IUBio

Great Quotes in Neuroscience

William H. Calvin WCalvin at U.Washington.edu
Thu May 30 19:49:20 EST 1996


Well, while I'm at it, here are the two wonderful epigrams 
about selectionism that open Act I of THE CEREBRAL CODE 
(they're at http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/bk9.html):


	"Everyone knows that in 1859 Darwin demonstrated the 
occurrence of evolution with such overwhelming
documentation that it was soon almost universally accepted.  
What <i>not</i> everyone knows, however, is that on that 
occasion Darwin introduced a number of other scientific and 
philosophical concepts that have been of far-reaching 
importance ever since.  These concepts, population thinking and 
selection, owing to their total originality, had to overcome 
enormous resistance.  One might think that among the many 
hundreds of philosophers who had developed ideas about change, 
beginning with the lonians, Plato and Aristotle, the
scholastics, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Descartes, 
Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, and the numerous philosophers of 
the first half of the nineteenth century, that there would have 
been at least one or two to have seen the enormous heuristic 
power of that combination of variation and selection.  But the
answer is no.  To a modern, who sees the manifestations of 
variation and selection wherever he looks, this seems quite 
unbelievable, but it is a historical fact."
                 Ernst Mayr, 1994


	"Looking back into the history of biology, it appears 
that wherever a phenomenon resembles learning, an instructive 
theory was first proposed to account for the underlying 
mechanisms. In every case, this was later replaced by a 
selective theory. Thus the species were thought to have 
developed by learning or by adaptation of individuals to the 
environment, until Darwin showed this to have been a selective 
process. Resistance of bacteria to antibacterial agents was 
thought to be acquired by adaptation, until Luria and
Delbr&uuml;ck showed the mechanism to be a selective one. 
Adaptive enzymes were shown by Monod and his school to be 
inducible enzymes arising through the selection of preexisting 
genes. Finally, antibody formation that was thought to be based 
on instruction by the antigen is now found to result from the
selection of already existing patterns. It thus remains to be 
asked if learning by the central nervous system might not also 
be a selective process; i.e., perhaps learning is not learning 
either."
 	Niels K. Jerne, 1967
-- 


  William H. Calvin                   WCalvin at U.Washington.edu
                       http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/




More information about the Neur-sci mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net