Dear ToKers,
Gregg has asked me to introduce myself in anticipation of my contribution to the April meeting. I am a Professor of Pediatrics, Ob-Gyn and Evolutionary Medicine at UCLA. I have a PhD in Experimental Medicine from McGill University, my first Faculty position was at Harvard Medical School, then at U Maryland, and now at UCLA.
I began an email correspondence with Gregg several months
ago, finding common ground between us in our mutual desire to bring new order
to both psychology and biology/medicine. My current perspective emerged via the realization that I could exploit the cell biology of
embryonic development and phylogeny (my research career) to trace the evolution
of the mammalian lung back to its unicellular origins. But when I turned to the
evolution literature on developmental biology, or EvoDevo, there was literally no
cell biology, initially due to a historic glitch caused by the absence of
cell science to propel evolutionary biology in the 19th century; so
instead the evolutionists embraced genetics, and never let go. But cell biology
underpins all of contemporary biology and medicine. I have made efforts since
that realization to introduce my cell biologic perspective on evolutionary
biology to the evolution of physiologic traits such as the lung, kidney, skin
and bone.
There are certain key concepts that have helped me to
recapitulate physiologic evolution from the unicellular state forward,
primarily the principle of cell-cell communication mediated by growth factors
and their receptors as the mechanism for embryologic structure and function, to
which I have contributed beginning in the early 1970s. That, in combination
with the observation that evolution is a series of pre-adaptations or
exaptations or co-options, offering the opportunity to see the
interrelationships between different physiologic adaptations based on cell-cell
communication mechanisms. But above all, the theory that the cellular
internalization of external factors in the environment such as ions, gases,
heavy metals, bacteria, gravitational forces, compartmentalizing them and
making them useful as physiologic traits is key to understanding the origins of
life, not as the Anthropic Principle that sees us in this environment,
but rather the realization that we are
‘of’ this environment. The “Endosymbiotic
Theory” can be understood based on the
unicellular origins of life and the subsequent cell-cell communication
mechanisms that fostered complicated physiology of multicellular organisms.
I mention all of
this because I am of the opinion that all of the organs of the body, including
the brain/perceptual consciousness evolved in tandem
with the visceral organs. For example, there was a big breakthrough in understanding
the evolution of the brain back in 2003 (Holland ND. Early central nervous
system evolution: an era of skin brains? Nat Rev Neurosci.
2003 Aug;4(8):617-27) when Holland showed that there was a continuum from the
central nervous system of worms to vertebrates based on its phylogenetic
origins in the skin, or the skin-brain hypothesis. The skin is a highly
underappreciated organ, which was hypothesized to be the origin of all
complicated physiology in vertebrates (Torday and Rehan. Evolution, the Logic
of Biology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
It is here that I share interests with the folks on this lis. I know Gregg has become quite interested in the view of the human as an extended cell and the braiin as the skin, folded inward. I have been able to exploit the idea that the first cell evolved from the immersion of lipids in water, both components coming from the frozen asteroids that pelted the early Earth before there was an atmosphere that could oxidize them. But that raises the question as to what was the basis for the spontaneous formation of lipid-based protocells? Traditionally, that has been attributed to the self-referential, self-organizational properties of life, giving rise to the First Principles of Physiology (FPP), which were generated by the protocell defined by its lipid membrane, distinguishing the internal and external ‘environments’. The FPP are constituted by negative entropy, or negative Free Energy within the cell, chemiosmosis, the most primitive way of generating bioenergy, intracellular membranes partitioning negative and positive ions on either side of them to generate an electrical current to sustain negentropy, and homeostasis as the monitoring mechanism for the interrelationship between the entropy within and outside of the cell.
I have hypothesized that the origin of self-referential self-organization was the Singularity of the Big Bang, given that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (Newton’s Third Law of Motion). With that cellular molecular mechanistic linkage from contemporary physiology, referring all the way back to its origins in the Singularity/Big Bang, I have speculated that that is the origin and continuum of Consciousness itself, or the Hard Problem (David Chalmers), how we ‘know that we know’. Hameroff and Penrose have speculated that the brain integrates information through the microtubules of the cytoskeleton of neurons. Yet all cells have cytoskeletons, so it is feasible that there is integration of the somatic and CNS microtubules, which Head and Holmes [1911], and more recently Haggard and Wolpert referred to as "Disorders of Body Scheme?"
The other breakthrough idea that may form common ground between physiology and psychology is the concept of the ‘Phenotype as Agent’ (Phenotype as Agent for Epigenetic Inheritance. Torday JS, Miller WB. Biology (Basel). 2016 Jul 8;5(3)). That notion emerged from the hypothesis that the unicell was the first Niche Construction (NC), NC being the concept that organisms generate their own immediate environments. So by combining endosymbiosis with NC, hypothesizing that the unicell internalized its environment (The Cell as the First Niche Construction. Torday JS. Biology (Basel). 2016 Apr 28;5(2)) as described above, that the process of evolution can be seen as a continuum from its origins to present day physiology, consciousness being the manifestation of that process at the level of being aware of one’s surroundings, both internal and external.
Just to be more concrete, as mentioned, the cytoskeleton may act as the structure within the cell that acts to communicate between cells throughout the body. Penrose has shown that anesthetics bind to the catalytic site within tubulin, inhibiting its formation, linking the cytoskeleton to consciousness. And when yeast, primitive unicellular relatives of vertebrates, are put in zero gravity they lose their abilities to polarize (unaware of up/down/left/right) and cannot reproduce due to collapse of their cytoskeleton. So depriving this organism of its sense of gravity renders it dissociated from its ‘consciousness’ of its surroundings, i.e. it is unconscious. Thus the putative link between the cytoskeleton, consciousness and Cosmic Consciousness.
This way of thinking about the continuum from physiology to our immediate perceptual consciousness of being, to the Consciousness of the Cosmos, conventionally referred to as something greater than ourselves, as the product of the iterative internalization of the environment, or the endosymbiosis referred to above, offers an opportunity to understand these processes mechanistically. And as I have proposed to Gregg, the ‘joints’ in his ToK can be understood as part and parcel of the same continuum mechanistically, merging his scheme with mine. For example, I have previously used the cell-molecular approach to ‘predict’ the evolution of endothermy (A central theory of biology. Torday JS. Med Hypotheses. 2015 Jul;85(1):49-57), largely based on the opposite effects of physiologic stress on ‘fight or flight’ versus meditation/hibernation. Such ideas may help to further elucidate the nature of consciousness, and the continual line from the Bigh Bang, through the FPP of the unicell, all the way to this email exchange.....Please don't hesitate to comment/critique......Best, John TordayTo unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1