The Delusions of Certainty

  16. Princess Elisabeth to Descartes, June 10, 1643, The Hague, in The Correspondence between René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, trans. Lisa Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 68.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Giambattista Vico, The New Science: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the Addition of “Practic of the New Science,” trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 331.

  19. Ibid., 338.

  20. Ibid., 311.

  21. René Descartes, quoted in Geneviève Rodin-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 6.

  22. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 10.

  23. “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression,” WebMD, www.webmd.com/depression/guide/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-for-depression.

  24. John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science: 1984 Reith Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 17.

  25. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 55.

  26. Ibid., 17.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Eva-Maria Simms, “Goethe, Husserl, and the Crisis of the European Sciences,” Janus Head 8 (2005): 166.

  29. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4.

  30. Ibid., 5.

  31. Katherine Brooks, “It Turns Out Your Brain Might Be Wired to Enjoy Art, So You Have No Excuses,” The Huffington Post, last modified June 20, 2014 www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/20/brain-and-art_n_5513144.html; Megan Erickson, “Is the Human Brain Hardwired for God?” Big Think, bigthink.com/think-tank/is-the-human-brain-hardwired-for-religion; “Male and Female Brains Wired Differently, Scans Reveal,” The Guardian, December 2, 2013.

  32. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 23.

  33. Ibid.

  34. See Petter Portim, “Historical Development of the Concept of the Gene,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27, no. 3 (2002): 257–86.

  35. “Without the highly structured cellular environment which is itself not constructed by DNA, DNA is inert, relatively unstructured, non-functional and so not ontogenetically meaningful.” Jason Scott Robert, Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52.

  36. “We have learned, for instance, that the causal interactions between DNA, proteins, and trait development are so entangled, so dynamic, and so dependent on context that the very question of what genes do no longer makes much sense.” Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, 50.

  37. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press), 158.

  38. Ibid., vii.

  39. C. H. Waddington, “The Basic Ideas of Biology,” in Towards a Theoretical Biology, vol. 1, ed. C. H. Waddington (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968), 1–32.

  40. “By extending Waddington’s epigenetic landscape metaphor . . . we can appreciate that an epigenetic landscape underlies each level of organismal organization.” Heather A. Jamniczky et al., “Rediscovering Waddington in a Post-Genomic Age: Operationalizing Waddington’s Epigenetics Reveals New Ways to Investigate the Generation and Modulation of Phenotypic Variation,” Bioessays 32, iss. 7 (2010): 553–58.

  41. Michael Meaney, “Environmental Programming of Stress Responses Through DNA Methylation: Life at the Interface Between a Dynamic Environment and a Fixed Genome,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 7 (2005): 103–23.

  42. François Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 9.

  43. Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 6.

  44. Siri Hustvedt, “Borderlands,” in American Lives (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2013), 111–35.

  45. John Dowling, The Great Brain Debate: Nature or Nurture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 85.

  46. Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The Practical Science of Reshaping Your Brain (New York: Harmony, 2013). Although the book’s text is identical, Hanson’s subtitle changed at some point between its publication and June 2015; Hardwiring Happiness acquired the far less bold subtitle The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. Whether this was due to criticism of the notion of “reshaping” one’s own brain, I have no idea, but it is a plausible explanation.

  47. Laurence Tancredi, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals About Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 29.

  48. Ibid.

  49. David Derbyshire, “Scientists Discover Moral Compass in the Brain Which Can Be Controlled by Magnets,” The Daily Mail, last modified March 30, 2010, www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1262074/Scientists-discover-moral-compass-brain-controlled-magnets.html. The article describes a study at MIT. After transcranial magnetic stimulation (a noninvasive stimulus) was applied to the subjects in the study, their moral judgments were altered. See Liane Young et al., “Disruption of the Right Temporoparietal Junction with Transcranial Stimulation Reduces the Role of Beliefs in Moral Judgments,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no.15 (2010): 6753–58.

  50. For the role of the temporo-parietal junction in perception and attention, see L. C. Robertson, M. R. Lamb, and R. T. Knight, “Effects of Lesions of Temporo-Parietal Junction on Perceptual and Attentional Processing in Humans,” The Journal of Neuroscience 8 (1988): 3757–69; Johannes Rennig et al., “The Temporo-Parietal Junction Contributes to Global Gestalt Perception—Evidence from Studies in Chess Experts,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 513. For RTPJ and memory, see J. J. Todd, D. Fougnie, and R. Marois, “Visual Short-Term Memory Load Suppresses Temporo-Parietal Junction Activity and Induces Inattentional Blindness,” Psychological Science 12 (2005): 965–72. For its role in self-other relations, see Jean Decety and Claus Lamm, “The Role of the Right Temporoparietal Junction in Social Interaction: How Low-level Computational Processes Contribute to Metacognition,” The Neuroscientist 13, no. 6 (2007): 580–93. See also Sophie Sowden and Caroline Catmur, “The Role of the Temporoparietal Junction in the Control of Imitation,” Cerebral Cortex (2013), doi: 10.1093/cercor/bht306. For theory of mind, see R. Saxe and A. Wechsler, “Making Sense of Another Mind: The Role of the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction,” Neuropsychologia 43, no. 10 (2005): 1391–99. In a later paper, however, an author questions whether “theory of mind” can be localized: J. P. Mitchell, “Activity in Right Temporo-Parietal Junction Is Not Selective for Theory of Mind,” Cerebral Cortex 18, no. 2 (2008): 262–71. In hysteria or conversion disorder, there is evidence that the RTPJ is less active or hypoactive; see V. Voon et al., “The Involuntary Nature of Conversion Disorder,” Neurology 74, no. 3 (2010): 223–28. Finally, the temporo-parietal junction has been implicated in out-of-body experiences. It is hypothesized that this experience may be the result of a person’s failure to integrate multiple-sensory information about his or her body state in the TPJ. See O. Blanke and S. Arzy, “The Out of Body Experience: Disturbed Self-Processing at the Temporo-Parietal Junction,” Neuroscientist 11 (2005): 16–24.

  51. The role of memory in Broca’s area remains controversial. Some scientists believe it plays a role in working memory and others don’t. See C. J. Fiebach et al., “Revisiting the Role of Broca’s Area in Sentence Processing: Syntactic Processing Versus Syntactic Working Memory,” Human Brain Mapping 24 (2005): 79–91. For its role in music, see L. Fadiga, L. Craighero, and A. D’Ausilio, “Broca’s Area in Language, Action, and Music,” The Neurosciences and Music III—Disorders and Plasticity 1169 (2009): 448–58. See also Ferdinand Binkovski and Giovanni Buccino, “Motor Functions of Broca’s Region,” Brain and Lang
uage 89 (2004): 362–69, as well as Emeline Clerget, Aline Winderickx, Luciano Fadiga, and Etienne Olivier, “Role of Broca’s Area in Encoding Sequential Human Actions: A Virtual Lesson Study,” Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology 20 (2009): 1496–99.

  52. John Hughlings Jackson, “On Aphasia and Affections of Speech,” in Brain: A Journal of Neurology 38, ed. Henry Head (New York: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1915), 81.

  53. Karl Friston, “Functional and Effective Connectivity: A Review,” Brain Connectivity 1, no. 1 (2011): 13.

  54. Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, Higher Cortical Functions in Man, 2nd ed., trans. Basil Haigh (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 20.

  55. Ibid.

  56. For a recent paper on the subject, see Eve G. Spratt et al., “The Effects of Early Neglect on Cognitive, Language, and Behavioral Functioning in Childhood,” Psychology 3, no. 2 (2012): 175–82.

  57. Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 140.

  58. Ibid., 141.

  59. M. Nitsche et al., “Dopaminergic Impact on Neuroplasticity in Humans: The Importance of Balance,” Klinische Neurophysologie 40, doi:1055/s-0029-1216062.

  60. See Oliver D. Howes and Shitij Kapur, “The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia: Version III—The Final Common Pathway,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 35, no. 3 (2009): 549–62. The authors point out that there is strong evidence that no single gene is involved in schizophrenia, and it has been linked to environmental factors including social isolation: “While further work is clearly needed to investigate the nature and extent of all these possible interactions, the evidence indicates that many disparate, direct and indirect environmental and genetic, factors may lead to dopamine dysfunction and that some occur independently while others interact.” They also write, “Because so much is unknown, it is a given that the hypothesis will be revised as more data become available.” For glutamate research, see Bita Moghaddam and Daniel Javitt, “From Revolution to Evolution: The Glutamate Hypothesis of Schizophrenia and Its Implication for Treatment,” Neuropsychoparamacology 37, no. 1 (2012): 4–15. For serotonin research, see Herbert Y. Meltzer et al., “Serotonin Receptors: Their Key Role in Drugs to Treat Schizophrenia,” Progress in Neuro-Pharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 27, no. 7 (2003): 1159–72. And for a follow-up to suspicions about birth trauma, see P. B. Jones et al., “Schizophrenia as a Long-Term Outcome of Pregnancy, Delivery, and Perinatal Complications: A 28-Year Follow Up of the 1966 North Finland General Population Birth Cohort,” American Journal of Psychiatry 155, no. 3 (1998): 355–64. For the involvement of the insula, see Korey P. Wylie and Jason R. Tregallas, “The Role of the Insula in Schizoprenia,” Schizophrenia Research 123, nos. 2–3 (2010): 93–104. For gray matter loss, see A. Vita et al., “Progressive Loss of Cortical Gray Matter in Schizophrenia: A Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression of Longitudinal MRI Studies,” Translational Psychiatry 2 (2012), doi: 10.1038/tp.2012.116.

  61. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 2009), 449.

  62. Ibid., 448.

  63. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 350.

  64. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Summers is cited as having said that “the evidence for his speculative hypothesis that biological differences may partially account for this gender gap comes instead from scholars cited in Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker’s best-selling 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.” Daniel J. Hemel, “Sociologist Cited by Summers Calls His Talk ‘Uninformed,’ ” The Harvard Crimson, January 19, 2005, www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/19/sociologist-cited-by-summers-calls-his.

  65. Larry Summers, “Remarks at NEBR Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” January 14, 2005, www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php.

  66. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1st ed., 1871), 316–17.

  67. Angus J. Bateman, “Intrasexual Selection in Drosophila,” Heredity 2 (1948): 363.

  68. Ibid., 365.

  69. Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man: 1871–1971, ed. Bernard Campbell (Chicago: Aldine, 1972): 136–81.

  70. Patricia Adair Gowaty, Yong-Kyu Kim, and Wyatt W. Anderson, “No Evidence of Sexual Selection in a Repetition of Bateman’s Classic Study of Drosophila Melanogaster,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2012): 11740–45, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1207851109. The authors note, “However, bias in the methodology is obvious in that mothers were statistically significantly less often counted as parents than fathers, a biological impossibility in diploid sexual species.”

  71. Patricia Adair Gowaty and William C. Bridges, “Behavioral, Demographic, and Environmental Correlates of Extra Pair Copulations in Eastern Bluebirds, Scialia sialis,” Behavioral Ecology 2 (1991): 339–50.

  72. Russell Bonduriansky and Ronald J. Brooks, “Male Antler Flies (Protopiophila litigate; Diptera: Piophilidae) Are More Selective Than Females in Mate Choice,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 76 (1998): 1277–85.

  73. Elisabet Forsgren, Trond Amundsen, Asa A. Borg, and Jens Bjelvenmark, “Unusually Dynamic Sex Roles in Fish,” Nature 429 (2004): 551–54.

  74. Robert R. Warner, D. Ross Robertsen, and Egbert Leigh, Jr., “Sex Change and Sexual Selection: The Reproductive Biology of a Labrid Fish Is Used to Illuminate Theory of Sex Change,” Science 190, no. 4215 (1975): 633–38.

  75. Marcel Eens and Rianne Pinxten, “Sex Role Reversal in Vertebrates: Behavioral and Endocrinological Accounts,” Behavioral Processes 51 (2000): 135–47.

  76. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female,” in Feminist Approaches to Science, ed. Ruth Bleier (New York: Pergamon Press, 1986), 137.

  77. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

  78. Michel Ohmer, “Challenging Sexual Selection Theory: The Baby Became the Bathwater Years Ago, but No One Noticed Until Now,” Discoveries: John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, no. 9 (Spring 2008): 16.

  79. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Concerning the Perceptions,” in General Treatise on Physiological Optics (1910), vol. 3, ed. James P. C. Southall (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962), 5.

  80. Peggy Seriès and Aaron Seitz, “Learning What to Expect (in Visual Perception),” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 24 (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00668. The authors advocate an approach to expectation through Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference and Bayesian statistical inference.

  81. William Wright, Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality (New York: Knopf, 1998), 80.

  82. Genetics and Human Behavior: the Ethical Context (London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2002), 41.

  83. Héctor González-Pardo and Marino Pérez Alvarez, “Epigenetics and Its Implications for Psychology,” Psicothema 25, no. 1 (2013): 5.

  84. Bella English, “Led by the Child Who Simply Knew,” The Boston Globe, December 11, 2011.

  85. Myrtle McGraw, “The Experimental Twins,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment: Myrtle McGraw and the Maturation Controversy, ed. Thomas C. Dalton and Victor W. Bergman (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 110.

  86. Myrtle McGraw, “Perspectives of Infancy and Early Childhood,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 47.

  87. Quoted in Donald A. Dewsbury, “Introduction: The Developmental Psychobiology of Myrtle McGraw,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 213.

  88. Ibid.

  89. Paul Dennis, “Introduction: Johnny and Jimmy and the Maturation Controversy: Popularization, Misunderstanding and Setting the Record Straight,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 75.

  90. Dr. Langford, quoted in Myrtle McGraw, “Later Development of Children Specially Trained During Infancy: Johnny and Jimmy at School Age,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 94.

&n
bsp; 91. Ibid., 98.

  92. Stephen M. Downes, “Heritability,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2015 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, forthcoming, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/heredity/.

  93. Jeremy C. Ahouse and Robert Berwick, “Darwin on the Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Is in Fashion—But Is Any of It True?” Boston Review, April/May 1998.

  94. Letter to the editor, New York Times, January 1, 2015.

  95. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 347.

  96. Ibid., 348.

  97. Richard Lynn, “Sorry, Men ARE More Brainy than Women (and More Stupid Too!) It’s a Simple Scientific Fact, Says One of Britain’s Top Dons,” Daily Mail, May 8, 2010.

  98. Scott H. Liening and Robert A. Josephs, “It Is Not Just About Testosterone: Physiological Mediators and Moderations of Testosterone’s Behavioral Effects,” Social and Personality Compass 4, no. 11 (2010): 983.

  99. For these findings, discussion, and numerous other studies, see Stephen Peter Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009): 81–98.

  100. David M. Stoff and Robert B. Cairns, ed., Aggression and Violence: Genetic, Neurobiological, and Biosocial Perspective (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 317.

  101. Jordan W. Finkelstein et al., “Estrogen or Testosterone Increases Self-Reported Aggressive Behaviors in Hypogonadal Adolescents,” Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism 82, no. 8 (1997): 2433–38. See also J. Martin Ramirez, “Hormones and Aggression in Childhood,” Aggression and Violent Behaviors 8 (2003): 621–44.

  102. Cristoph Eisenegger et al., “Prejudice and Truth About the Effect of Testosterone on Human Bargaining Behavior,” Nature 463 (2010): 356–59. For an account of hormones and their ideological uses in science, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Men and Women. (New York: Basic Books, 1982). For a critique of sex difference in brain studies, see Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).