“If we evaluate a human being as a type, we need not take the individual case into account, and that is so convenient. It is as convenient as evaluating an automobile by its make or body type. If you drive a certain make of car, you know where you stan

ICONOCLASM: Chapter 4 of “Beyond Biology” by Charles S. Yanofsky

Contents:

Iconoclasm Defined

Biology of Motivation

Lobar Model of Behavior

Neural Model of Psychological Types

“If we evaluate a human being as a type, we need not take the individual case into account, and that is so convenient. It is as convenient as evaluating an automobile by its make or body type. If you drive a certain make of car, you know where you stand. If you know the brand of a typewriter, you know what to expect of it. You can even select our breed of dog in this way; a poodle will have certain inclinations and certain traits, a wolfhound will have others. Only in the case of man is this not so. Man alone is not determined by his origins; his behavior cannot be calculated from the type. The reckoning will not come out even; there is always a remainder. This remainder is the freedom of man to escape the conditioning factors of type. Man begins to be human only where he has the freedom to oppose bondage to a type. For only there, in freedom, is his being--being responsible; only there “is” man authentically, for only there is man “authentic,”. The more standardized a machine is, the better it is; but the more standardized a person is, the more submerged he is in his race, class, or characterological type, the more he conforms to the average--the more inferior he is from the ethical standpoint.” [1]

ICONOCLASM

From Whence Comes Motivation?

Every age has its own idols, its “isms” for us, Mechan-ism or scient-ism. This is a systematized belief, that anything understood deeply enough can be explained in mechanistic terms and is no different from any other belief ingrained at an early age. Mental events comprise a subset of all phenomena, by no means unusual, and thus can be reduced to physical processes that take place primarily in the brain. In its deepest sense this belief system implies that pure thought is reduced to events that take place in matter. Experience is mechanical and material. But foundations grounded in matter in the palpable as opposed to the invisible, are beginning to crumble. There is evidence that we find these old paradigms inadequate to begin with. For instance, in the United States, the richest and most powerful nation in history, depression and a profound disappointment with life is endemic, especially in affluent neighborhoods. This shows material comfort and spiritual fulfillment are different. Is it not significant to find so many persons suffering from a profound anxiety, ennui with life, that we function zombie-like without a direction or purpose? A rise in psychosomatic illness signals deeper pathology. This does not mean that the basic method of reasoning is to blame, only those cherished structures no longer suffice.

What makes you the person that you are, determines your proclivities and behavior including reaction to positive and adverse stimuli, level of happiness, productivity and whether or not you have emotional problems? If we only knew! How much could we profit from such knowledge! What of the age-old questions of nature, the way persons are built, how we are vs. nurture, what our immediate environment makes of us? Are people basically good or evil? Do we have only a thin veneer of civility and control with evil kept constantly in check (We certainly get that impression in Yugoslavia today and looking back through history!) Why are some people more ethical than others? Why do some persons care too much about ethics and morals while others care not at all? In the past these were philosophical even metaphysical questions; it was OK for everyone to have their own personal opinion in the absence or knowledge, but not anymore. Science is slowly pushing back the limits of philosophical debate and answering many of these questions, and frequently surprising intuition.

Despite all of our scientific advances we have only a rudimentary idea about basic human motivation. It is all we can do to vaguely state that motivation may reside somewhere in the frontal lobes. The most advanced research has defined, only to a limited extent some of the influences that shape decisions in terms of anatomical substrate and perhaps more usefully, certain neurotransmitters as we shall see below. But where is the kernel or core of human will? When you decide to do something as simple as moving your finger, where is the ultimate source, anatomically of this decision? We do not know! Our tests, functional MRI or PET scans merely point out activated areas of brain that are implicated in such actions; they may show a pattern of activation that varies from subject to subject and between situations, but they will never show the ultimate source of even the most rudimentary decision. They do not show us from whence derives motivation, especially the drive to change one’s world or the direction of one’s life.

Two persons raised the same way, even growing up in the same household, can turn out different. No one has been able to predict how someone will turn out by looking at his or her environment, which frustrates social engineers. There is a lot of debate about what constitutes a healthy upbringing. Bad persons can be born under ideal circumstances and in many cases persons show tremendous resilience despite., or even because, of their being dealt a bad hand. There is little question that in our society we tend to trust the highly born. Most of our heroes hail from patrician lineages and we scoff at the lowly born. It's the self-made person who we truly should admire, but we don’t trust him. He is a nouveau riche. We seek a purebred highbrow who has had everything handed to him. Yet we all know of persons lowly born, who have achieved a great deal (even if this is not the usual case) and there is perhaps more social mobility in American society than most places around the world. Most of us don’t think very much of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage.

We all know someone who grew up under adverse circumstances having to struggle against seemingly insuperable odds, and yet have achieved material, educational or ethical milestones beyond imagining, and of others whose lives were a disappointment despite their having all of the advantages of material comfort and close nuclear family. We enjoy citing these examples because they seem to prove that some persons have an inner fire while few others have any burning passions inside. Examples abound of persons born to limited means who become rich or famous by virtue of burning ambition. Bill Gates, the Intel guy, Clare Boothe Luce, Einstein and Freud, Faraday, and a host of others were born poor and to unknown families.

When it comes to human behavior facile rules, break down, not always, but occasionally, and enough to make all the difference. This slight infrequent breaking of rules, this difference or residual is just enough to stake our claim in the world; it's what makes us a little difference and the same stuff is what makes our civilization, our whole consciousness advance. It's swimming against the tide. It's not doing what is manifestly or immediately advantageous, not secreting behavior that is predictable, but choosing instead to perform unpredictable acts, separate from the mold of contingencies and the people who pull all the strings, iconoclasm, by which we mean not

Momentum= Mass X Velocity, but rather,

Force = Mass X Acceleration.

Sometimes, perhaps not that often, a person does the unexpected, fails to go with the flow, but instead, exerts a force on his world which in turn, changes his course or his outer world. The paradigm, or rather its exact opposite, that illustrates the concept, is Parkinson’s disease, a disorder of the human motor system. The victim of Parkinson’s is at his basic worst, a non-initiator of action. He is inertly immobile. If he needs to stand or begin to walk, his greatest problem is actually starting out. Once he gets moving he can continue at a constant velocity. In fact, he has difficulty stopping, and turning will cause him to fall. His body at rest remains at rest, in motion, remains in motion at constant velocity, unable to accelerate in any way, that is change velocity, in physical terms, apply force, in the way we all take for granted in our daily lives. This force is rooted in the human will, motivation, the desire to exert a force and bring about change.

Parkinson’s disease is caused by Dopamine deficiency in the basal ganglia of the brain, specifically in the substantia nigra or black substance which is less black in Parkinson’s brains because there is also less melanin, a metabolite of Dopamine. In his popular book, Awakenings, Oliver Sacks showed how there is spectrum from the Dopamine deficiency of Parkinson disease to Dopamine excess brought about by excessive Dopamine replacement therapy. Patients may run the gamut from immobile inertia, to aggression, excessive movement, and hypersexuality depending their Dopamine levels. Thus Dopamine is the transmitter of more than simple motor action acceleration or force. There is evidence connecting Dopamine with basic motivational processes, an inner fire, pleasure seeking, motivation.

Cocaine increases brain Dopamine by blocking Dopamine transporter, the protein that transports Dopamine from the synapse, back into the neuron, where Dopamine ceases to be active. Every neurotransmitter released into the synapse needs to have some method for its deactivation lest it continue to work forever and cease to be a phasic messenger. For Dopamine this is the Dopamine transporter. Certain persons are more apt to become dependent on substances such as cocaine, may even crave stimulants, because of an inborn deficiency in their Dopamine systems. This anhedonia hypothesis, meaning the absence of pleasure, also known as reward deficiency, is arguably caused by many factors. Perhaps a person is constantly beaten down, made to feel that his own life is worthless, or grows up deprived. He will become emotionally stunted, hypoactive, will have what is frequently noted in depressed patients, psychomotor retardation. Or, he might have to an inborn dopamine deficiency, some learned or environmental influence that reduces Dopamine effect, or probably more likely, if the process is genetic, a polymorphism in Dopamine or other neurochemical receptors. He might then crave substances that provide him some relief from his deficiency. Addictions run in families, particularly alcoholism, which is rare among some ethnic and even racial groups, highly common in others, but also obesity and certainly other drug addictions and compulsive behaviors, such as gambling that seem to afflict certain kindreds over many generations. We all know that cravings are multifactorial, that there are environmental influences to be sure, but could a certain susceptibility for pleasure giving substances, whether they be foods, alcohol or drugs, be genetic?

The D2 Dopamine receptor subtype is implicated in this process. Experimental Rats try to stimulate certain nuclei in the brain, that contain Dopamine, especially the nucleus Accumbens. Alcohol, Cocaine, and nicotine, increase the effect of Dopamine in the brain. The ventral tegmental area of the midbrain also has Dopamine secreting neurons that project to the nucleus accumbens. Other transmitters, serotonin, enkephalins GABA also get into the act, stimulating or inhibiting the ventral tegmental Dopamine containing neurons. The final common pathway though is the nucleus accumbens that has D2 dopamine receptors. Does an inherited alteration in Dopamine D2 receptors predispose a person toward alcholism and cocaine addiction, pathological gambling or other cravings?

Evidence is contradictory at this point but there is some support in work by Blum et al.[2] Have found an increased incidence of a certain gene type in alcoholics designated as A1 allele, which associates with the D2 Dopamine receptor. These associations are fairly weak if they exist at all, but are more convincing in more severe cases of alcoholism. For example, if the A1 subtype has a frequency of about 20% in normal Caucasian control group, there may be around a 45% incidence among Caucasian alcoholics, not a very convincing association, but enough magnitude to be statistically significant. D2 receptor subtypes seem to account for some susceptibility to alcoholism and also the A1 polymorphism connects with other disorders, motor tics, compulsions, attention deficit disorder and autism[3]. Others have found that alcoholics, as opposed to the rest of us, are simply not as sensitive to the effects of alcohol, that is may require higher doses, more drinks to become uncoordinated, high, or have changes on their EEG. In other words, future alcoholics may have an inherited decreased susceptibility to the acute effects of alcohol.

Figure 1: The nucleus accumbens in the frontal lobe. CCg=corpus callusum, Ch=caudate nucleus, IC=internal capsule, P=putamen, GP=globus pallidus, AC=anterior commisure, Fcol=columns of Fornix, NA=nucleus accumbens, an extension of the putamen, part of the deep motor system in the brain.

[4]

What if alcoholism and other cravings were found to be true genetic based disease states? Does that absolve the alcoholic from responsibility for his own behavior? A more important practical consideration is that understanding drug cravings, which may have to do with an ascending tracts in the brainstem and Dopamine transmission, an internal reward system, may one day help us to find medical treatments for all sorts of cravings and addictions.

To me, the interesting part has to do with the weakness of the data. The statistical strength of Dopamine receptor subtypes in ethanolism is fairly minimal and even there, some groups reach contradictory conclusions. Under the best of circumstances it is far from possible to draw firm conclusions about a genetic or any organic basis for any specific human craving.

The best model of craving is Tourette Syndrome which is a study of the irresistible urge. In Tourette’s the patient has an urge to perform certain acts, ordinarily simple tics or mannerisms such as forceful eye blinks and shoulder shrugs, but also more involved activities throat clearings, vocalizations and other utterances, sometimes expletives, “coprolalia” ( from Greek, literally fecal babbling). Some persons have copropraxias (praxis, to do) and needing to touch themselves for example, even in public. The Touretter will be able to suppress his irresistible urge for a while, but the urge will always be expressed. He will try hold out until he is alone, but the act will always get done and there is no way to stop it. Not surprisingly, Touretters have various compulsions of all types, even to ritualistic behaviors and obsessive-compulsive disorders sometimes gambling. Dopamine is the major transmitter implicated in Tourette syndrome, as drugs that block Dopamine, the anti-psychotic drugs, are by far the most effective tic-suppressors, but other medicines, especially Serotonin-increasing antidepressants, seem to be most effective for compulsions. These medicines are effective at treating many secondary symptoms such as an addiction to gambling. An organic disease such as Tourette’s is the strongest argument in favor of the notion that humans are subject to predetermined irresistible urges that cannot be controlled, also that one may use organic means, namely drugs, to control these urges. But Tourette’s is a disease which says little about health and superlative ability.

In fact most information about neurotransmitters and psychiatric disease, the brain, behavior connection, is generated about what we know about the effects of certain drugs. Typically certain classes of medicines are found to be helpful for certain conditions, sometimes quite by accident, then it is up to researchers to find explanations for why this might be so. Thus isoniazid used to treat tuberculosis, was found, quite by accident, to diminish depression and cause in some, susceptible persons, a form of mania or excitation. From this observation, the first generation of antidepressants, known as tricyclics developped, amitriptylene and imipramine. These drugs were only later found to affect the transmitter brain norepinephrine. Tourette’s was at one time thought to be a purely psychiatric disease. Today, many of us doubt that such a thing exists as a psychiatric disease because of known physical concomitants. The first hint that Tourtette’s is actually neurological came from empirical observations about the effects of Haloperidol on the tics in this disorder. From clinical this observation, a Dopamine hypothesis about the causation of the disease arose. Why? Haloperidol was known to exert its effect, primarily through dopamine blockade.

Iconoclasm Defined:

Igor Stravinsky was an early twentieth century iconoclast. His Rite of Spring explodes with energy, rhythms so earthy and complex Stravinsky had difficulty figuring out how to put them to paper. This was a heady time, in the days before the Russian Revolution, the Great War, in the years between Einstein’s Special (1905) and General (1916) Relativity, the victory of Quantum mechanics over a Newtonian Physics. Le Sacre raised more than a stir at its premier in 1913. By that time Stravinsky had already introduced two wonderful earlier ballets, Petrushka (1911) and Firebird (1910) whose music was influenced by his brilliant teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. But Le Sacre was different. Its offenses were sufficiently revolutionary, too much for his audience to take. The premier touched off one of the more celebrated riots in music history. It is hard for most people to appreciate how sometimes great art must offend, not fit neatly into the blueprint of previous works. Here Stravinsky literally helped create modernism. The ears and eyes of the musical public were not quite ready for this, but that is what must happen, once in a while, if we are to make any advance. It is emblematic in art.

Le Sacre is about a pagan ritual that welcomes Spring with the worship of the earth. The theme is a ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin whirls and dances herself to death under the watchful eye of sage elders. The music crashes through the gates breaking conventional romantic musical idols along a path of conquest. Great music and art is most of the time is simply validating and uplifting. Yet if Stravinsky’s sound is appealing, and though explosive and primitively advanced rhythm, it does not sound all that unusual to us today. We have heard so much since then that we hardly know what all the fuss was about back then. Its appeal is not to emotions primarily which is better done with melody than rhythm. Still the music finds new patterns of activation within the cortex, new patterns of arousal and mental exercise. Ironic that a break with the romantic past in the early twentieth century depicts pagan ritual – iconoclasm in the service of idolatry. Le Sacre may break idols, but the earthy primitivism of matter still wins out over mind.

The archetypal iconoclast was Abraham. The Abraham in Biblical accounts, broke all of the idols of his father and idol merchant, Terah, and then left the ancient land of Ur to change history and become the father of nations. People would pay good money for these idols thinking them to be gods. "Why did you destroy all my idols?” Abraham's father cried, (so the legend goes) for they were more than gods, they were Terah's livelihood. "That giant statue over there who is bigger than the others, destroyed all the other gods and then himself.” Abraham is said to have retorted sardonically. Then and there his father realized how stupid was attribution human will and motivation to inanimate objects and began to worship the spirit-god as did his son.

Iconoclasm. There are echoes of Abraham. The convention was to worship inanimate material objects, themselves the products of human hands “Why do you worship statues that can’t do or feel anything? How can these objects possibly have any control over your life?” you hear Abraham say. Chances are his father sympathized with him. Undoubtedly Terah sympathized with his son, but didn’t have the personal fortitude to leave his life behind, or perhaps he was by then too old. Chances are he merely made his living selling the dumb statues but didn’t believe in them. Abraham’s insistence on a non-material spirit who created and controlled the universe was the first iconoclasm. in history. That is not to deny that to this day we worship physical objects.

People still need to see something tangible and real and churches have made peace with this human clamoring with its extensive iconography that a lot of people require in their religious worship. When you consider it, this dependence on an icon is one of the most powerful and pervasive forces. Seeing is believing and it's hard to believe that something spiritual, numinous, is actually there.

Idol-breakers accentuate humanness. They swim against the tide, eschew the conventional. they arouse hatred and alienate. This doesn’t mean that the outrageous is always good or valuable, nor that art needs to be outrageous in order to be good. Without form, or meaning, expression turns crude, vulgar. Formless meaninglessness is what we have in rap and rock music of a drug influenced new age. Recall that a whole political movement revolved about the sacrilegious Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a photograph of a crucifix immersed in the artist's urine. This drew criticism from Senator Jesse Helms that nearly did away with the National Endowment for the Arts. Innumerable articles were written about the subject. Finally the Supreme Court got into the act and supported a standard of decency as prerequisite to federal arts funding. Many persons recoiling from this outrageous art that offends sensibilities, have used this for a pretext to condemn the entire art world. Yet it is in the very fiber of art to swim against the tide, to challenge convention with the outrageous. Sometimes this simply offends and does so without substance with little regard for form let alone our deepest feelings. Such amorphous garbage does not express anything. Rather it tramples over us.

Adolescence is in part about the same rebellion, a declaration of one’s own identity, as if to shout to the world, “I’ve arrived! I’m here and in your face!” It’s the source of a youthful enthusiasm that to adults maddens and insults, but it is what an individual identity is about. At least in adolescence you can say that you are on the road to something.

David Gelernter in his book 1939, The Lost World of the Fair[5] gives us a poignant look of youthful enthusiasm and optimism, a post-depression world in the throes of a world war when one would think there was little reason for such optimism. Gelernter presents a young architect and his own unconventional visions for playgrounds, schools and buildings. A building as a vision can positively change lives and society and its institutions. Creativity begins well before you have been infused with the conventional, while you are learning in school, as you are flushed with the new, and a host of things you have yet to learn. After you have reached a state of high competence in a field, you begin to see things as others do. You lose that youthful creative spirit. Having established a line of thought in your youth it is usual that you are trapped in it, you will spend the rest of your years in that area. For one thing, you just have too much invested.

Unless, you are fortunate enough to be able to do something totally different in later life, a phenomenon well described in Betty Friedan’s Fountain of Age and in Gail Sheehy’s Passages.

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Enter Biology:

Medical science has uncovered a large number of biological processes that profoundly affect personality and behavior. As more data accumulates we are finding that behaviors and internal personality structure are controlled by innate, genetic internal elements. These come less from Western literature and more from biology and chemistry. Controlling for environmental factors, intellectual, musical and athletic abilities are largely inherited. It seems to be no accident that abilities as well as diseases and disabilities run in families. It was more than the musical environment that made musicians in generations of Bachs, Mozarts and Beethovens. In retrospect, it is hard to believe how much we were taken in by arguments of the strong environmentalists anyway. All of us know of examples of children driven by some inner force though never trained in the field of music medicine or law, and never encouraged to enter into it were driven in a certain direction anyway. What determines such a drive is more than a mere talent. It is motivation and proclivity. Society functions best when it allows people to make their own choices.

Most of us tend to gravitate into the fields for which we are the most suited. Society would do best by not restricting this choice and basically leaving people to pursue their own dreams. One example is Richard Wagner a towering figure in music the greatest composer by far of German opera. Friedrich Wagner, a minor police official who died 6 months after Richard’s birth, was probably not his father. Richard was most likely the illegitimate son of Ludwig Geyer, an actor and singer who married his mother a year after Friedrich’s death and provided all important exposure to the theater while absolutely forbidding him to have anything to do with music. These facts are even more ironic since Wagner, noted for his later anti-Jewish sentiments was probably the son of Geyer a Jew*. But his paternity would go a long way in explaining his proclivity for both literature and music and his grand scheme to unify the arts in one magnificent operatic structure. Richard studied music on the sly and Geyer died in 1821 at any event. Hearing Beethoven’s Fidelio in 1829 was something of an epiphany for Wagner that awakened his own latent interest in music. Before that point his artistic interests were mainly literary.

More and more we are hearing about spectacular discoveries bearing on biological links to behavior. A genetic defect in MAOA, monamine Oxidase A, which is the enzyme that deactivates Serotonin in the brain was created in mice. These mice with an up to nine-fold increased brain serotonin are more tremulous as pups and more aggressive adults, exhibiting increased grasping in a clumsy attempt to mate, irritability, and a tendency to bite and attack. Two years earlier a Dutch kindred lacking MAOA was discovered with overly aggressive with males who would rape, commit arson, and brandish knives, try to run down an employer with a car. These men were also found to have elevated brain levels of Serotonin due to a deficiency in the Serotonin metabolizing enzyme MAOA.[6] We know personality and behavior can be altered in using drugs that increase or decrease levels of Serotonin and other chemicals, so why should veterinarians be hesitant to use the same chemicals in animals that are known to alter emotion and behavior in humans? Many of them do will give your pets with emotional disorders doses of antidepressants and tranquilizers such as Prozac and Valium.

Even more biological ammunition comes from ethology which looks at the innate behavior patterns of animals. Animals inherit much more than physical characteristics such as eye and hair color. Complex patterns of behavior are also inherited and have profound effects on maturation and mating. Some speciation is determined more on an inherited behavioral basis than any physical quality. Certain simple physical characteristics act as releasers of behavior. The famous example given by Konrad Lorenz a pioneer in this area of study is the propensity, expressed over a limited period shortly after hatching, of ducklings to follow a moving walking animal. Almost always this animal turns out to be the mother of the hatchlings but if a human should intervene and begin to walk away during this critical period shortly after birth then the ducklings will continue to follow the human who will be treated as the ducklings’ mother. This is imprinting. What is required is an inborn pattern of behavior, wired into the central nervous system, and a releaser that brings out this behavior often in a critical period. Earlier in chapter one the releaser of the male stickleback fish which is another classic example, was mentioned. The best example of imprinting pointing to the interaction of environment and inherited behavioral patterns is birdsong. Most birds are born with a simple limited repertoire of song patterns. These basic patterns are later blossom into their full complexity and diversity during a critical period of learning that occurs early in life. A bird’s song is endowed with a local species-specific dialect that is superimposed on simpler patterns and learned through contact with older adults who have fully developed song. The male utilizes song mainly to attract a female of the same species as part of a mating ritual. If he is raised in isolation from other males, the very basic innate unembellished song pattern is what remains. Therefore the song of the male bird is largely inherited and partly learned as well. Not only the basic song apparatus and wherewithal to produce the song, the vocal and neural apparatus, but also the proclivity to learn more complex song patterns during a specific period of the bird’s early life. Song, as much as any physical character, ensures that females only of the same species are attracted for mating purposes. Perhaps other closely related females might look almost exactly the same and mating might possibly occur, purely on the basis of morphology or appearance. But the specific male song, and heritable differences in actual mating behavior, help ensure that this will not occur. Male aggressive behavior is controlled by the same factors. The birdsong is sexual and has both attractant and aggressive repercussions. Other males, hearing conspecific birdsong that is part of the competitive mating ritual, if done in their own territory, might be inclined to attack so that a physical fight will occur. More often the song is a declaration keeping competing males away from females and out of the singing male’s territory. The male bird will sing more vehemently if deprived of sex or sexually excited. Aggression will be more vehement as well. While in birds with more complex brains some specific elements have yet to be worked out neurophysiologically, it has been possible to show in certain stridulating insects such as grasshoppers, that inherited song dialects, also used to attract females, translate into firing patterns of single neurons tuned to respond (fire) to exact frequencies produced. Thus there is a certain inherited lock and key when it comes to bird and insect sound production, a correspondence between the motor output, influenced as it is by internal states, and sensory response.

It’s also impossible to escape generalization of these same principles to human language dialects. Presumably with us, language is more a matter of learning with minimal genetic component (excluding the basic abilities to speak and to respond to language) but the effect is the same. Mostly by learning humans are “tuned” to respond to specific languages and dialects and mating and other social interactions are much more likely to occur among persons who are genetically, racially and linguistically similar. Our analogy also extends well beyond language over the whole gamut of ethnicity with its own biological and cultural and linguistic components. Ethnic linguistic variation, which is an evolutionary tree of sorts, largely parallels genetic differences. Human racial varieties parallel ethnic and linguistic ones.

Considering that almost all organisms have evolved methods for kin recognition[7] ranging from elaborate olfactory systems in paper wasps, tadpoles and sweat bees, to location of eggs in certain birds we should note that many of our ethnic concerns are biologically determined. Humans go out of their way not to breed with close family members. That would be a disadvantage in two ways. Recessive traits, many of them injurious, would be expressed doubly by mating with a close relativeF. Also mating with very close relatives would limit the store of genetic variation, so that making populations so homogeneous they would not have the basic fuel required to evolve. The fuel of evolution is individual variation. Organisms evolve when variations in individuals affect fitness.

On the other hand evolutionary forces limit out of group mating. This is true especially in complex social animals such as humans. Each large group or kindred is also a separate evolutionary experiment and there is pressure to mate within a group (ordinarily for man a common language or ethnic group) and fierce competition for survival between groups as well. The survival of the individual’s genes is married to that of his group. If the group is large enough, there will be adequate genetic variation to fuel adaptation. History describes kindreds conquered, displaced, obliterated. There are records of such total destruction since the invention of writing. When you consider it, it seems that language may have developed entirely to separate out different ethnic groups or, the biblical descriptions of such processes through marriage, and war are very likely highly accurate. Groups segregate after separation of a founding member into separate family groups or kindreds then continue to grow apart. Two related kindreds that separated only few generations ago may later make war against each other much as sons of Isaac and Ishmael who had Abraham as their father or Jacob and Esau (founder of the Edomites) who were both sons of Isaac. What this means is that we need come to some accommodation between mating with relatives that are too close (as exhibited by incest laws) and those who are too distant (the mechanisms of language, religion and war are instrumental here.)

Ethology has shown that behaviors are inherited just as much as morphologic characters. Behavior is the efferent side. On the afferent, receptive side it is very likely that we inherit a propensity to perceive the world in a certain way. It is certain that a whole logic is wired into the brain and that the origin of this logic or wiring system that shapes our perception is in evolution. We turned out this to view the world in our own specific way as humans because evolutionarily that is what was most adaptive; that is what increased our fitness in the world. All of us wonder about what is truth, what determines out perception of truth debates which we have today but which were fully shaped by enlightenment philosophers by Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley and Kant. The debate in epistemology, the origin of truth, how we know what we know, whether what we think is true bears any relationship to an objective reality, revolves about how our world is formed by the interaction of the inner workings of our mind and perceptions and how this fits into a pattern that is our world view. Is there a mental form or pattern into which we fit our perception or a blank slate into which we place individual raw perceptions to eventually make a mental model. The striking thing for me, is that all of these philosophical debates were formed before Darwin whose greatest lesson for us is that the form of our mind, and brain arose from nature and very likely reflects nature. Every perception is molded by and placed in context with a mental pattern that is inherent. In the brain, and the mind, every perception has its place and context in a mental system comprised of inherent logic and emotion. That system is a product of, and must reflect, nature, otherwise it would never be instrumental in helping us to adapt to our own environment. Thus science has materially contributed to the philosophical debate about truth. When these men argued in the seventeenth century they had not the tools to properly close their debate having had almost no knowledge about the form and function of the brain which is the organ of perception, or its biological origins from nature.‡ What these men lacked was an understanding of the critical link between the knower and the known. Not appreciating the nature of this link, they rightly questioned humankind’s understanding of reality, whether understanding was true or not. My contention is what they did not understand is how the brain and hence the mind were born of nature and the universe and was therefore linked with it. Knowledge is thus critically linked with the knower, for the knower has adapted practically to truths within the universe. Presumably mankind continues to compete successfully with other organisms because his view of the world is at the very least adaptive, if not accurate. Perception does not arise in a vacuum, it is not created willy-nilly from the outside or above but arises empirically through daily encounters with an unforgiving environment. When you see rightly, your dealings are bound to be a success; misperceive and you could have a disaster. Man, as part of nature, will most likely be an accurate manipulator and systematizer.

So the third aspect of the scientific examination of personality and behavior, after analysis, and behaviorism, is biology. And here we have made the greatest strides in the latter part of the twentieth century. Biology definitely explains a lot. Major objections to Darwin and evolutionism, far and away the most powerful biological theory before the revolution in molecular genetics, that we are in the throes of at present, have come from radical religionists, and they are armed with fundamental misunderstandings about a Christian and English speaking literal interpretations of their Bibles and little, if any, appreciation of other areas of enquiry.

Scientists have failed to inquire about whether it is possible for a mechanism of free will to be built into a biological system. Could it be that the brain is designed to be a repository of free-will? This would be contrary to our understanding of all other mechanical systems to be sure, but is a theoretical possibility that should not be overlooked. Of course it is contrary to our understanding of other mechanical systems and that is what makes it so interesting. We have alluded to examples of other systems, scientifically described, whose behaviors cannot be readily predicted. These include descriptions of sub-atomic quantum behavior where the uncertainty principle applies. Since we cannot know at time t₀ the position and momentum of an elementary particle at the same time, the behavior of such elementary particles at time t₁ cannot entirely be predicted. Also, in recent years, science has explored chaos theory which describes the relatively unpredictable, yet still deterministic in the wide sense behavior of such areas as weather prediction and the stock market, even EEG and EKG non-rhythmic patterns. It is even more probable that free-will will fall into the purview of chaos. Another alternative is that of new areas of inquiry about self-organization order out of chaos theories as described by Ilya Prigogene and Stuart Kauffman[8] for example. Or, we may be forced to admit the possibility of free-will built into neural systems via scientific principles that have yet to be defined.

Psychologists would like to be able to predict behavior and prognosticate on abilities. If nothing else this would legitimize their science by giving it predictive power. What if one could develop a test that would accurately predict school performance or find the best recruits for officer candidate school? Imagine if one could tell who among us are most likely to commit a crime. Parole boards could know which inmates to keep and which to set free. Our penal system would be turned on its head. For the first time one could come up with rational arguments, a high probability that a certain personality type would be at risk to commit a crime, to preemptively incarcerate or neutralize a criminal prior to his actually committing a heinous act.f . What if you knew which persons were more reliable, which ones had a tendency to steal, and the proclivities of all candidates, then you would have an idea what person could be hired and which to turn down. The Holy Grail of psychology is finding instruments that can predict future behavior. The history of such attempts is full of failure because behavior is willed and not determined.

The best that you might hope for is to be able to define abilities, proclivities, and more vaguely on emotions and motivation. You could make a statement about various influences then, but would be unable to predict behavior with any measure of certainty. A probabilistic model is all you could hope for. With those tools you might furtively enter the realm of prediction, knowing depending on the design of your test you may not be accurately assessing all you intended to measure.

In a certain sense it may not matter very much. For example consider the much-vaunted SAT test used for high school students. The Education and Testing Service has tried to design a test that can predict college performance, to provide an objective means to compare high school juniors from many different schools and backgrounds. We all know that a student with high grades from a mediocre high school may not be as academically gifted as one with lower grades from a more demanding or competitive class. The SAT seeks to correct for these deficiencies. The SAT test is very subject to a practice effect which means scores improve considerably on repeated testing because the questions from exam to exam are not that different. Consequently the SAT’s and other standardized tests have started a mini-industry of courses that essentially defeat these exams.

What about IQ tests which measure intelligence and seek to stratify persons into prognostic categories predictive of school and work performance? It is shocking how little IQ testing is questioned in the lay and academic media especially when you consider the checkered history of the tests and how they have been used by pseudo scientists of all stripes in the past. In the early part of the Twentieth Century these instruments, developed by such pioneers as Binet and Terman, administered to military recruits found a low general level of intelligence, somewhere around the 13 year old age level. IQ tests administered to new immigrants on Ellis Island yielded even more frightening results. Many could not tell you the month or year or copy a figure implying a high incidence of mental subnormality greater than 80% for some groups of Eastern Europeans. It wasn’t long before such tests became the principal argument for the eugenics movement seeking to limit immigration from oppressed and indigent populations in Southern and Eastern Europe on the basis of their certifiably inferior intelligence. Allowing large numbers of these dirty and ignorant partisans would encourage mixture of inferior stock into our more purely Anglo and Nordic gene pool and end up lowering the intellectual endowment of future generations of Americans. So went the argument. When within one or two generations these dirty poor stupid and immigrant families raised the intellectual standards of public schools and colleges and were picking up Nobel prizes and other high academic honors, the fallacious arguments had been forgotten and new excuses invented for keeping immigrants and inferior groups out of the United States. Laws were passed that blocked immigrants from entering the U.S. between the wars. No one knows how many souls were later slaughtered in the second World War and the holocaust on the basis of these fallacious judgments.[9] The same arguments have been made continually and in our own time in fact very recently. The well-publicized book THE BELL CURVE makes very much the same point. Persons perform on IQ tests very much along racial lines and so, the argument goes, the wisest use of limited resources would be to cut your losses, and not emphasize teaching of abstract topics to persons ill-equipped to learn them. This was a position essentially endorsed in a position paper later published in the Wall Street Journal whose many signatories included IQ mavens of all stripes. Nothing in The Bell Curve explains why, much to the dismay and puzzlement of the testers, IQ has steadily been slowly rising from 1918 to 1989 consistently in constant IQ points to the tune of about 24 points. A person scoring at the 90th percentile 100 years ago on the progressive matrices test, one of the least culturally loaded subtests, would end up in just the fifth percentile today. This is the so-called “Flynn Effect” named for James R. Flynn who first noticed it when studying intelligence in the U.S. Military, but the effect is quite robust, seeming to extend over the decades to just about every different I.Q. test.[10] Just one major area of fallout is the estimates of dementia in the elderly who come from a period when I.Q. scores were considerably lower. If elderly I.Q.’s are compared with those of younger folks, you would be looking at the Flynn effect not any measurement of dementia. For that one needs to dig out measures of these own folk’s past performance. While achievement test scores decrease or at best remain stagnant, I.Q. scores are slowly increasing and no one knows why. I.Q. is supposedly mostly a genetic endowment, not very culturally determined and should remain constant over generations but doesn’t. Is our intelligence actually increasing perhaps through better nutrition, more contact with electronic devices and more abstract concepts?. Almost certainly not. There is most likely some systematic slow change in the means of administration of the test that introduces artifact, perhaps a similar artifact to that which stratifies the races in such treatises as The Bell Curve. No measuring device is perfect and this one may be subject to the biases of the measurer. And the same tests are used to classify and prognosticate on your own children, even though the instruments claiming to measure intelligence actually do no such thing. Even correlation of test scores with academic performance is poor.

Current research indicates that about 50% of variation in human IQ is inherited. Common techniques used to explore this interesting area include correlation coefficients of certain testees, identical and fraternal twins raised together and apart, biological parents and their children whether adopted or raised by them. The upshot of such research is that mental tests correlate more strongly with inheritance than upbringing. Your IQ is much more likely to correlate with your biological sibling or parent especially an identical twin, than adoptive parents or siblings. Heredity is more important than environment. Not surprisingly, mental abilities also correlate fairly strongly with each other. Spatial and verbal abilities while being handled to some extent in separate areas of the brain, correlate well with each other for the most part.

Starting from the seed of the IQ test, a whole branch of psychology has developed around the use of tests and instruments that seek to measure aptitudes and emotions. These consist of hundreds of tests and inventories many of which are all too familiar since we have all taken many of them. The simplest are the test administered by teachers and we all know how imperfectly such exams actually measure mastery of subjects we have taken in school. After you come out of an exam aren’t you always questioning whether you had a fair or and unfair test? In many cases you have not been tested fairly but at least a teacher’s exam does get you to study. The closest thing to an IQ tests are exams of “scholastic Aptitude” given to high school students in an effort to prognosticate on their abilities. You can improve your performance markedly on such exams through practice and a mini-industry has evolved just because students do improve their scores utilizing these courses and the test largely determines entrance into competitive schools. If you can improve your scores then the word aptitude is a misnomer, but at the very least, the test cannot be quantifying any innate academic ability and the exam is quite easily defeated. The problem is that there is no very good way of comparing students of diverse background and from different schools. Psychological testing has evolved into a whole specialty.

Many people are not aware how many different tests there are. Tests measure abilities and proclivities of all types. Interests, personality types, emotions, linguistic mathematical musical abilities, character, honesty, frontal parietal lobe functions, are all measurable with these instruments. Tests are not used only to admit a student to a certain college but to help quantify brain injury for court cases or to help decide whether or not to hire a prospective candidate. As on all measures you accept a certain limit of accuracy. Schools and employers are well aware that in trying to find the best candidates some of the best students and employees will be excluded while other poor candidates will be accepted and are willing to take their chances that on the whole, in most cases they will find the fittest candidate. Besides, in case anyone inquires (or sues) they can always show that all comers no matter what their race or ethnic background were subjected to the same “objective” measures. The most common instruments used to measure brain function are IQ tests especially the Wechsler scales and Wechsler memory scales, MMPI, Halsted Reitan and Luria Nebraska batteries, Beck depression inventories etc.[11]

A few cognitive deficits are specific and can be localized to a given region of cerebral cortex. They localize to areas mostly because of lesion experiments that show when a certain area of the brain is cut out then these functions are impaired implying that the affected area must somehow be connected with performing the function. Contrary to popular belief, decreased function via lesioning does not necessarily infer that the area in question is responsible for the function. One situation is termed Gerstmann syndrome after the psychiatrist who first noted a curious combination of problems. The subject with Gerstmann’s is unable to write, recognize his own fingers, calculate, and tell right from left. He has in order of appearance above, agraphia, finger agnosia, acalculia, right-left disorientation. The lesion is in the angular gyrus of the dominant (usually left) parietal lobe. All of these problems, taken individually, can be caused by anatomical defects elsewhere in the brain, but when they occur in combination, they almost always point to a problem in the left angular gyrus or an area near it. This doesn’t mean that the angular gyrus performs these functions, far from it. However it is one area that is necessary for the performance of these individual tasks. Why?

The angular gyrus processes data arriving from many sources, the visual cortex, auditory areas etc. It helps to further process this data. It is one of the areas of the brain collating and operating on information from diverse sources. Some of the tasks are actually composites multiple subtasks. Let’s take the problem of acalculia. Before you are able to use and manipulate numbers you have to be able to recognize them properly through either an auditory or a visual pathway usually, i.e. you must be able to receive numbers and the problem. Then you must understand the operations, addition, subtraction etc. that you are expected to perform. You have to have some language function in order to know what to do to operate on the numbers. This language function is the same as what is taken care of by the left hemisphere of the brain and as such persons with some types of aphasia (see previous sections) may have a number language defect or a type of “aphasic acalculia”. Such problems in linguistic interpretation ordinarily localize to the dominant cerebral hemisphere.

What if you are confronted with a complex problem whose answer you don’t know by rote such as addition of more than two or three columns with carrying and place holding? Then if you have a spatial deficit such as could be caused by a lesion on the right side of the brain you could get into trouble. Hence such problems involving extended computation and place holding are trouble for those persons having right hemisphere deficits. Other folks have more a pervasive problem with calculations that do not involve place holding or language function. Those people ordinarily may have more extensive bilateral defects such as occur with Alzheimer’s disease and have “anarithmetria.” Therefore as we have found with some other cognitive deficits such as naming, arithmetic computation, calculation, is a composite function that is not entirely localizing since so many steps are necessary for it to be carried out correctly by the brain. But where it occurs in conjunction with other defects as listed above, it localizes to the left angular gyrus [12](picture) Complex mental tasks, even those as seemingly simple as naming and calculation involve many areas of brain that are all necessary for the completion of the act. Each of these areas do not perform a function that is sufficient in and of itself, nor is it specifically involved in doing the function in question, say to name or to calculate. An area of brain, if lesioned, may impair a certain function. Yet it is rarely possible to connect that particular cognitive function specifically to that area. The most you can say is that particular area is necessary for the performance of that function, not that it alone is totally responsible for performing it.

Cognitive functions are characteristically composite in this way, that is, they involve putting together simple tasks into a complex whole. The brain usually parses out each simple function to a specific zone. Therefore each of these possibly disparate zones may in fact be responsible for a deficit that we see when we examine the patient. The classic examples are with calculation as shown above where a simple spatial problem such as space holding may impair the function and that is localized to the parietal lobe, or there may be a problem translating numbers linguistically that has to do with the language areas of the brain and either of these two simple deficits is sufficient to cause the larger deficit of acalculia because each is a necessary prerequisite to calculations. Another classic example is with naming, i.e. anomia. In order to name an object you have to have some visual recognition which implicates the visual areas, ie the occipital lobe and connecting parietal lobe, and you have to somehow connect the language area of the brain with the visualized object, this involves white matter connections from the visual to language areas, and even after the language to visual connection is made, you still have to find the right word which involves in the language area choosing from a vocabulary repertoire of nouns from memory banks and then in Broca’s area of the brain, making the sound, either saying it or writing it. If any of these links is broken, the subject will seem to have an anomia. The clinician’s skill is in further localizing the deficit which is almost always done on the basis of accompanying deficits. For example a subject with anomia who has a visual deficit will have his lesion localized to the parietal or occipital lobes whereas an anomia that associates with a decreased speech production in general is located in the frontal lobe, near Broca’s area. Hence for brain localization we depend on the concurrence of more than one, hopefully two or even three deficits. A single task especially a composite task, often involves disparate areas that are each responsible for simpler functions but each is a link in the chain which is broken, a lesion in any of a number or areas will result in the single deficit.

Psychologists and neurologists too typically find certain deficits on behavioral test or on examination. On the basis of these problems they try to find a diseased area of the brain. A patient with a Broca (motor) aphasia is supposed to have a problem in the inferior posterior frontal lobe (Broca’s area). Usually we are correct when we try to localize problems in this way. Aphasias or brain-related disorders in handling language, are the easiest cognitive deficits of all to precisely localize. With a proper analysis of the specific dysfunction, the clinical impression of a lesion correlate very well with what is seen on a CT or an MRI scan. In a few instances we may find a patient with a Broca type aphasia does not have a lesion where we expect it, in Broca’s area but somewhere else, often in the deeper part of the left hemisphere or even in the thalamus and we are often wrong, because there are a number of other brain areas that are necessary for the performance of the function and any of these might be responsible. However we do a lot better when we identify a combination of problems as these localize to specific areas of brain most precisely. What if we have a Broca Aphasia and right sided weakness? Then we know where the problem must be, in the Left frontal lobe. It’s a lot like localizing with one coordinate compared with triangulation which is a lot more precise. For this reason one might in fact achieve deficit triangulation. A lesion in the brain is most like a radio transmission that is best localized along more than one axis. These axes in space are the specific deficits. Even a seemingly simple classic deficit such as naming turns out to be a composite function involving a number of brain regions.

It is most fascinating to compare changes in personality with alterations in the brain. Here we have to keep in mind how personality is on even a higher level of abstraction than even cognitive cerebral functions. Not only is the topic in question composite, culling together multiple brain areas but also there are much more subtle problems in recognition of a personality change. We are talking about seeing human patterns of response or characteristic style of response that each of us has to specific sets of like situations. How does a person characteristically respond to stress, for example? Does he worry and perhaps become immobile and withdraw, or is he a person who takes action. This requires at the very least, repetitive periods of observation before a conclusion can be drawn, or perhaps at the very least, self report.