THE GENIUS WITHIN

Neurosurgeon Vertosick (Why We Hurt, 2000) makes an ambitious attempt to demonstrate that intelligence, evolution, and life itself are manifestations of the same process.

He gets off to a fine start, illuminating details of the microbial world (bacteria and viruses) in which the socialization of these tiny organisms produces an “intelligent” biochemically based network that can react quickly and productively to anything the supposedly superior human intellect can throw at them. When it comes to cancer, AIDS, and increasingly drug-resistant microbe populations, the author points out, we’re simply not winning the war. But he then goes on to examine the “genius” of the human immune system, with its own marshalling of biochemistry and manipulation of DNA based again on a network comprising everything from “living” white blood cells to enzymes that send “messages,” which has kept us around all these eons to even have a chance at winning. Having established a networking analogy, Vertosick moves on to the brain itself and how neural processes both resemble and differ greatly from digital computing. There’s a lot to absorb here, including the role of randomness (noise) in neural networks and the concept of collective “superorganisms” that scale to ecosystems and beyond. While the author takes pains to provide basic analogies for readers with no science background, he also continually apologizes for oversimplifying, as if writing with a peer review board looking over his shoulder. (In fact, an entire chapter of addenda offers a pre-refutation of potential expert critics.) The net effect is that the reader gets constantly shoved to the bottom of the intellectual food chain, not a totally comfortable position from which to deal with the more provocative philosophical forays, such as the proposal that arguing for intelligent design (creationism) of life versus adaptive behavior (evolution) is a false debate because “evolution and intelligence are one and the same process.”

Occasionally hobbled by its split focus on two audiences, but worth it for the battle of bugs vs. human immunity alone.