Reviews for Molecular Biology of the Neuron

The average rating for Molecular Biology of the Neuron based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-26 00:00:00 Joshua Hare When you first start investigating a topic, it is necessary to read several books before you are able to discern the different positions taken on that topic and who has the best arguments. This can involve suffering through not a few mediocre books. But it can also involve stumbling on a book that far surpasses the others in excellence, by the fact that it suddenly shines a brilliant light on the subject in comparison with which the light of the other works were only glimmers. That was how I felt reading The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom in Nature by Robert Augros and George Stanciu. I have read many books now on biology and the disputes over Neo-Darwinism. Some of them were exclusively scientific; others were exclusively philosophical. The best among them, such as Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, were both scientific and philosophical. The New Biology, written by a Thomist philosopher and a theoretical physicist, surpasses even Meyer’s masterpieces. This is so for several reasons: 1. The presuppositions on which the authors are working, the arguments which they are making, and the basis of those arguments, are always made crystal clear to the reader. One always finds this in books that are honestly seeking for the truth. 2. The book is chock full of scientific facts, real and solid empirical evidence from the biological world. Many of these facts were not discussed in other books, which made me feel as if I had previously been systematically presented a truncated vision of lifeforms, while this book was providing me the full picture. 3. There are many wonderful illustrations throughout the book, drawn by Michael Augros, whom I take to be the son of Robert and the author of the excellent book Who Designed the Designer?. 4. The book is brief! It does a fantastic job of compacting an entire spectrum of philosophical argument and scientific fact within the confines of 230 pages. 5. The words of empiricist biologists, who do not agree with the authors’ conclusions but cannot but concur with their notice of the facts, are amply quoted throughout the book. This gives the reader a convincing impression of the fairness of the book. 6. Best of all, the book does not just criticize Darwinism on the scientific side and present an alternative scientific view, as the Intelligent Design movement does. It moves beyond the strict confines of science to speculate on the interventions of God in the physical order. This is more satisfying for the reader who is, as most of us are, looking for a complete view of reality. There are nine chapters in The New Biology. The first chapter points out how the methods of physics have lately been applied to all realms of science, including biology. Those methods have revealed that nature cannot be reduced to matter. Likewise, in biology, the methods of physics show that purely mechanistic accounts of lifeforms are inadequate. I was pleased to find, in this chapter and a later one, a very similar account of the relation between biology and physics as that which I presented in chapters 3 and 10 of The Realist Guide to Religion and Science. The second chapter masterfully points out the characteristics of the organism that set it apart from human machines: “its astonishing unity, its capacity to build its own parts, its increasing differentiation through time, its power of self-repair and self-regeneration, its ability to transform other materials into itself, its natural action from within, and its incessant activity” (p. 31). Modern biology is not able to arrive at a definition of life, something that should be the starting point for the science, because of its bondage to Cartesianism. If we allow, however, with Aristotle, that living things have a living form, above matter, then the definition is simple: “life is the capacity for self-motion” (p. 32). Chapter 3 explains the differences between animals and man, as my own book does in its chapter 11. Fascinating scientific facts are brought forward to show that “sensation is neither reducible to matter nor does it emerge out of matter” (p. 53) and that animals have consciousness. This does not, however, mean that animals are intelligent. On the contrary, clever experiments with animals lead us to this inevitable conclusion (p. 72): Animals [] deal with phenomenal appearances, not with what things are. They do not distinguish between sense qualities of a thing and what the thing is. Consequently, they are incapable of understanding causes. Once more, in this area of biology, a reductionist mechanistic model of humans and animals is inadequate. What is needed is a new biology that is hylemorphic, allowing for the presence of both form and matter in living things. After chapter 3, the book turns to a consideration of Darwinism and provided, for me, the high point of its already brilliant contents. Up to this point, I had not seen such a clear and compelling critique of evolutionary theory. Since that critique spans from chapter 4 to 8, I will take those chapters as a block. On pages 157-158, the authors explain the assumptions behind natural selection, in Darwin’s own words. They can be reduced to three: 1. Population growth – plant and animal populations increase at a geometric or exponential rate 2. Competition – plants and animals struggle against one another and their environments for food and survival 3. Gradualism – life forms have an unlimited plasticity whereby they continually accumulate little differences over time which cause them to transform into different species It turns out, when we perform detailed field studies that were not available at the time of Darwin, that all three of these assumptions are found to be false. 1. First of all, in regard to population growth, Darwin thought that “every single organic being may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase its numbers” (p. 124). This creates an intense competition among animals to thrive and survive, to be the winner in the reproduction race, which in turn drives the process of evolution. What we find, on the contrary, is that species do not increase without limit. Rather, they have built-in natural regulations that lower birthrates when overcrowding occurs. The authors point out that the birth rate or the age of first reproduction depends on population density in many large mammals, including white-tailed deer, elk, bison, moose, bighorn sheep, Dall’s sheep, ibex, wildebeest, Himalayan tahr, hippopotamus, lion, grizzly bear, dugong, harp seals, southern elephant seal, spotted porpoise, striped dolphin, blue whale, and sperm whale. Increases in population density alter birth rates in small mammals also. (pp. 125-126) Other assumptions related to population growth made by Darwin have also been shown to be false: the assumption that almost all animals of reproductive age mate, when in fact “a large nonbreeding portion of the adult population is the norm in many species” (p.126); the assumption that litter and clutch sizes remain the same, when in fact they vary according to the amount of food available; the assumption that “animals and plants produce as many eggs and seeds as physiologically possible” (p. 127), when in fact production varies greatly according to circumstances. 2. Nor is nature in a state of fierce competition—Darwin’s second assumption behind his doctrine of natural selection. That state is needed to justify ‘survival of the fittest’ as being the driving cause of natural selection. Instead of competition in nature, there is rather cooperation. Nature is not “red in tooth and claw”, but rather replete with harmonious co-existence. If we define competition as “whenever two or more individuals or groups ‘strive together’ for something in short supply” (p. 91), we find that nature employs many strategies to prevent competition: • geographical isolation of species that could eliminate each other; • the division of lifeforms living in the same habitat into different ecological niches, that is, different diets, different periods of activity, different changes introduced into the environment, and so on: “among the most thoroughly documented principles in the science of ecology is the dictum that two species never occupy the same niche” (p. 93); • mutual sharing of resources—space, light, water and food—so that as many as possible can survive, rather than the pursuit of mutual elimination; • periodic migration of birds, fish, mammals, and insects to avoid competition; • sequential flowering of plants to avoid competition in attracting pollinators; • even predators are kind to their prey by never eliminating its species and also maintaining with it a dynamic equilibrium; • symbiotic relationships between animals such that two species have a mutual interdependence: this interdependence is even found between the whole of the plant kingdom, which produces oxygen needed by animals, and that of the animal kingdom, which produces carbon dioxide needed by plants. In short, population is regulated internally by the plants and animals themselves. It is not regulated from the outside by a fierce competition between them. Nor are they at war with their environment, the topic taken up in chapter 5. 3. The third assumption behind natural selection, gradualism, maintains that little variations in species can continue indefinitely and turn into major variations over time. In other words, there is no limit to the degree to which species can change. I was gratified to find the authors of The New Biology pointing out (pp. 214-216), as I did in The Realist Guide to Religion and Science (pp. 446-449), that this effectively eliminates the very existence of species, which then makes it impossible for natural selection to account for the Origin of Species. Besides this, empirical evidence does not support gradualism. First of all, plants and animals do not allow for unlimited change. They have fixed boundaries beyond which they cannot be pushed. Here is some of the evidence cited by Augros and Stanciu (p. 159): Between 1800 and 1878, crossbreeding increased the sugar content of sugar beets from 6 percent to 17 percent. But fifty years of subsequent experiments produced no further increases. All experienced breeders recognize the constraints. Luther Burbank: "I know from my experience that I can develop a plum half an inch long or one two and a half inches long, with every possible length in between, but I am willing to admit that it is hopeless to try to get a plum the size of a small pea, or one as big as a grapefruit." Secondly, the fossil record is the opposite of what gradualism predicts (see also The Realist Guide making this point on pp. 457-462). For Darwin, minor groupings come first and major groupings only much later. In fact, the major groupings came first and the minor ones only much later. This “pattern of shift from few species in many groups to many species in fewer groups” flatly contradicts Darwinian gradualism; for if evolution proceeded by species accumulating small variations, we should see over long periods new orders, classes, and phyla emerging with increasing frequency. But just the opposite occurs in the fossils. Darwin’s model is backward. (p. 169) The fossil record starts with vastly different ‘themes’ of animals and then diversifies with variations on each of those themes, and the variations progressively have fewer differences between them. What this means is that the entire diversity of biological form is present at the beginning and simply works itself out over time, rather than there being no diversity present at the beginning and it being produced over time by natural selection. The third thing counting against gradualism is the fixity of species. Many species have been observed to go for hundreds of millions of years without any substantive change. This is another instance of reality being the opposite of what Darwinism predicts. If Darwinism is so obviously contrary to everything we observe in the biological world, what is responsible for the diversification of life? Augros and Stanciu speculate that “some process develops new regulatory gene patterns that eventually produce new body plans and hence new species” (p. 181). In other words, there is an internal genetic mechanism in living things that sometimes causes DNA that is superfluous to be engaged and produce a new species over time. I am a little skeptical about the plausibility of such a scenario. The authors themselves admit that “much research remains to be done” (p. 186), and perhaps this research has been done in the 30 years since their book was published. But I agree with them that their model is at least “a consistent model that truly illuminates the facts”. As for the origin of life itself, that can only be God (p. 191). This is evident from the fact that DNA contains a language, a conventional code. Such codes, by the fact that they are conventional, cannot be products of chemical or physical necessity. In short, The New Biology is excellent in every respect. It is a shame that it is no longer in print. However, there are used copies available, one of which I acquired from Thrift Books. The book is well worth the purchase for those who are looking for a remarkably clear and concise cross-disciplinary look at the facts of modern biology.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-08 00:00:00 Richard Necklen "Origins," chapter six of this book, is interesting. It is also clearly the only reason that the book exists, and I'm giving two stars simply because of that one chapter. The rest of the book is very poor support for that chapter. The arguments are poorly formed. Moreover, I don't know, this bugged me: there are whole pages which are just quotes from various people. Some of these people are introduced, some are not, one was introduced simply as "a tree lover." But the point is, these quotes are bundled together, and there is little to no original writing by the authors of this book explaining why these quotes are significant to the book's argument. Here is the entire original content of one of these pages: "Jacob states:...He contends that purpose is part of the essence of the organism:...Dobzhansky writes:...Thorpe points out that purpose opens a line of inquiry unique to the life sciences:...Simpson continues the same idea, arguing that purpose cannot be reduced to physical or chemical considerations:" This is an entire page of writing! the quotations outstrip the author's writing 8 to 1! This makes the book read more like the rough outline of a student's essay than a finished book. All this to say that I am keeping my copy of this book only so that I can use it for compost, and in that way it will be able to make a valuable contribution to biology.