Every revolution has its origins in the past, and the revolution that culminated in the new science of mind is no exception. Although the central role of biology in the study of mental processes was new, the ability of biology to influence the way we see ourselves was not. In the nineteenth century Charles Darwin argued that we are not uniquely created, but rather evolved gradually from lower animal ancestors; moreover, he held, all life can be traced back to a common ancestor, all the way back to the creation of life itself. He proposed the even more daring idea that evolutions driving force is not conscious, intelligent, or divine purpose, but a 'blind' process of natural selection, a completely mechanistic sorting process of random trial and error based on hereditary variations.
Darwins ideas directly challenged the teaching of most religions. Since biologys original purpose had been to explain the divine design of nature, his ideas rent the historic bond between religion and biology. Eventually, modern biology would ask us to believe that living beings, in all their beauty and infinite variety, are merely the products of ever new combinations of nucleotide bases, the building blocks of DNAs genetic code. These combinations have been selected for over millions of years by organisms struggle for survival and reproductive success.
The new biology of mind is potentially more disturbing because it suggests that not only the body, but also the mind and the specific molecules that underlie our highest mental processes, consciousness of self and of others, consciousness of the past and the future, have evolved from our animal ancestors. Furthermore, the new biology posits that consciousness is a biological process that will eventually be explained in terms of molecular signalling pathways used by interacting populations of nerve cells.
Most of us accept the fruits of experimental scientific research as they apply to other parts of our body: for instance, we are comfortable with the knowledge that the heart is not the seat of emotions, that it is the muscular organ that pumps blood through the circulatory system. Yet the idea that the human mind and spirituality originate in a physical organ, the brain, is new and startling for some people . They find it hard to believe that the brain is an information processing computational organ made marvellously powerful not by mystery, but by its complexity, by the enormous number, variety and interactions of its nerve cells.
For biologists working on the brain, mind loses none of its power or beauty when experimental methods are applied to human behaviour. Likewise, biologists do not fear the mind will be trivialised by a reductionist analysis, which delineates the component parts and activities of the brain. On the contrary, most scientists believe that biological analysis is likely to increase our respect for the complexity and power of the mind.
Instead, by unifying behaviourist and cognitive psychology, neural science and molecular biology, the new science of mind can address philosophical questions that serious thinkers have struggled with for millenia: how does mind acquire knowledge of the world? How much of mind is inherited? Do innate mental functions impose on us a fixed way of experiencing the world? What physical changes occur in the brain as we learn and remember? How is an experience lasting minutes converted to a lifelong memory? Such questions are no longer the province of speculative metaphysics; they are now fertile areas of experimental research.
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