Discussion»Questions»Science and Technology» Does DNA control every aspect of our being? Anything we can do on our own apart from it? Or are we 100% stuck with it and being us?
It does not control our thoughts, intellect and emotions. It helps provide the physical mechanisms necessary, in the brain's physiology, but not the actual results of that physiology working.
Thank you for your reply Durdle and Happy Sunday. It is a template then? To that extent it limits us doesn't it? What about inventiveness/creativity, imagination? Where does that reside if not in DNA? :)
I don't think anyone knows where and how the qualities that make us individual humans, and which you list, reside and work.
DNA controls a cell's structure, so indirectly affects its function, but intellect and emotion are far harder to define. The brain works as a fantastically complicated network of individual cells and nerve fibres, but the intellectual and emotional functions must use large regions of the human brain outside of the bits that simply control all the other organs and systems that keep us alive as animals.
Neuroscientists are understanding more and more of the brain's physiology at cellular level, but they are no nearer to understanding how the physiology makes the mentality of a healthy brain operates. About the only thing that can be said is that our brains must have far larger memory sections, in proportion, to those of any other animal.
Also, the human memory is thought to run on two levels so the processing needed to, say play a violin, is stored by constant practice at a deeply subconscious level allowing the violinist to play a sonata on sight without stopping to work out which strings to press where. It is very possible other creatures have similar memory systems, but that might be impossible to determine.
One puzzle I have in mind there is the ability of bats to find their way in and out of caves in which there is absolutely no light so their sight cannot augment their echo-location. They subconsciously learn the routes, and only from remembered echoes, in the way we can recall our way around a familiar building by sight without thinking about it, but even this is still far from identifying intellect and emotion in a physiological sense, in a healthy, fully-functioning brain.
Where DNA does come in, is when it goes wrong, creating a congenital condition or a tumour preventing the brain from working properly. It's one way to identify which part of the brain does what, but hardly a welcome way beyond helping scientists and doctors searching for cures.
Thank you for a very helpful, informative and fascinating analysis. Don't bats use radar Durdle? Isn't that how they navigate in pitch-black caves? Porpoises have a sonar-like ability as well don't they? I know the brain is a never-ending source of mystery. During President Obama's administration something called "The Brain Initiative" I believe was undertaken. I'm sure that would have been something The Donald John destroyed immediately since the brain is not something of which he is particularly fond. It sounded great. Cognitive Science is very interesting. It's funny we can visit space and land on the moon but inner space? That seems so much more complex. I shall ask a question about it! :)
No, bats don't use "radar", which stands for "Radio Detection and Ranging". Their method is nearer the porpoises' "Sonar" ("Sound" instead of radio). The animals call in particular ways, and detect obstacles or their prey by the resulting echoes.
A caving friend of mine observed by chance the behaviour of bats in a cave in which he was carrying out a particular project. When the bats tried to fly across a chamber in which he was standing, he presented an unfamiliar obstacle to them, and after some flying around they found they could avoid him by flying close to the wall.
Nest day he deliberately waited there at about the same time, but this time sat down and turned his lamp away to influence the animals as little as possible. The bats still followed the wall, remembering something had been in the way in the middle of the chamber last time round.
In the UK it is illegal to touch or disturb bats without appropriate permission and training (to protect them), but even without that, cavers love bats and like my friend we are always very careful not to disturb them, whether underground, in a building or outside. I have once had to give way to a bat in a very small cave passage - it wanted to get away from us but was baffled by being between me and by a colleague a few feet away. We covered our lamps and crouched right down in hollows, and I heard and felt its soft, velvety wing-strokes as it flew past barely a foot from my face, up into the safety of a much larger chamber.
The puzzle is not their acoustics. A lot of work has been carried out on them. Some experiments let bats fly around searching for the mealworms they love, in a large, darkened room equipped with mealworms suspended on threads, and lots of discreet microphones. The anatomy of their vocal tracts, ears and for the horseshoe bats, the curious skin folds known as the "nose leaf" which helps to focus the call forwards, is well-known (in the appropriate scientific publications). Other experiments use not living bats, but models of their heads, to obtain numerical data on their sound patterns by methods like those used to test microphones and loudspeakers. (Similar models, of human heads, are used to test things like ear-defenders and hearing-aids.)
Yet we still can't say what they hold in their memories - it must be sets of some sort of sound-images of the surroundings they know; and they also have a strong homing-instinct. The difficulty with studying animals is that we can't talk to them, can't ask them questions!
What's particularly striking about these little animals is that their brains are very small, yet contain instinctively some very powerful, high-speed sound-imaging and response processes and memories alongside the rest of the brain that, as in us, is busy running the animal's body.
Marine animals use sonar primarily to find prey and avoid obstructions. They call to each other socially (as do bats) but that's not the same thing. I wonder if one reason whales may become beached is that they stray into water too shallow for their sonar and social calls to work comprehensibly, so they become disorientated, lost and panicky. They have sometimes been led to safety by playing whale social calls through sonar equipment on survey ships cruising a safe distance from shore.
As for your esteemed President... to you I'm a foreigner so I can't really comment on him, but I don't know his attitudes to science, or the general science policy he wants for the USA.
The science and engineering needed to explore space is very sophisticated, but simple compared to understanding the brain!
This post was edited by Durdle at September 4, 2017 3:51 AM MDT
I take exception to one thing you said with which I completely disagree. To whit "to you I'm a foreigner so I can't really comment on him." WRONG. I see I shall have to disabuse you of that erroneous view. Everything Doofus Donny does has the potential for worldwide impact. America is not an island entire of itself. So you have as much right to give your views about things that are American as any American citizen IN MY OPINION. What other people think is up to them. I cannot speak for them. I can only speak for myself so please always say what you think about anything you wish on one of my questions. Now getting back to the point. This read was HUGELY enjoyable and massively informative. My two favorite reasons for being on an internet social site. I found it so touching that you and your friend crouched down to give room to the bats. You respect them and their space and most people (me included) cringe when they think of bats. I see now that is very wrong. Thank you for the info about the difference between radar/sonar. You know by now science is not my strong suit though that never prevents me from asking questions about it. I'm gonna read your post again. Yes. It was THAT interesting Durdle! :)
I don't like to comment on America's internal politics, but I do worry about some of Trump's attitudes, especially on international matters.
Apart from etiquette I don't know enough about the USA's internal affairs to comment on them anyway. I don't for example know the difference between Right and Left in American terms - they seem to differ from their British shades of meaning.
Thank you for your compliments on my writing about bats. Have you ever seen a sidescan-sonar image? These are false-colour images of the sea-bed and objects on it like ship-wrecks, produced by sound rather than light because sound travels far further in water than light can. They look a bit like rather grainy television pictures. I've often wondered if a bat "sees" something like that in its mind's eye.
They are marvellous little animals. Their sonar range is quite short, at best no more than 10 metres (about 33 feet), because although their hunting calls are extremely loud (rock-concert level) the power in them is very low.
Think of something that can sit on the palm of your hand, flying among tree, looking for fat juicy moths for breakfast. It has to call many times a second, picking out the weak, erratic echoes back from a moth flying randomly against a background of shaking leaves; then listen to each echo in turn, and process it so it can control its flying, breathing or eating accordingly. Without thinking about it. They make a submarine's highly-sophisticated sonar (which spends almost all its time listening, very rarely "pinging" despite what Hollywood has you believe) look rather amateurish, although the scales are very different.
Now, we humans use our senses in analogous ways - walking along a street we see an obstacle ahead so automatically steer ourselves round it. When we hear something we turn our heads, sometimes instinctively, to try to face its origins - we prefer to do so when talking to each other. Our ears pick up the sound at very slightly different times and levels, and our brain uses those differences to tell us which way to look for the course.
Some blind people have developed a very basic echo-location, by clicking their tongues and listening to the echoes. It only works in fairly quiet places with hard walls close by, such as in corridors.
The fear many people have of bats is that of collision or entanglement in hair. Bats are rather better than that at avoiding things, but the chances are the poor little bat would come off worse. Even so, my own brother was once hit in the face by a bat when he and I were standing in his house drive on Summer evening! It didn't hurt him.
Here's an intriguing memory experiment I invented and tried on myself. It's not really scientifically very valid, but it may mean something. Sit still, in a quiet place. Clear you mind then as rapidly and briefly as possible think of a familiar building. Then let your memory recall it - I found it seems to work in layers: the basic shape first, such as room size and locations of doors, or route through it; and only then starts to add details, and recalling subtle points like small pictures on the walls takes some effort.
Durdle 