Genes at the Crossroads

For years the general public has been receiving optimistic predictions about how genetic research will change everyday life. In particular, there have been promises that all kinds of human behavior -- including overeating, belief in God, altruism, happiness, and depression -- can be linked to genes in a one-to-one correspondence, i.e., a single gene providing the key to a behavior. Hence the obesity gene or the gay gene, even the faith-in-God gene. But in his New York Times column a few days ago, David Brooks quotes a Hastings Center report that says, "behavioral genetics will never explain as much of human behavior as was once promised." The reason for this about-face, which has spread throughout the genetics community, has to do with the word "complexity." Human behavior isn't complex the way a game of chess is, or the way the wiring is in a computer, for example.

In those cases, the root of complexity is mathematical. There are so many possible moves in a single game of chess and so many crossover connections in a computer that simple actions become logarithmically multiplied. Human behavior isn't complex like that. We are complex because we are creative, emotional, unpredictable, uncertain, conflicted, confused, contradictory, impulsive, and personally unique. We are also constantly changing in response to the environment. It would seem obvious that these all-too-human traits cannot be ascribed to one gene or even a large group. An article this week in the journal Nature finds that it takes over a hundred coordinated genes to participate in the process of cell division, implicating an equal number of feedback loops, since cells operate by self-regulation, monitoring chemical reactions through opposite chemical reactions that keep both in balance. Cell division is simple compared to human behavior, and without knowing how the cell coordinates its activity, genetics is miles from figuring us out.

The deeper problem is that genetics insists on the wrong kind of complexity, the mathematical kind, in order to make progress. In another Nature article, researchers found that rats will perform not simply for rewards but for cues that remind them of those rewards, which the team terms cues for happiness. Human beings do the same thing. Seeing a can of Coke -- if you happen to like Coke -- will cause you to reach for it even though you haven't tasted it yet. But the researchers are stumped, in terms of brain response, by perverse behavior like drug addiction, which causes addicts to reach for their drug of choice even though the outcome will be unhappy. If cues produce happy and unhappy responses both, no clear brain function can be found for happiness. Again, one is facing a materialist fallacy, for it's not the brain that makes people happy or unhappy but a complex relationship that involves both feelings, often at the same time, as we live our lives. Perverse behavior is at once confused, conflicted, compulsive, influenced by memory, and tied to self esteem. So are bad marriages and dead-end jobs: people stay in them not for happiness but for reasons that bounce off each other and interweave in a tangle. Rats aren't a suitable model for our inner world and its mysterious ways.

In theoretical terms, genetics will predictably proceed in the same direction it is going. The mathematical model of complexity won't change. How could it? To truly understand human behavior, you have to turn inward, and subjectivity remains anathema to science's credo of detached objective observation. But since by definition consciousness can only be explored by consciousness, it has to be a subjective exploration. Any objective understanding of consciousness can only be inferential. On a practical basis, however, genetics is at a crossroads. In the same week that human trials for a potential AIDS vaccine had to be abandoned, the complex behavior of a retrovirus has defeated two decades of research, making one wonder exactly when those vaunted promises of a new age in medicine based on genetic breakthroughs are going to produce results.

www.intentblog.com

www.deepakchopra.com

Comments

[Enubilate]

I think it's wrong to say that, with respect to HIV 'the complex behavior of a retrovirus has defeated two decades of research'. The first patient that I treated with AIDS died within three weeks. Two decades of research has provided much more effective treatment even though we are still unable to find a cure.
The disconnect here is between the problem that you want to solve and the problem that you can solve. The scientific method can only be applied successfully to a relatively limited number of problems. But where you can apply it, it's power is that it does provides an objective point of views. Apples fall down off trees all over the world.

[Idytme]

"The scientific method can only be applied successfully to a relatively limited number of problems"
I completely agree

"But where you can apply it, it's power is that it does provides an objective point of view"
Umm, better said is perhaps a "more" objective point of view. (is it a particle or a wave?)
Lets go to placebo studies. Remember that placebos can cause permanent change, and this has been documented in depression studies using brain imaging.
One study found that how well placebo studies worked was determined by the enthusiasm of the researcher. If the researcher was enthusiastic about the drug they were testing, this enthusiasm rubbed off on the patients and the results were better. Doctors are the new shaman in western society and their beliefs transfer to patients.
In correlation to that, this explains why when a new drug is first released, its effects tend to be reported better than a few years later. Doctors pass their enthusiasm to patients (perhaps talking up the drug rather than just write a prescription for a generic), the patient has higher expectations and either in self reporting or in actual effects it seems to work better. As the doctor becomes less enthusiastic, either with time or due to results, the drug does not stand up as well over time.
It could be that the only way to be truly objective in double blind studies is to have the drugs dispensed by robots and testing done in an automated fashion.

[Dap]

Dear Dr. Chopra,
Just wanted to drop in and say thanks for the essays/posts over the three plus years now, it has been interesting to watch you explore. You reminded me of myself before I truly became enlightened, those Jesuits sure did a number on you, nevertheless, you're still ok in my book, and are an excellent political pundit.
I'm slowing gown and can't keep up. All the best, Agape. dapper

[Dap]

Dear Dr. Chopra,

Just wanted to drop in and say thanks for the essays/posts over the three plus years now, it has been interesting to watch you explore. You reminded me of myself before I truly became enlightened, those Jesuits sure did a number on you, nevertheless, you're still ok in my book, and are an excellent political pundit.

I'm slowing gown and can't keep up. All the best, Agape. dapper

[fairwitness]

As human, we inherit a dual nature--we have thought, which is symbolic, abstract code (language) which represents "the world" as images and verbal or mathematical descriptions which can be formulated and communicated (fixed), and we have "presence", our actual, momentary, subjective, experiential consciousness--we ARE the subject which experiences all happenings within its consciousness . Science partakes of the first aspect, legitimately parcing and modeling what we parochially call "reality", and is very successful at that as far as it goes. Science occurs, though, as one aspect of human functioning WITHIN a human consciousness, not in some separate, hermetic sphere free of human subjectivity.

It is when science is conceived of as free of subjectivity that it can become myopically fragmentary (or, if divorced from human moral sensibilities, monstrous). There is no such thing as "detached objective observation"--all observation happens within human subjective consciousness, try as it might to imagine otherwise.

Science is a powerful tool human consciousness has found within itself for leveraging its power to satisfy desires and avoid suffering. Seated in its human context, a great boon. At the mercy of human desire and fear run amuck, a great evil.

We need to keep our powers, our sciences, within our conscious, innately empathetic sensibilities, even if we need to forego their full expression, lest we are victims of our success. A fine line to walk, yes, and our greatest challenge. If we fail, perhaps the Universe will try another, less material way to know itself.

[LesHamilton]

Through some fortuitous accident of genetics, the human brain"s wiring became complex enough to become self-aware. This led to being able to understand cause and effect and to make predictions. This prescience was then the basis for creating a more complex social infrastructure than the family to increase the chances of survival. Our social infrastructure became in effect a secondary non-biological evolutionary structure that is unique to humans. This self-evolving system directs the way conscious individuals will conduct themselves. It has resulted in the creation of politics, religion and culture and all the rules, rewards and sanctions in order to maintain some continuity and consistency for humans to have reasonable expectations of how the future is to unfold for each of them. The problem is that all of these learned social constructs were only consistent depending on the speed and limits of communication at the time they were created. Ideas can only be spread and reinforced with repetition and reference back to the source, which explains how diversity is introduced in these systems.

The premise here is that genes created the consciousness person and everything that such a person perceives or thinks he perceives is a product of human creation as a result of that consciousness and has no independent existence otherwise.

[wondering]

Where does this loathing of science come from? I just don't get it.

Look at this : "In particular, there have been promises that all kinds of human behavior -- including overeating, belief in God, altruism, happiness, and depression -- can be linked to genes in a one-to-one correspondence..."

Who says that? Where did you get that idea from?

And this : "In those cases, the root of complexity is mathematical ... Human behavior isn't complex like that. We are complex because we are creative, emotional, unpredictable, uncertain, conflicted, confused, contradictory, impulsive, and personally unique."

Creativity, emotion - these are merely words we place on certain aspects of our complex natures. How do you know they are not mathematical in nature? Because they don't "feel" mathematical?

Continuous promotion and media exposure has made you an icon to certain types of gullible New Agers. As such, you have some influence on societal discourse. Please stop tearing down science and trying to drag us back into the dark ages.

[Dave24]

"Any objective understanding of consciousness can only be inferential" is a subjective statement, so there's no reason to believe it to be objectively true, which of course undermines the very point you're trying to make.

[mamacat]

Science, "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena." - Columbia Encyclopedia

How could anyone object to the practice of science?

"But since by definition consciousness can only be explored by consciousness, it has to be a subjective exploration." Now this is a loaded sentence. Dr. Chopra, are you assuming that consciousness can only be explored by consciousness, for now and forever, and is therefore not capable of "obsevation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation"? It seems to me that you are indeed making that assumption, without recourse to discussion, argument, or evidence.

I think that you are correct to hold to the view that the world is more complex than what some self-described scientific experts propound. I would go so far as to say that the world is so complex, and so little understood, that we cannot even predict in which direction new discoveries will take us.

However, I do not dismiss science, nor ridicule it and our current limitations of understanding. Not at all. I merely think that since our understanding of the cosmos is increasing exponentially, I look forward happily to the thought that we may someday understand things that today we are afraid to acknowledge as part of our universe.

[cc]

"...subjectivity remains anathema to science's credo of detached objective observation"


Yup, this is the stumbling block of the entire discipline. In a nutshell, it's half-witted. The religion of science only validates reason even though its fold of true believers and its scientists themselves must use both feeling and reason in living their lives!


I will never again embrace a philosophy, theory, or creed that has as its underlying premise the idea that there's something WRONG with being human, and science--in denying feeling and insight validity--fits that parameter. Our species needs a fresh, unifying, belief--one that affirms and employs ALL of the brain's potential for understanding ourselves and our world.