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RE: interesting reading

Posted by geoffkait on April 2, 2011 at 05:18:45

In Reply to: interesting reading posted by unclestu on March 31, 2011 at 15:27:36:

From a review of O.E Wilson's book, Consilience:

"As to the logical error, even if a particular behavior were universal, there are alternative explanations to its having a genetic basis. In fact,even if a trait is biological it is not necessarily the result of direct lines of genetic inheritance. There is a phenomenon, well known to biologists, undoubtedly including Wilson, called evolutionary convergence."

"Convergence is illustrated, for example, by the variety of relatively unrelated species that can fly. These include birds, insects, and bats. Since these species do not have a common flying evolutionary ancestor, the fact that they all fly cannot be the result of common genetic inheritance, but rather that similar environmental conditions sometimes allow the evolution of similarly adapted features. And this evolution can happen independently many times in various evolutionary branches. Furthermore, on rare occasions even sheer coincidence can play a role, since chance and causality are both aspects of nature."

"Similarly for human behaviors, such as fear of snakes. This fear (wherever it exists) can just as easily be explained as a response learned as a result of repeated experience with harmful snakes in one society after another. It is logically flawed to imply, as Wilson does, that the only possible (or even most likely) explanation for a widespread (or even universal) human behavior is that it is genetically inherited. But this implication constitutes the main thrust of his speculative assertions and faulty logic throughout the book."

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It appears that many great thinkers, including E.O. Wilson, conclude human and animal behaviors can be explained by the simple sonclusion, "it's in the genes." Can I suggest this conclusion is simply a cop out; much deeper explanations for human and animal patterns of behavior, things that are usually referred to by biological scientists as "instinctive" or "inherited in the genes," can be found in the theories of Rupert Sheldrake, PhD Biology, Cambridge, the most controversial yet convincing layout of his theory of morphic resonance and the especially the influence of human evolution on the brain and behavior being, of course, The Presence of the Past. While pretending to be Unification Theory of multi scientific disciplines, the O.E. Wilson book actually gets us no further than what can best be described as the conventional wisdom, the explanation that is easily accepted by the ordinary man: "It's in the genes."

Better and deeper theses of the operation of the mind are also presented in Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind and the works of David Bohm, a student of Oppenheimer.

University of London physicist David Bohm (1917-94) developed the theory that our universe consists of physical and metaphysical (= spiritual/divine/God/etheric/astral etc - whichever term you prefer) dimensions which are interwoven. This is hard enough to accept when we are accustomed to regarding our sensory physical experience of the world as being "it" i.e. being a complete and objective experience of reality.

However, Bohm went even further. He proposed that each small unit of the weave of the universe contains all the information possessed by the entire universe. This would be really hard to swallow except for what we know about holograms. If a hologram of a flower is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half still contains the entire image of the flower. If the cut halves are cut are cut up into smaller pieces, each tiny piece of the holographic film will always contain a smaller, but complete, version of the original whole flower image.

Edits: 04/02/11 04/02/11

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