Our Neurogenetic Archives: A Few Notes

I have a guitar student, and she had a high school assignment to write on John Locke and was worried. I piped up, unwisely: "Ask me anything about John Locke! I'm here to help ya!" She had the vaguest notion of what Locke was up to, but she did know he influenced the risk-takers and revolutionaries who established Unistat. I told her Locke has been shown to be pretty far-wrong with his notion of our minds at birth as tabula rasa. Already, I had lost her.

But aye...I think the jury has come in with a unanimous decision on this: we come equipped, fully loaded. For presumably many but not all imaginable things. This has been established, in historical time, a few seconds ago. Or say 1950-now.

But to what extent are we loaded? Is it only activated with experience in-the-world, with language, with education? Certainly we inherit a shuffled deck of genes from mom and dad. Is that it?

(Aside: this genetic inheritance, modified by drugs, learning, changes in environment, bombardment by cosmic rays, alterations in diet, etc: this is my best unpacking of "Plato's Problem" as mentioned briefly in the review of Knight's book on Chomsky, below.)

In his lecture after winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968, Marshall Nirenberg talked about "genetic memories." Well of course, our genes can be said to have "memories" in a certain metaphorical sense, but details about this metaphorical sense? As I tried to read his lecture (quite technical...but it turns out Nirenberg was wrong about "nonsense codons"!), I can't get a line on it. He's certainly not going off about how the Akashic Records were "right after all!" or anything like that. Nirenberg gets as close to mentioning the astral plane as Keanu Reeves gets to winning Best Actor.

But that was way back in 1968.

Since then, there's been an explosion of knowledge about epigenetics: it turns out experience-in-the-world of our immediate forebears does have influence on our genes/lives. Poverty has been linked to epigenetic changes and mental illness, for example. Epigenetics is the study of how genes get expressed, and the more I read about it the more my head spins. RNA has much ado about gene expression. It's not merely a "messenger," as many of us were told in skool. Some genes get turned on or off like a binary light switch; others get modulated like a rheostat, gradually becoming more and brighter, or less and dimmer.

Here's another example from the past year: the methylation of the genes coding for the hormone oxytocin - a hormone linked to nurturing, trust and social skills - can get taxed by intense emotional experiences. What a wonderful example of the new reality of understanding biology: a gene that helps us do very important things such as falling in love with baby as soon as she is born? It's processed in the brain, like a drug. (Hell: I see oxytocin as one of the more interesting endogenous drugs we have, and we can synthesize it too!) This hormone/drug, via social interaction in the world, affects our behavior, and the social world/environmental feedback can alter the expression of the gene. This circular-causal feedback looping of nature/nurture ---> nature/nurture, ad infinitum, till death do us part - seems like a microcosm of how Everything works. (And remember: then the epigenetic effects can get inherited by the next generation, via what happened historically in the environment, and just, wow. So: death is not the end of our story. We're connected in ways we didn't know before.)

Gosh dad!: Father may pass down more than his genes: his life experience too?
Oh, my: a bad night's sleep can epigenetically alter your genes.
Our genetic cups runneth over: epigenetic drugs are in the works.
Not fair: Study of Holocaust survivors show trauma passed on to children's genes.

Think of how all this impacts the roiling and boiling issue of income inequality...

There's plenty more where that came in. A fine readable book for non-specialists that I can point to 'cuz I read it and was enthralled: Nessa Carey's The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance

Combine this with a few books on the new synthetic biology, CRISPR techniques, and what the hell: quantum computing and ye head shall be spaghettified.

But back to the neurogenetic archives. They seem to have some ontological status outside the drawing room where the Theosophical expert waxes on about past lives. But to what degree?

Darold Treffert is a psychiatrist who's been studying savants and autistic people with extraordinary abilities in some domain of life. He's been at it for many decades. He became personal friends with Kim Peek, the person "Rain Man" was based on (though that character was a composite of many savants, says Treffert). In the beginning he was a traditional scientist who read Jung and thought it wasn't science: too soft. Now he thinks Jung was on to something; he thinks we may have genetic memories of things experienced in the past by others whom we often cannot identify. See his two books (mentioned in the text linked to) and give us a better explanation.

How wild this is! We can inherit knowledge? We can get bashed in the head and suddenly write symphonies, when before we couldn't even carry a tune? (Being somewhat conservative in certain areas, I'd rather not get my head bashed in and instead risk continuance of not being a genius.) Treffert says we inhabit a metaphorically left-brain (linear, rational) society; maybe activate latent abilities by spending more time doing what the Kulchur is telling us as "wasting time": doing art. (Here's yet another argument for Basic Income?)

Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson have a collectively dizzyingly rich series of speculations on neurogenetic memory, based on their reading in genetics, mythology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and literature; they scattered their ideas throughout their many books, and I'd point to Leary's Info-Pyschology and Wilson's Prometheus Rising for starters...

David Foster Wallace, in an essay on David Lynch collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, riffs on our topic, saying our internal impressions and moods are, "An olla podrida of neurogenetic predisposition and phylogenetic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop culture iconography." (p.199 in my copy) I hadda look up "olla podrida."

Well, now I said to myself, "I think I write too much for this texting world. I'll try to make this OG spew a short one," and so I'll end with a quote from my favorite cognitive neurolinguist, George Lakoff:

"When we understand all that constitutes the cognitive unconscious, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is vastly enlarged. Consciousness goes way beyond mere awareness of something, beyond the mere experience of qualia, beyond the awareness that you are aware, and beyond the multiple takes on immediate experience provided by various centers of the brain. Consciousness certainly involves all of the above, plus the immeasurably vast constitutive framework provided by the cognitive unconscious, which must be operating for us to be aware of anything at all."
Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, p.11

Thanks for bringing your immeasurably vast constitutive framework of your cognitive unconscious to the OG: see ya!

                                      художник Боббі Кемпбелл зробив цю графіку для мене

Moral and Political Thought

Picking up where I left off the last: This business of hardwired political views as a new science is, as they say in Hollywood, "blowing up;" it's becoming a big deal. The metaphor "hardwired" ought to be looked at for a second: does our moral and political behavior really work as if someone had spot-welded all the parts together, with no going back and unplugging these wires from over here, plugging those in there, soldering a new cable into a jack bought at the parts store because a component was discovered that would access other systems was spied in the manual, etc? No changes can occur? It's a "done deal" at some point?

Well, apparently lots of scientists would like us to think so. There's the Grail of isolating the one gene, or a cluster of genes, that would sure enough predict that your two-year-old would indeed grow up to read Noam Chomsky...or Ann Coulter. In Sasha Issenberg's piece I linked to above, a political strategist reads some new Psychology books and decides he'll help his candidate by focusing ads based on "thinkers" versus "feelers." Haidt says most of our political "thinking" is "moral instinct papered over," and what a good writer Haidt is! It's lines like that that get people persuaded you're really onto something. And maybe he is. A quick diversion:

In a previous blogspew on Jonathan Haidt, I linked to his YourMorals.org test. Here's another test, called Political Compass. It's much shorter than the battery Haidt's colleagues want you to take, and one of its main purposes is to get you out of thinking on the dumb Euclidean line of
Left<-----------Centrist------->Right; it's more 3-D-ish, and it's HERE if you wanna take it. I think it gives a certain snapshot of who you are politically, and by association, morally. I've taken the test three times now, most recently within 72 hours of my writing this. HERE's my result. I'm a "left libertarian." A quite pronounced one, it seems.

Robert Anton Wilson explains the Dumb Game of Left-Right Euclidean politics in a way no one else I've ever seen come close. [Thanks to the guys at rawilsonfans.org.]

Haidt says he wrote The Righteous Mind not to try to convince anyone to switch their allegiances, but to try and understand the Other better, and possibly minimize the hate. (His name rhymes with "fight," not "fate," as I've been listening to people talk about him lately.) I liked the last two paragraphs of Jonathan Ree's pithy review in The New Humanist. The most I can implement from this book, I take it, is to use George Lakoff's framing techniques to talk about Authority, Sanctity, and Loyalty in a way that might catch the ear of a "conservative." I'll get back to Haidt in a moment, but I was talking about genes and morality...

I think we can safely agree that we have a reflex for self-flattery, that emotions do rule, that our reasoning is like a lawyer's trying to win a case. And of course our political ideas are NOT totally deliberative. I do think environment and experience and learning all contribute, especially if one has tested one's own presumptions many times. I've done it. I've read National Review. I read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. I once had a job where I was offered a transfer to another library branch, one in a very beautiful and wealthy section of Los Angeles, where most of the patrons I'd meet would be old, very wealthy Republicans. I had very long hair and thought I'd try testing myself here - I'm pretty sure I was a left-libertarian then too - and I was prepared to experience lots of nastiness. But after a few years, I really liked most of the patrons, and they were very sweet to me. Some were obviously very conservative, but they asked me questions about politics and I gave them my honest takes, and they respected me.

I'd say about 8-12% of the patrons I ran into there were the classic mean, pinched, bitter, evil, ugly rich old white people. Most were surprisingly, delightfully pleasant. This opened my eyes. It didn't change my politics much though.

                                  William Irwin Thompson. "The history of the soul is always
                                  the history of the voiceless, the oppressed, the repressed."
                                  Photo by Michael Laporte

But do I think genes will explain all this? No, despite NYU psychologist Ned Jost's findings in the "The End of the End of Ideology" paper, mentioned in Issenberg's excellent overview article. Indeed, read the section on Jost's work and see if it doesn't look isomorphic to the Rattray-Taylor oral/anal lists I gave in my previous blogpost. Jost: We're not divided by class, geography or education so much as by temperament. 


Temperament. O! How I urge you, Dear Reader, if you haven't already, to read the first lecture in William James's Eight Lectures on Pragmatism. If Haidt and his data-set don't come off as "tender-minded," then you weren't paying attention.

It seems the search for a genetic substrate that will explain macro-world phenomena gets you funding. It allows scientists to do what they really want to do: wake up in the morning and go to work to solve some problem of some sort. If their hypotheses don't work out the way they had envisioned, they write that up anyway: it's still good science: if we thought it worked this way, we were probably wrong. Meanwhile, jobs and knowledge were created. And though searching genomes and testing genes has gotten much cheaper over just the past year or so, it's still heady stuff. It's creative work, too. Get the ideas. Figure out how to test them. Figure out how to test your test. It's brainy stuff, aye.

But I remember the great generalist and one-time M.I.T. lecturer William Irwin Thompson - who dropped out of academia - saying about hardcore sociobiology something along the lines that it's sheer bullshit to say you're going to find a gene to be an auto-mechanic. You say morality and a political bend is more "basic" than something as particular as Thompson's reductio ad absurdum? You're probably right, but do we realize how dizzyingly complex "genes" are? If you try to keep up with this stuff, it seems like it's getting to be like particle physics. Or worse. It may be even more complex than that, especially if we take into account epigenetics, where RNA plays a much bigger part than we'd imagined. It's not just DNA sending RNA "the" message to other genes to make proteins z, q and x3. That was the older, simpler days. Now the environment has genes and RNA-DNA feeding back in ways we didn't guess, hopping genes, "junk DNA" that is turning out to not be so junky...I mean check out this recent article, "Chromosomes Organize Into 'Yarns': May Explain Why DNA Mutations Can Effect Genes Located Thousands of Base-Pairs Away," from a few days ago.

Although why I'm some left-libertarian socialist and those who love Fox News are decidedly...<cough> not, and I find their morality, extrapolated/writ large as basically stupid, devolutionary, and sadistic, I don't really know why I'm like this. One parent was staunchly Democrat. Another a Republican who never really got into the Issues. I have a sibling who went from extreme Right Wing Christian born-again Evangelical to a sort of New Church, Jesus said to heal the sick and feed the poor leftist Christian. Most of the other immediate family members aren't very political, although if they are, it's right wing authoritarian stuff.

Ultimately, it's genes, something like ethological "imprinting," family upbringing, peer group at puberty, geography, historical moment, accidents like meeting a very influential person at one point or another when you're vulnerable to some sort of change, and...more accidents and happenstance. Genes? Yes. And probably a bunch of stuff we have only the slightest inklings about. Here's one we've just begun to really gain deeper understandings about:

There's a neuroeconomist named Paul Zak. He wondered about how economies are effected by the human action of "trust," which seemed kind of nebulous to me. He thought - and it made sense to me - that the more trust, the better the economy works. Here's a short article on the "trust hormone" that we make endogenously and secrete when we make eye contact, hug, smile at each other, fall in love, etc. The video of Zak is about 3 minutes long. So add to all the factors above: hormones.

                                        Neuroeconomist and "Dr. Love," Paul Zak

Finally, back to Jonathan Haidt. In my understanding of the world to date, there are some people who, like Oscar Wilde, thought/think that obedience to authority was the Original Sin. In modern terms, these people have often transcended the socio-sexual Hive Morality and experienced neurosomatic bliss, then showed others how to do it. We got the Sexual Revolution from these people, largely. And I see that movement as still going strong, still playing out on the stage, at least in the West. When Authoritarian Men try to roll back gains women had made, even subject them to sexual humiliation, I think it's largely because women have made so many gains. Women are doing well, relative to men, at least in Unistat. By 2019 they will probably make up at least 60% of all graduate students. And they will continue to do well. As well they should. They aren't hurting men by doing well. But a small, loudmouthed, fairly fascistic set of men are responding to the changes - probably mostly unconscious of the deeper reasons why: their fear of losing Control - so they are making themselves very busy right now, shooting every toe on each foot, one by one...

                                                         Oscar Wilde: Heretic

Those who transcend Hive Morality - cranks, neophiles, inventors, deviates, heretics - drive human evolution. The drag on cultural evolution - the Authoritarians, the inflexible Loyalists, the Sanctimonious about some Angry God they've projected from within themselves onto the rest of us: they are most of the Church, most of the Politicians and Legislators ("Well...let's look at precedent!"), and Mammon-worshippers. They're nationalists, often racists and small-minded loudmouths who say they're for individual liberty but do quite something else. These are the drags on progress. Haidt thinks they deserve to be understood by "liberals" because these people - the guardians of Hive Morality - don't want things to change, because it represents a threat to their status in the primate hierarchy.

Given my political bend, no wonder Haidt's equal Big Six doesn't wash with me.