Argument: Understanding the mind is still a huge, looming challenge. When I met the British biologist Lewis Wolpert in London in 1997, he declared that The End of Science was "absolutely appalling!" He was particularly upset by my critique of neuroscience. The field was just beginning, not ending, he insisted. He stalked away before I could tell him that I thought his objection was fair. I actually agree that neuroscience in many ways represents science's most dynamic frontier.
Over the past decade, membership in the Society for Neuroscience has surged by almost 50 percent to 37,500. Researchers are probing the brain with increasingly powerful tools, including superfast magnetic resonance imagers and microelectrodes that can detect the murmurs of individual brain cells. Nevertheless, the flood of data stemming from this research has failed so far to yield truly effective therapies for schizophrenia, depression, and other disorders, or a truly persuasive explanation of how brains make minds. "We're still in the tinkering stage, preparadigm and pretheoretical," says V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego. "We're still at the same stage physics was in the 19th century."
The postmodern perspective applies all too well to fields that attempt to explain us to ourselves. Theories of the mind never really die; they just go in and out of fashion. One astonishingly persistent theory is psychoanalysis, which Sigmund Freud invented a century ago. "Freud . . . captivates us even now," Newsweek proclaimed just last March. Freud's ideas have persisted not because they have been scientifically confirmed but because a century's worth of research has not produced a paradigm powerful enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all. Freudians cannot point to unambiguous evidence of their paradigm's superiority, but neither can proponents of more modern paradigms, whether behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, or psychopharmacology.
Science's best hope for understanding the mind is to crack the neural code. Analogous to the software of a computer, the neural code is the set of rules or syntax that transforms the electrical pulses emitted by brain cells into perceptions, memories, and decisions. The neural code could yield insights into such ancient philosophical conundrums as the mind-body problem and the riddle of free will. In principle, a solution to the neural code could give us enormous power over our psyches, because we could monitor and manipulate brain cells with exquisite precision by speaking to them in their own language.
But Christof Koch of Caltech warns that the neural code may never be totally deciphered. After all, each brain is unique, and each brain keeps changing in response to new experiences, forming new synaptic connections between neurons and even—contrary to received wisdom a decade ago—growing new neurons. This mutability (or "plasticity," to use neuroscientists' preferred term) immensely complicates the search for a unified theory of the brain and mind. "It is very unlikely that the neural code will be anything as simple and as universal as the genetic code," Koch says.
Argument*: If you really believe science is over, why do you still write about it? Despite my ostensible pessimism, I keep writing about science, I also teach at a science-oriented school, and I often encourage young people to become scientists. Why? First of all, I could simply be wrong—there, I've said it—that science will never again yield revelations as monumental as evolution or quantum mechanics. A team of neuroscientists may find an elegant solution to the neural code, or physicists may find a way to confirm the existence of extra dimensions.
In the realm of applied science, we may defeat aging with genetic engineering, boost our IQs with brain implants, or find a way to bypass Einstein's ban on faster-than-light travel. Although I doubt these goals are attainable, I would hate for my end-of-science prophecy to become self-fulfilling by discouraging further research. "Is there a limit to what we can ever know?" asks David Lee. "I think that this is a valid question that can only be answered by vigorously attempting to push back the frontiers."
Even if science does not achieve such monumental breakthroughs, it still offers young researchers many meaningful opportunities. In the realm of pure research, we are steadily gaining a better understanding of how galaxies form; how a single fertilized egg turns into a fruit fly or a congressman; how synaptic growth supports long-term memory. Researchers will surely also find better treatments for cancer, schizophrenia, AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; more effective methods of agricultural production; more benign sources of energy; more convenient contraception methods.
Most exciting to me, scientists might help find a solution to our most pressing problem, warfare. Many people today view warfare and militarism as inevitable outgrowths of human nature. My hope is that scientists will reject that fatalism and help us see warfare as a complex but solvable problem, like AIDS or global warming. War research—perhaps it should be called peace research—would seek ways to avoid conflict. The long-term goal would be to explore how humanity can make the transition toward permanent disarmament: the elimination of armies and the weapons they use. What could be a grander goal?
In the last century, scientists split the atom, cracked the genetic code, landed spacecraft on the moon and Mars. I have faith—yes, that word again—that scientists could help solve the problem of war. The only question is how, and how soon. Now that would be an ending worth celebrating.
*Note: John Horgan "whacked" this paragraph for being wishy-washy in Horganism, his new blog. (Return to the part in question.)
