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John and David Krakauer

2017; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 15 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2017.06.008

1879-0445

John K. John, David C. Krakauer,

Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology

John and David Krakauer were born in the US, grew up in Southern Portugal, and moved to London for secondary school. They are now both back in the US. This peripatetic existence is attributable to the whims and idiosyncrasies common to all families who seem incapable of living in one place. David is President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He served as the founding Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and Professor of genetics all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was previously at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a long-term fellow, and has degrees from Oxford and London Universities. His interest has always been in the evolution of intelligence in all of its variety and absence on planet earth. John is John C. Malone Professor, and Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, & Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab (www.BLAM-lab.org) at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His areas of research interest include experimental and computational studies of motor control and motor learning, and investigation of brain reorganization and motor recovery after stroke. John is also co-founder of the creative engineering Hopkins-based project named KATA, which is predicated on the idea that animal movement based on real physics is highly pleasurable, especially when the animal is under the control of our own movements. A simulated dolphin and other cetaceans developed by KATA has led to a therapeutic video game, interfaced with an FDA-approved three-dimensional exoskeletal robot, which is being used in an ongoing multi-site rehabilitation trial for early stroke recovery. John was undergraduate at Cambridge University and went to medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. How did you get interested in biology? John: I was always interested in animals. In Portugal, my most treasured books were about wildlife and I had the Jungle Book soundtrack on my little record player all the time. We also had quite the pet menagerie growing up, including German Shepherds and assorted mongrels, feral cats, hedgehogs, frogs, and ducks. Later I was a member of the Young Zoologists Club at London Zoo. Running along in parallel, however, was the desire to be a doctor. A school friend and I would go on frequent weekend pilgrimages to a medical bookshop, which has long-since closed, on Gower Street near University College Hospital in London. I can remember the reverence we felt for all those knowledge-heavy textbooks arrayed on dark shelves. This biology/medicine duality has never gone away. I spent my last year as an undergraduate in the Zoology department doing experiments on locomotion in the locust, nerve conduction in the worm, and DNA transcription in Xenopus oocytes, instructed by deep and original thinkers such as Malcolm Burroughs and John Gurdon. I then went on to medical school and residency in New York. During neurology residency I was drawn into the orbit of Columbia neuroscientist Claude Ghez who had trained in Italy in the grand physiological tradition with Pompeiano and Maffei: intellectual descendants of Sherrington, Granit, and Lundberg. Claude and I would have innumerable wide-ranging discussions over the years in which he taught me about diverse subjects ranging from the properties of muscle spindles to theories of the reaction time. Claude was (is) a hugely gifted experimentalist who transitioned over time from physiological studies in the cat to human psychophysics. He showed me how careful psychophysical experiments in healthy humans can reveal behavioral invariances, which provide clues as to how evolution designed the nervous system — specifically, how the problem of action is decomposed into a hierarchical physiological and anatomical architecture with an attendant computational and algorithmic modularity. David: I got interested in biology through the glimmer of an idea of life as an evolving computation. This derived from my early fascination with programming computers and the ridiculous idea that I shared with my nerdy friends, that we might create new life through simulation on an 8 bit 6502 processor. I was interested in the idea of what biology is before I was interested in biology itself. Physics always seemed rather obvious to me — the universe of particles, forces and fields. The living world is so much messier and odder, and frankly, incomprehensible. And the people practicing biology whom I read, Darwin, Linnaeus, Jacob, Darcy Thompson, were searching for ways of mapping this beautiful mess onto an underlying logic — taxonomical, algorithmic, and geometrical. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that what I was drawn to, even as a teenager, was complexity — the delicate balance of chance and necessity or noise and determinism. But as a young boy this was experienced more like a cybernetic fantasy, a world of weeds and wires, intelligent machines humming and rusting in dense forests. I am also very lucky as I grew up discussing science with my brother John and then continued the collaboration with my wife Jessica Flack, a Professor at SFI and director of the collective computation group, C4. Science is for me a family affair. If you had not made it as a scientist, what would you have become? David: I like large scale interlocking structures — things with many unpredictable moving parts. If I could I would shrink myself into the inside of a mechanical watch and bounce around like a loose movement. In lieu of this I became a scientist. And if this had failed — perhaps it has — I would have enjoyed directing films. I remember reading Siegfried Kracauer’s incredible book, From Caligary to Hitler, a history of Weimar filmmaking. I was struck by what he said about the chaos of cinematic composition, its democratic and decentralized character. Directing is just directing currents and setting the motivating voltages that activate a production. I enjoy all messy yet ultimately coherent worlds. The reason I love novels. John: In school I loved history and during medical school I would sneak off to Columbia’s Morningside campus to take graduate courses in literature, philosophy and art history. During residency I attended Richard Dworkin and Thomas Nagel’s famed political philosophy seminar at NYU. So I think I would have been quite happy as a historian or philosopher of science, and indeed have begun to get my feet wet in these areas recently. Cities and architecture are a bit of an obsession, so who knows what might have happened in a parallel universe. Like David, I also love film and have always fantasized about making either a documentary or the great American urban gay love story. The brilliant Barry Jenkins has now done the latter with Moonlight so I can let it go. If you could ask an omniscient higher being scientific questions, what would they be? David: Does physics plus enough time imply life? Does life plus enough time imply intelligence? Does intelligence plus enough time imply consciousness? Does consciousness plus enough time imply catastrophe? John: I have three rather specific questions that relate to my current work. First, how does spontaneous biological recovery after stroke work, what can we do to amplify and prolong it in the acute stroke period, and how can it be turned on again in the chronic stroke period? Second, what exactly are the unique contributions of the motor cortex, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum to motor learning and motor control? I know some may think this question overly modular but I think it can still be usefully asked. Finally, I would like to know what practice is and why it takes such a long time to become an expert at anything. In the absence of an omniscient being, I will settle with teaming up with David on this last question, as I suspect this has as much to do with task complexity as it does with neural constraints. What is wrong with science? John: There is a LOT wrong, at least in biomedical research and neuroscience, areas in which I am in a position to speak. Perhaps I can partially convey the problem through reference to Milan Kundera’s slim novel Slowness, written in 1995. At the beginning of the novel the narrator asks “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” In science, reading books, let alone writing them, is out. Imagine if a graduate student or post-doc were to say to their PI that they are off to the library to spend a few hours in quiet contemplation. The response would not be pretty. A corollary of this crowding out of thought is of course the horror of the current system of scientific publication and the twisted academic incentive system with which it is locked in a death embrace. I recently heard a senior professor talk with excitement about speakers they had invited to a symposium because of how many publications they had. This lamentable state of affairs, in which the measurement (publications) becomes the goal rather than what is measured (good science), is an example of Goodhart’s law, which was first applied to economics: “As soon as the government attempts to regulate any particular set of financial assets, these become unreliable indicators of economic trends.” A related symptom of this absurd situation is requests for ever-speedier review of manuscripts, which is to be predicted when the publication itself rather than its content is what is valued. In other words, the science currently encourages production of ever-shorter fragments that must burn ever more brightly to get attention. The journals revel in this superficiality, with articles increasingly reading like a combination of a TED talk and a needlessly complicated cooking recipe. I struggle to articulate precisely the feeling that comes over me when I start to read a typical neuroscience article in a top-tier journal; a mild cognitive allergic reaction sets in. The reigning house style is almost designed to irritate: the disappearance of a starting hypothesis, the substitution of well-constructed arguments by a few gnomic sentences, the presentation of hopelessly intricate figures designed to hide rather than to reveal, and the concluding statement, simultaneously exaggeration and anti-climax. My final concern relates to the state of biomedical research, with its relentless belief that we will solve disease either one molecule or one gene at a time. The ‘-omic’ phase we are in now is so over-hyped it is hard to know how to begin to describe the emperor’s less than attractive naked body. Michael Joyner and John Ioannidis, among others, have written very perceptively about this problem. People are rightly worried about the state of the humanities but my brother and I are similarly worried about science, as it is crowded out by technology-worship and frenzied data collection. David: I love science, implying doubt, uncertainty, experiment, theory, connections, mechanisms, prediction and understanding. Science is the most spectacularly disrespectful activity in the history of the world. It is a shock and probably a mistake that scientists are seen as respectable. At the same time science is hard, deliberative, and useful — it changes the world — for the better when coupled with sensible policies and when combined with a humanistic stance. As John puts it so well, today too much science has been derailed by short-term economic and technological considerations, mutant professional incentives, territoriality fitting of a medieval castle with mental moats, gates, and keeps, and a devastating disregard for historical and intellectual currents. It is high time we returned to our roots in radical, deep and irreverent scholarship of the sort discussed in the rich philosophical and historical work of Ian Hacking (Historical Ontology), Peter Galison (Image and Logic), and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (Leviathan and the Air Pump). How do you arrive at an interesting question? John: Science is for me about unease and puzzlement, which can be triggered either by observations in the world or by the feeling that prevailing ideas are not quite right. This unease leads me to design new experiments or to contemplate alternative conceptual frameworks. For example, I decided to take another look at what consolidation of motor memory is, at what the patient HM actually taught us, and at the efficacy of current neurorehabilitation. By nature I am a splitter, and like to break phenomena down into their more primitive component parts. I am wary of theories that prematurely see a single universal thing when there are lots of messy things. In a sense, I am a fox rather than a hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin’s famous dichotomy. I think a question is interesting when it has richness in its particularity but the answer has a more general principle hiding in it. David: The signature of an interesting question is complete and utter befuddlement, what John calls puzzlement. I am drawn to problems that are grounded in particularity and that suggest, through some subliminally intuitive hints, surprising generalities. Discomfort and unease is what I desire when I go to a talk — the opposite of boredom — and when I am pursuing the lead for an idea. I think of science the way that early naturalists might have thought about the world — full of frightening and unlikely organisms, each new encounter defying common sense. This feeling is captured by Darwin’s remark that “It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.” And the weirder the better, which leaves lots of room to reconcile multiple observations within lucid frameworks of some sort. How important are the humanities and the arts for your science? John: They have been and remain crucial to us both personally, but we also consider them central to the scientific enterprise itself. I am not alluding to the obvious fact that science is a cultural product and is therefore subject to ideologies that run along in parallel with its claims to objectivity. This is almost banal when stated as a generality but good scholarship on instances when prevailing fashions and ideas from outside of science influence science itself is both fascinating and important. One only has to think of the shameful relationship between racism and biology over the last two and half centuries. In a short essay on Nabokov, the writer WG Sebald (a huge favorite of ours) states: “the most brilliant passages in his prose often give the impression that our worldly doings are being observed by some other species..” This is what we love about Nabokov and Melville, and other writers, lyrical naturalists observing us. Artists look out at the world, transform it and in doing so enhance our understanding of it. Is this not what scientists also do? Like David, I find the divide between art and science pernicious and I suspect it comes, in part, from the belief that once things become formalized mathematically the fuzziness of art, which is expressed in images and words, is no longer needed. In my view this is profoundly wrong for biology — both with regard to how we think our way to scientific truths and the form in which we come to understand them. Also of great value is the fact that the academic units of the humanities are the extended essay and the book. These, in my view, are superior tools for thought than the typical short scientific paper. Having just co-authored a book, I have concluded that books through their length and organization demand extra complexity in one’s scientific thinking. David: We grew up reading books about physics, evolution, natural history, mathematical logic, and neuroscience. The gifts we gave each other for birthdays and Christmas were always books: fiction, philosophy and science. Favorites include Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, George Perec, Bertrand Russell, Martin Gardner, Raymond Smullyan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Medawar, Stephen Jay Gould, and Oliver Sacks. So naturally I am depressed by the idea of a world that is not rich in science, the humanities, and the arts. These are all representational endeavors — all seek to encode into abstraction some essential elements of reality. They find and communicate patterns, and in so doing, render parts of perception comprehensible and in some special cases make our lives better. It is a terrible state of affairs that our educational system allows for such an extreme fragmentation of knowledge. When you consider the range of ideas and stylistic excellence of Newton, Darwin, Thompson, Einstein, Bohr, Poincare, not to speak of my colleague at SFI, Murray Gell-Mann, you see that they all read voraciously, they all grapple with very deep ideas and they accept that they can only make a professional contribution to a very small number of them. The fact that we are limited in time and ability should not make us limited in curiosity and culture. I place Melville’s Moby Dick beside Darwin’s Origin of Species, Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities beside Thompson’s On Growth and Form, and Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat beside Isaiah Berlin’s Crooked Timber of Humanity. What scientific works — paper or book — have changed the way you think? David: I loved the arcane unity of On Growth and Form, the genealogical depth of Gould’s essays in Natural History magazine, Martin Gardner’s graceful expositions of mathematics, Daniel Dennett’s rigorous demolitions of obfuscation in Brain Storms, Feyerabend’s incendiary and maddening alternative philosophy of science, Darwin’s anti-authoritarian insights recorded while nauseated at sea, and Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach — one of the few successful fusions of deep ideas spanning the arts and sciences. No single book changed the way I think, but in totality books have made thinking my most passionate habit. When it comes to papers a few standout: Nash’s Non-cooperative games from 1951, Turing’s The chemical basis of morphogenesis from 1952, and Jacob and Monod’s Genetic regulatory elements in the synthesis of proteins from 1961. These are certainly very high water marks. And they are all elegantly written, all introduce or at least integrate very big ideas, and all do so without a profusion of pointless citations. John: I was very much influenced by Richard Passingham’s book The Frontal Lobes and Voluntary Action, in which chapter by chapter, he maps motor behavior onto the physiology and anatomy of the motor, premotor and prefrontal cortices. This book has served as a mental template ever since. Similarly, Robert Porter’s and Roger Lemon’s Corticospinal Function and Voluntary Movement is another treasure trove of scholarly exegesis on comparative motor physiology and anatomy that I return to all the time. Two other books that stay with me are Ian Hacking’s brilliant introduction to the philosophy of science Representing and Intervening, and Randall Collins’ massive The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (a gift from David and his wife Jessica). Hacking argues strongly for the continued importance of experiment in its own right and not just as the supplier of material for theory. Collin’s argues that creative ideas arise out of interaction rituals between groups of friends. Once you have read this it becomes clear how silly tenure based on individuals showing independence is. For me, Eric Knudsen’s classic papers investigating how binocular displacing prisms in young and adult barn owls cause corresponding changes in their auditory maps are beautiful exemplars of experimental design and scientific writing.