INCOGNITO by David Eagleman -- enjoyable, looking forward to more and better from this author

At the Sunday Morning Book Club of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Houston, we finished our discussion of INCOGNITO by David Eagleman. I waxed and waned on this book quite a bit - probably more so on this book than any I have read recently. I found some chapters very enlightening and other chapters kind of "thin" possibly written mainly to entertain and achieve a bestseller status (which it did). But the final chapter did not disappoint and was the best part of the book.

I learned some minor details about things such as seizures of those with temporal lobe epilepsy which induce victims of this disease (or condition) to hear voices from an external presence such as God and often to be hyper-religious. It has been speculated by some neuro-scientists that Muhammad had such seizures as well as Joan of Arc.

I also learned not such minor details such as in David Eagleman's opinion, the Human Genome Project was a failure. He said that we HAD to complete it but that doesn't mean it achieved the expectations that many hoped for. Basically the Human Genome Project convinced many scientists (perhaps not all?) that the complexity of our DNA is to such a degree that finding solutions for diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease has been moved out to a much further horizon in time.

And continuing on the subject of complexity, combined with the subject of reductionism which basically is a method of scientific inquiry where scientists spend lots of time in labs examining molecules, Eagleman indicated he thought we needed to totally re-think this method of inquiry - that it was doomed to failure - can't remember if he used these exact words but this was my conclusion based on what I read of his opinions. He was definitely pessimistic about successfully understanding human life if we didn't radically pursue other paths of investigation. Made a few of us in our discussion think of the often used term "paradigm shift".

He sums up this point near the end of the book by writing the following:

A meaningful theory of human biology cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics, but instead must be understood in its own vocabulary of evolution, competition, reward, desire, reputation, avarice, friendship, trust, hunger, and so on - in the same way that traffic flow will be understood not in the vocabulary of screws and spark plugs, but instead in terms of speed limits, rush hours, road rage, and people wanting to get home to their families as soon as possible when their workday is over.

Looking forward to our discussion next Sunday, July 15th when we will begin a new book titled THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by Will Durant. More information about our group can be found at www.houstonbookclubs.org/SundayMorning/