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True or False? Testing the Cornerstones of Modern Biology What is the Truth? Science Textbooks Tell Us:
The Issues
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Dedicated to a Revolution in Biological Theory Human Memory Resides in the Brain and Instinctive Memory Resides in DNA True or False?
Are our memories are stored in our brains? Where else could they be, one might ask? Scientists assure us that memory resides in the brain's dense neural network. However, science can tell us very little about how memory actually works. Memory is like a video camera that records every conscious moment of the day and dreams at night. Yet, science cannot explain how this great movie of life is stored, recalled, chronologically organized, and cross referenced in the mind. And science cannot explain how memory organizes the brain's torrent of sensory data into our perceptions of the people we see, the places we visit, and what we are doing. With the human brain extreme complexity, these questions remain unanswered. But suppose we leave the mystery of the human memory and turn to the instinctive memory that animals possess. As humans, the memory of our previous experience guides us in the world. In contrast, most animals already know a great deal from birth. For example, birds instinctively know how to interact with their environments. They know how to fly, sing their songs, build their nests, how to mate and raise their young, what to eat, and the time of year and direction to migrate. Birds have this memory from birth. They do not need to watch other birds to gain this basic knowledge. Instinctive memory and memory learned from experience are very similar. Often, the behaviors that arise from the two cannot and be distinguished. For example, from simply from observing a bird in the wild, an ornithologist cannot tell if the bird's song is instinctive or learned. Only by hatching a bird that is isolated in the laboratory can one determine if the bird's song is learned, instinctive, or a mixture of learning and instinct. The behaviors of learned and instinctive memory grade imperceptibly one into the other. Or, for example, suppose one watches two mammals run across a field. Is their ability to run learned or instinctive? If one animal is a human, we know that the motor memory is learned and took months and months to develop. The human baby starts with the goal to rise. Then with conscious awareness of the results of his actions, by trial and error he very gradually gains control of the hundreds of muscles that operate his arms, legs, head, and torso. Yet, a newborn horse can walk within an hour of birth. The fold's complex neuromuscular system of hundreds of muscles is fully coordinated at birth. But, simply from viewing the developed motor actions of the two animals, one would have no inkling as to whether the motor memory of either the human or the fold is learned or instinctive. Without prior knowledge, one cannot tell the difference. Such similarity strongly suggests that learned and instinctive memory share the same basic mechanism. Despite the glaring similarity, the material basis of biological theory demands that the source of learned and instinctive memory can hardly be more different. A purely material understanding of life demands that memory must reside in the atoms and molecules of the here and now. Since DNA of the fertilized egg cell is the only material substance passed between generations, biologist maintain that DNA contains a creature's great volume of instinctive memory. These "genetic programs" are said to create in the brain of an animal "wiring programs" that enable a fold to walk and a bird to fly. Further, DNA is said to direct the immense chronology of an animal's motor actions, behaviors, and perceptions that direct it through its life. However, biologists' "genetic" explanation for instinctive memory is pure speculation. Biologists can offer no explanation for how DNA actually contains this instinctive memory or how DNA might direct the moving panorama that is a creature's "movie of life." Science cannot explain how DNA might direct a bird to construct a nest of a specific architecture, select a mate, direct its migration, and initiate the many other behaviors at each stage of the bird's life. In addition, this same DNA is direct the astronomic chronology of molecular events that construct and operate the bird's body. Does this really make sense? Suppose we step outside conventional wisdom and ask, is DNA a reasonable container of instinctive memory's four-dimensional volume? Suppose we consider a spider's instinctive memory. A baby spider requires no learning to spin a perfect web. The baby spider possesses a conceptual design of the ideal web which it seeks to replicate. An orb web is a flat, spoke framework of thirty or so strands upon which the sticky, capture spiral is laid. In total, the strands are interconnected at over a thousand points. The spider's instinctive memory contains the chronologically organized sequence of motions that direct its eight, multisegmented legs to construct its web. To appreciate the true extent of the spider's motor memory, one might imagine repeatedly reaching out with one's arms and legs to grab the web's slender strands. Each claw on the spider's eight legs accurately grasps the hair-thin strands of the web's spiral framework and its legs harmoniously move with its abdomen and spinnerets to lay the strand. In total, a sequence of millions of individual muscle actions are required to build and operate the web. How might a spider's instinctive memory to construct a web develop? Humans learn from trial and error. Learning is a continuous process of conscious selection. We observe our motor actions and modify them to achieve a goal. Would a human baby ever learn to grasp an object without a goal and awareness of what he is doing? Moment by moment, we store the memory of what works and what what does not work. By memory of previous actions, we selectively prune motor actions to attain the desired goal. But, according to biological theory, instinctive memory cannot arise from conscious learning directed to a goal. Biologists assert that DNA contains the spider's immensely complicated sequence of motor actions that build its web. Yet, as they explain, the learned experience acquired by a creature during its life cannot become imprinted on its DNA. There is no physical way for this to occur. Rather, current theory demands that the spider's immense chronology of motor actions can only to arise from the random mutation of DNA (1). Theory asserts that with enough mutation and enough time, Darwin's environmental selection will weed out unproductive portfolio's of motor actions, leaving the viable product. However, science's theory that DNA holds instinctive memory faces several insurmountable problems. First, one needs to ask, what is the possibility that the spider's complex chronology of millions of motor actions that precisely activate each leg, leg segment, claw, abdomen and so on might develop from unsupervised actions? There is a probability that anything can occur. However, unsupervised, undirected motor actions can go in an infinite number of directions. For example, one can move one's arms and legs an infinite number of ways. But DNA cannot consciously choose which actions might be useful. So without a goal or supervision, why would events produce a spider's web? Suppose we ask a human computer programer if random typing or alteration of computer code is likely to produce a viable operating system? Or might a writer produce a book by randomly typing letters? In each case, the immense number of useless possibilities is truly overwhelming. The second problem with the current theory is how instinctive memory might be formed by Darwinian selection. With natural selection, the only way for useless variations of "genetic programs" to be culled is through the life and death of the organism. This "life and death" selection of Darwinian evolution is entirely different from the conscious mind's "trail and error" selection. Darwinian selection is a once in a lifetime event while conscious supervision is a continuous, moment to moment process. Unless a mutation can produce a viable creature that can live long enough to reproduce, the mutation goes nowhere. Yet a spider's legs face an infinite number of possible motor actions. The probability that Darwinian selection of the undirected mutations of "genetic programs" will produce the spider's coherent chronology of millions of individual motor actions that build a web simply goes into the realm of immeasurably small. Further, random alteration of DNA strands leads to a truly astronomic quantity of variations. For example, it is estimated the total number of sequence variations of a single bacterial chromosome with 4.7 million nucleotide pairs would fill the physical volume of the Universe! (2). This is a mind-boggling quantity. A spider has more and larger chromosomes. Therefore the total number of possible nucleotide variations available to a spider's chromosomes would fill the volume of uncounted universes. We might ask, which of these nucleotide sequences might contain the viable "genetic" instructions for the construction and operation of a web? What is the chance that random mutation of DNA would produce one of these variations out of a volume of variations that fill uncounted universes? For that matter, how many of these variations of "genetic programs" might produce a functioning creature of any sort? There is a point where improbabilities become so vast they need to be called impossibilities. In addition, one should reasonably ask, how might DNA contain the spider's four-dimensional chronology of motor actions? Can it contain the spider's spatial memory of the web and its various stages of construction? And then, how might this information be so perfectly inflated into the spider's physiological system in the the growth of the spider? How might these immeasurable complex web building programs be imprinted in each spider's neural system such that they produce the uniform web that is characteristic of the species? How might theorized "genetic programs" direct the spider to make choices and decisions when it builds or repairs a web? (Beyond all this, we are also faced with how DNA might direct the astronomic, four-dimensional chronology of molecular events that build and operate the spider's trillions of cell of its brain, organs, limbs, and so on.) Such questions need to be asked and answered. The purely material theory of modern biology offers offers no actual mechanism to explain what is observed. Existing biological theory must invoke near infinite quantities of time to explain astronomic improbabilities. Yet life displays no such grand improbability. Life produces extremely uniform products that bear no resemblance to the random variations of molecular activity that are the hallmark of the nonliving world. The source and mechanism memory is the central mystery of life. A coherent explanation for memory and behavior strongly suggests that learned and instinctive memory share the same mechanism. Somehow, the chronology of events that occurred in the past reappears in the present. A species' physiological form and chronology of behaviors reappears in the world generation after generation with great fidelity. What might we conclude? If instinctive memory is not contained in DNA, science must not only radically rethink the mechanism of memory but the whole nature of life. One is left with the perhaps bizarre conclusion that the actual container of memory does not exist in the material substance of the here and now. Modern physicists theorize that time is not the fleeting moment we experience but is actually "thick" like a dimension of space. Might memory be contained in this vast "thick" dimension of time? Is the conscious mind is a nonphysical quality that accesses memory through this "thickness" of time? Conventional biologists rigorously object to this possibility. However, should one accept that life is the proactive force of conscious intelligence, one can readily develop a coherent theory for all aspects of life. Just as the vast chronology of molecular events that create the form and activity of the living body transcends the substance of DNA, so does the chronology of instinctive behaviors that direct a creature's interactions with its environment.
References: (1) Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought. (2) Kuppers, Bernd-Olaf, Information and the Origin of Life. Also, see The Vital Dimension by Carl Gunther, Chapters 8, 9, 10, 11, and 14.
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