The Biology of Brains_图书大全
The Biology of Brains
ISBN: 9780121360504
定价: 54.00
内容简介
"The human mind is essentially a food-seeking system, and no more
necessarily a truth-finding apparatus than the snout of a pig."
--attributed to Lord Balfour by H. G. Wells in his Introduction to "Mind
in the Making" by J. Harvey Robinson.
Food-seeking or truth-finding, this apparatus has proliferated thought
over the centuries like a spore proliferating cells. But where some still
mysterious-seeming programme, lent by the genes to the cytoplasm of
the spore, regulates with a fine precision the marshalling of its cells so
that an ordered, functional body is produced, the same cannot be said
of the proliferation of human thought. More like the unregulated, dis-
persing cells of a cancer, the ideas boil up and spill over randomly, to
generate results that often seem entirely beyond human control; be-
cause of the dangers that now appear to arise from this lack of control,
the time seems ripe for a symposium on the biology of the organ whose
peak development has been responsible for producing this mystery of
thought.
Till recently we have been very content to accept the results of
thought, whether they were controlled or not. We have seen disease
reduced by medicine, famine reduced by various technologies, new
pleasures, natural and synthetic, made available to us. True, we have
also seen massacres and wars fiendishly worsened; but this, we said
comfortably, was "Nature's pruning hook", as we especially in the
West--sat back enjoying our increasing pleasures and decreasing drudg-
eries. But now it has changed: like a quiet underground myeelium, the
massing research in the young science of ecology has put out flamboyant
mushrooms of aposematie vermilion (Pileus ehrlichii Commoner)
warning us of possible catastrophe on a scale unequalled by our worst
wars and famines. Because of this, these results of ecological thought
are in a different class from what has gone before. Each previous result
was either a direct augmentation of our well-being or an increase in our
potential to wrest the means of well-being from someone else; it was
therefore a positive feedback system, increasing our collective drive for
more. :Now, because the threat is on
human communities stand to suffer
xi
a planetary scale, because now all
from the overdrive of any one of
