The marsh is covered with diamonds this morning from a deep overnight freeze, and the wind has shifted to its winter habit of blowing steadily right down the Dyer River into my face as I head for the back door. The winter is a very complicated time of year around here, which you can experience best if you resist the temptation to dart from car to house. Even in his black hoodie, little Jimmy the pup has become deeply committed to his indoor puppy pads.
The beauty and mystery of nature’s astonishing complexity are part of what drives me to resist over-simplification of the world around us. There is an unfortunate tendency of some in the science-industry-media complex to promote abridged versions of our experience. Very intricate processes are reduced to obvious little chains of cause and effect. For some, mystery is a temporary problem to be solved (“just one more grant will do it”), while complexity is addressed by sufficient distance to let us see only the important stuff, without the confusion of detail.
Genetics is still is the grip of such over-confident reducers. We’ve been told all about the little machines in our bodies, and how they work like switches, turned off or on, producing predictable effects. We had the “gay gene,” we had various genes for breast cancer. We have genes – now I’m getting close to home – for the illness that killed my wife.
Except, not really. What we have is the creation of an expensive test that lets us see if a certain configuration of amino acids is present. Then we have statistical correlations – often really weak ones - with something in the world to that chain. Weak or not, we sometimes act on those statistics.
Let me give you an example. I have a little gizmo taped to the inside of my mailbox door that sounds a buzzer in my kitchen when the gizmo is moved vertically. Somewhere in the world, a set of computers runs a program that sorts through received data and causes a machine to print out a bill from Central Maine Power. The machine gets the bill into the mail system. When Glenn comes by with my mail and opens the mailbox, the gizmo sets off the buzzer. I get the mail, sit down at my computer with the bills, log onto my credit union account, and pay Central Maine Power for the electricity that runs the mailbox buzzer and my computer.
In the World of Jimmy, every afternoon there’s an sensational sound that causes The Master to go out the front door. Then the sound happens again and then The Master comes back in the door. This is an immensely loud and exciting time, involving much racing around and tail wagging. Jimmy would go on public television I’m sure, and tell his pup audience all about the noise that makes The Master go and come back, and pat Jimmy on the head.
Aside from my discomfort with bad science, greedy technology and idiotic television, I think we run some real risks and sometimes palatable harm from reductionism: the condensation of unknowns into owned knowns. We’re going to look at this problem some more using neuroimaging as an example – how taking pictures of blood flow inside people’s heads results in some people narrating the worlds of physiology, psychology, philosophy and even religion.