Rutter – biology

The idea that all the answers lie within the cell is an absurd oversimplification. So that what’s going on in the cell provides what is relevant in relation to learning, emotion, social relationships, so we need to understand how that happens, but the precise ways in which this is operated out in social relationships or emotions will be personal.  

Now, some scientists, not me, get agitated that are you saying then that it’s all free will? No. On the other hand what I am saying is it’s not all deterministic. So that the goals of physics are very much to find a law that applies to all matter in all situations all over the world and indeed in other planets if that’s what you’re interested in. Biology isn’t like that. Biology is probabilistic; so that we know that at a very simple level that the construction of the brain involves genetic programming of the neurons where they’re at, the ways in which the neurons migrate from one part of the brain to another, but it doesn’t get it completely right. It’s probabilistic and therefore what it built in is a way of pruning, so the neurons that are working and serving a useful purpose are retained, the ones that aren’t get deleted. That’s typical of biology as a whole and why minor errors in development are almost universal.