From owner-biophysics@net.bio.net Sat Apr 16 23:00:00 1994 Path: biosci!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!sgiblab!sgigate.sgi.com!olivea!news.bu.edu!noc.near.net!news.delphi.com!usenet From: GREGORY C.O'KELLY Newsgroups: bionet.biophysics Subject: neurobiological antinomies betray problems with hard sciences Date: Sat, 16 Apr 94 22:57:57 -0500 Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice) Lines: 88 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: delphi.com BIOLOGICAL AND NEUROSCIENTIFIC ANTINOMIES BETRAY CONFLICTS WITH THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES The paper "Biology, Bioelectricity and the Nervous System" deals with some key presumptions of biology that have their roots in 17th century rationalist philosophy and Newtonian mechanism. These presumptions or 'meta-theories' have had an impact on biological and neurological thought in the most subtle of ways and in the most devastating of ways serving to ossify dogma that embodies incompatibilities. In the former case the idea that life is somehow special, an 'emergent' quality of the elements, has been relied upon by the gradual school of genetic evolution championed by Ernst Mayr. This view of life sees its beginning occurrence as unlikely even given meteorological and chemical conditions conducive to its origination. This view of life encounters problems when pressed for a functional model of the nervous system, and can only gage nervous system complexity in terms of relative brain size and weight. Its most glaring shortcomings are associated with vertebrate speciation in terms of phylogenetics, especially with regard to the field of paleoanthropology. In the most devastating way these meta-theories, with their view of life as something special and mechanical, prevent neuroscience from making connections that are obvious on more fundamental approaches to nervous system functioning. The result is the characteristic lack of clinical efficacy of neurological science and the failure of medicine not only to understand the primary causes of degenerative illness and aging, but also to do anything about either. Western medicine is focused on acute problems even though they may be brought on by degenerative maladies. In a style of medicine and pharmacology that demands clinical results, it should seem surprizing that archaic neurological and scientific dogmas should be perpetuated when they result in so little therapeutic intervention. The answer lies in an examination of the history of organized medicine in this country, the rise of Osler's "school of therapeutic nihilism" at Johns-Hopkins University, the adoption of the Hippocratic oath, and the institutionalization of certain ideas about the nature of nerve impulse propagation and electrical stimulation before the phenomenon of electricity was even understood. Ever since the middle of the last century the idea has been accepted that a nerve or a brain cell can be stimulated by touching an electrode to it. It didn't seem to matter whether AC or DC was used. It was thought that this simulated actual brain and nerve function. Areas of control in the brain were 'mapped' using this technique. But this presumption is incorrect. In the first place, AC and DC are different in electron behavior. Despite what John Eccles and Charles Sherrington had to say about the issue, you cannot get charge from AC without changing it to DC. Neuroscientific work has always focused on the examination of voltages, something present in both AC and DC, but only DC has charge, amperage. Neuroscience has accepted a definition of depolarization that does not involve the annihilation of electrical charge, but is the result the balance of equal numbers of oppositely charged ions. This sort of iatrophysics is, like life itself, thought to be an emergent property, though of nervous systems and cells rather than chemicals, that is the result of a type of electricity found no where else in the world, one in which the electricity is molecular rather than electronic. Such 'animal electricity' is though the result of fluid dynamics and molecular 'depolarization', an 'ionic mechanism'. Such sciosophy tries to account for biology in terms of the first fundamental force of nature only, gravity (the world of Newtonian 'classical mechanics'). The effects of the second fundamental force, electromagnetism, are not thought particularly pertinent, are not understandable on traditional, theoretical models of the nervous system, and so are neither exploitable for their significance nor accorded any more status than artifact of research, e.g. that bones heal faster when a DC current flows across the break, that childhood leukemia rates are up around power lines, that electrical discharges in a simulated early-earth atmosphere triggers a rain of amino acids. Many claim that forces on the level of that of the electron and electrical charge have little influence on life as we know it, though they admit, when pushed, of the use of such things as gel electrophoresis in the study of genes and amino acids. They do not want to admit that electrical charge and its movement play any part in the body's functioning however, and back off to the Newtonian world to explain nerve impulse propagation, saying that electrons can have no existence in the body apart from molecules. The equivalency of mass and energy is not thought of as biologically pertinent, and energy is spoken of as heat which is due to molecular collisions in a world in which only particles and their motion have any substance, and the particles are no smaller than atoms. A strange form of iatrophysics is invoked to explain behavior in terms of consciousness as if this were somehow more than mere physics or biochemistry. And neuroscience muddles on while clinical neurologists still check for 'reflex arcs' in their diagnoses before saying nothing can be done. Would you care to find out more about these issues? Ask me for a copy of the paper. It is available in either binhex 4.0 form in which all the extras like italics, underlining, bold print, different size fonts, are used, or in a basic ascii format in which the text appears like that possible only on a typewriter, though without underlining. Write me GOKELLY@Delphi.com for a copy, specify the format, and then wait for a couple of days before I load the sucker again and send it along. It's over 40 pages long. .