You seem to concede that there's an element of mystery to human life, though you don't use the word.
"Every slight difference adds up to different personalities," you say, and I think you're right-though this
needn't be taken as a hard and fast rule. But you also acknowledge that scientists are a long way from
being able to pin the stuff of these slight differences down: "In 100 years ... more will be revealed from
neurobiology and behavior." I'm sure you're right about this.
But I'm much more skeptical than you are that what most people see as mystery in life will be
completely cleared up. That won't be because people haven't been sufficiently educated but because life
really is as people experience it-namely, partly mysterious. I notice that you dedicated your doctoral
dissertation to your kids, "the greatest gifts of nature in my life." Perhaps the feelings you have for your
children correspond perfectly with the view that these amazingly complex little robots consuming oxygen
in a meaningless universe are the products of time + chance, but most people don't see things that way.
Maybe it's because they need education.
Or maybe a lot of people would be glad to know as much about neurobiology as they could (I wish I
had more time to read about it) because they would find it fascinating; they would find their appreciation
for the wondrous complexity of humans bolstered, if not fully explained. I don't know; I don't want to talk
nonsense (my recent research involves studies of early-twentiethcentury northwestern Alaska!). But I am
reluctant to accept the suggestion that neurobiologists are the messiahs of the new age. I'm all for
neurobiology but, given the human record, I'm skeptical of people who have the Answer, or who say that
they're in the process of arriving at it. We see eye to eye here, though I think that in some ways you're a
greater man of faith than I am.
Greg Graff in, "The Answer," Generator (1991)
If neurobiology is at times fundamentally at odds with common sense and common experience, then life
is even more ridiculous than the most committed cynics would have us think.
I wonder if this drive-not for education but for the silver bullet that will finally snuff God-isn't a recent
example of what humans have been up to for a long timereally, since the beginning of recorded history.
Gilgamesh wanted to take his place among the gods; the builders of the tower at Babel wanted to build an