Skip to main content

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. 

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Interview by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more