STEVEN Rose is scathing about attempts to explain the mind’s ills in terms of genes, as though they were just like one of the rare one-gene diseases. He equally abhors simple-minded accounts of how experiences happen. In The 21st-Century Brain he goes so far as to assert that to “interpret a particular pattern of neural activity as representing my experience of seeing a red bus…you need my entire neuronal and hormonal life history”.
I respond to this as I did to many of Edward Wilson’s proposals in Consilience: why? To answer that would be an interesting research programme – because the oft-presumed answer that a…
