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Kevin Mitchell - Five Way Interview

Kevin Mitchell is a graduate of the Genetics Department, Trinity College Dublin and received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (1997), where he studied nervous system development. He did postdoctoral research at Stanford University, using molecular genetics to study neural development in the mouse. Since 2002 he has been on the faculty at Trinity College Dublin and is now Associate Professor in Genetics and Neuroscience. He writes a popular blog on the intersection of genetics, development, neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry  His latest book is Free Agents, published by Princeton University Press, which is out now.

Why science?

I think I couldn’t help myself! I grew up with a fascination for the natural world, enchanted especially by animals and their behaviour. I also have always just wanted to understand things, at a deep level – it’s so frustrating not to! That led me to become a biologist and eventually to research at the intersection of genetics and neuroscience. Working in this field for nearly three decades now has only deepened my fascination for the wonders of the living world.

Why this book?

It felt important to me to push back on some of the claims and implications from neuroscience about what we really are. We’ve become so good at explaining behaviour and cognitive processes at the level of neural circuits that we risk explaining them away. We can be left with a picture of organisms, including human beings, as mere machines – complex stimulus-response automata, pushed around by neural mechanisms within them. This certainly seems to be the view of some prominent neuroscientists. However, we are not forced into that position. We can adopt a perspective that centres agency, goal-directedness, purpose, and meaning, couching these concepts in perfectly naturalistic terms. That was my goal with this book – to bring the organism back into the picture, to show how agency is actually the defining feature of life, and to argue that human beings in particular can exercise rational control over their behaviour in ways that fit the criteria for 'free will'.

Can a topic like this ever be purely scientific, or will there always be an element of philosophy?

Topics like agency and free will can – must! – be approached from both scientific and philosophical angles. I see these as highly complementary and both are necessary to get a good understanding of these phenomena. Paying attention to results from science can help ground otherwise abstract philosophical debates. Conversely, carefully considering conceptual issues and implicit philosophical framings can help keep scientists from making metaphysical claims that are not in fact supported by their findings.   

What’s next?

I’m just starting a new book – entitled The Genomic Code, for now – all about how the form and nature of an organism is encoded in its DNA. Debates about this go back to Aristotle and while modern genetics and developmental biology have revealed many of the underlying mechanisms, they haven’t really given us a good conceptual framework for how to think about the relationship between the genome and the organism. How does a simple molecule like DNA encode information about a complex thing like a cat or a dog or a human being – not just about their physical form, but their nature, their instincts and behavioural tendencies? How does the information get in there and how its interpreted through the processes of development? A clear, non-reductive way of thinking about that is what this book aims to provide. 

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’m very excited by what feels like a move away from simple, reductive, mechanistic thinking in biology – trying to understand how living beings work by analyzing their parts – back towards a more holistic, organismic, ecological sort of framework. This is largely thanks to the development of technologies for studying whole systems at a time – recording from thousands of neurons in a behaving animal, for example, or tracking the expression of every gene in every cell in a developing embryo. Figuring out what all those data mean is a daunting task but there are amazing computational tools being developed that can help us do that, and conceptual tools from the study of complex systems that are just what we need to grasp the logic of the dynamic processes of life. 

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