We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
This paper is intended as a contribution to a recent vigorous debate in The Times, between the distinguished journalist Bernard Levin, the eminent Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman and the Archbishop of York, John Habgood, among others. The debate concerns morality, ‘free will’ and determinism. As a former German (now British) Jew, who lost close relatives at Auschwitz (e.g. my mother's sister) and who suffered personally severely in my youth under daily virulent Nazi persecution (even from schoolmasters who earlier professed to be ‘good democrats’ but were vicious antisemites), I obviously cannot remain strictly detached and neutral. Yet, I shall attempt to retain as much neutrality as possible, since I think that the main rivals in this debate have all some very relevant, interesting and valid things to say. Let me also state other, probably very relevant, biases. I am an ardent Zionist (and have been so since the experiences of my youth). In addition, I am a diehard mechanistic materialist as regards basic philosophy, although I am tolerant of other people's religious feelings, because I realize that my materialism is as metaphysical as their religious views. With this as background let me return to the technical issues. Obviously, in a philosophical journal one can write at a level above that of The Times, where there is, perhaps, insufficient room to debate philosophical, biological, physical and other niceties in some depth.
1 Wassermann, G. D., ‘Materialism and Mentality’, Review of Metaphysics 35 1988 (1982), 715–729.Google Scholar
2 Wassermann, G. D., ‘Theories, Systemic-Models (SYMOs), Laws and Facts in Evolutionary and other Sciences’, Synthese (1988).Google Scholar
3 Davies, P. C. W., The Forces of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
4 Green, M. B., ‘Unification of Forces and Particles in Superstring Theories’, Nature, London 314 (1985), 409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Wasserman, G. D., Neurobiological Theory of Psychological Phenomena (London: Macmillan, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Levin, B., ‘The Evil Some Men Do is Born Within Them’, The Times, London (24 11 1986), 16.Google Scholar
7 Wassermann, G. D., ‘Human Behaviour and Biology’, Dialectica 37 (1983), 169–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Cf. the extensive review of genetically controlled species-specific wiring-in of nervous systems by Wassermann, G. D., ‘The Wiring-in of Neural Nets Revisited’, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 48, (1986), 661–680.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
9 Hinde, R. A., Animal Behavior: a Synthesis of Ethology and Comparative Psychology, 2nd edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).Google Scholar
10 Clowes, J. S. and Wassermann, G. D., ‘Genetic Control Theory of Developmental Events’, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 46 (1984), 785–825CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and Wassermann, G. D., Molecular Control of Cell Differentiation and Morphogenesis (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1972).Google Scholar
11 Kimura, M., ‘The Neural Theory of Molecular Evolution’, Scientific American 241 (11 1979), 94–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Wassermann, G. D., ‘Note on an Abnormality of the Operator for the Structural Gene of the Dopamine D1 Receptor as a Possible Partial Cause of Schizophrenia’, Journal of Theoretical Biology 120 (1986), 277–283.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
13 Pollin, W., ‘The Pathogenesis of Schizophrenia’, Archives of General Psychiatry 27 (1972), 29–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
14 Gottestman, I. I. and Shields, J., Schizophrenia and Genetics (New York: Academic Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Gottesman, I. I. and Shields, J., ‘A Critical Review of Recent Adoption, Twin and Family Studies of Schizophrenia: Behavioral Genetics Perspectives’, Schizophrenia Bulletin 2 (1976), 360–401CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Heston, L. L., ‘The Genetics of Schizophrenia and Schizoid Disease’, Science 167 (1970), 249–256Google ScholarPubMed; Heston, L. L., in Biological Psychiatry, Mendels, J. (ed.) (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1973)Google Scholar; Crowe, R. R., in Schizophrenia as a Brain Disease, Henn, F. A. and Nasrallah, H. (eds) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 40–60.Google Scholar
15 Berrettini, W., Vogel, W. H. and Clouse, R., ‘Platelet Monoamine Oxidase in Chronic Schizophrenia’, American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977), 805–807Google ScholarPubMed, and Crowe, R. R. (1982) op. cit. note 14, pp. 45–46.Google Scholar
16 Henderson, D. and Gillespie, R. D., A Textbook of Psychiatry, 7th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1952).Google Scholar
17 Lewontin, R. C., Rose, S. and Kamin, L. J., Not in Our Genes (New York: Pantheon, 1984).Google Scholar
18 Fleming, G., Hitler und die Entlösung (München: Limes Verlag), 29Google Scholar (English translation Hitler and the Final Solution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985)Google Scholar; the present translation is provided by the present author).
19 Arendt, H., Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Bettelheim, B., Surviving and other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson), 258–273.Google Scholar
20 May, S., Cambodian Witness: the Autobiography of Someth May (London: Faber, 1986).Google Scholar
21 See also Wassermann, G. D., Brains and Reasoning (London: Macmillan, 1974), 132Google Scholar, and elsewhere in that book for closely related remarks.
22 Cf. op. cit. note 5, section 5.13.
23 Beckerman, W., ‘The Problem of Judging Evil’, The Times, London (17 12 1986), 18Google Scholar; see also, by the same author, The Times, London (7 02 1987), 8.Google Scholar
24 Marciano, W. and Pageis, H., ‘Quantum Chromodynamics’, Physics Reports (Section C of Physics Letters) 36 (1978), 137–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Lewontin, R. C., The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).Google Scholar
26 Laplace, P. S., in A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 6th edn, trans, by Truscott, F. W. and Emory, F. L. (New York, 1961), 4, argued:Google Scholar
Given an intelligence which could for one instance comprehend all the given forces by which nature is animated and the respective situations of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms, for it nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.
27 Cf. Vernon, M. D., A Further Study of Visual Perception (Cambridge University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michotte, A., Bulletin de l'Academie royale Beligique (class des Lettres) 34 (1948), 268ff.Google Scholar
28 Levin, B., ‘Programmed to Choose’, The Times, London (20 01 1987) 14.Google Scholar
29 Popper, K. R., ‘Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind’, the First Darwin Lecture given at Darwin College, Cambridge, 8 11 1977Google Scholar, and Popper, K. R., in Popper, K. R. and Eccles, J. C., The Self and its Brain (Berlin: Springer International, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 Wassermann, G. D., ‘Reply to Popper's Attack on Epiphenomenalism’, Mind lxxxviii (1979), 572–575.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 Hayek, F. A., The Sensory Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952).Google Scholar
32 The Archbishop of York, DrHabgood, John, ‘Man's Freedom with Responsibility’, The Times, London (12 01 1987), 12.Google Scholar
33 Kolb, E. W., Seckel, D. and Turner, M. S., ‘The Shadow World of Superstring Theories’, Nature, London 314 (1985) 415CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Ellis, J., ‘The Superstring: Theory of Everything, or of Nothing?’, Nature, London 323 (1986) 595–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
