problems. To stay for another moment
with our metaphor: Ali's descendants were so impressed by and delighted
with the apparently inexhaustible capabilities of the computer (in those
happy periods when it was allowed to operate unimpeded) that they fell
victim to the understandable illusion that the computer was potentially
omniscient. This illusion was a direct consequence of evolution's
overshooting the mark. In other words, the brain's powers of learning
and reasoning turned out to be so enormous compared to those of other
animals, and also compared to the immediate needs of its possessors,
that they became convinced its untapped potentials were inexhaustible,
and its powers of reasoning unlimited. There was indeed no reason to
believe that problems existed to which the computer had no answer, because
it was not 'programmed' to answer them. One might call this attitude the
'rationalist illusion' -- the belief that it is only a question of time
before the ultimate mysteries of the universe are solved, thanks to the
brain's unlimited reasoning powers.