If as Socrates suggested, 'the unexamined life is not worth living', how can studying biology help?

I have tried to be a little bit playful with my title. It was originally going to read:

'If, as Socrates suggested, 'the unexamined life is not worth living', how might studying biology help?'

This implies that there are probably ways in which studying biology does help in the examination of life. After all, biology is supposed to be the study of living things. It also implies that I am going to reveal some of those ways in which studying biology helps.

Using 'can' allows the following implied reading:

'If, as Socrates suggested, 'the unexamined life is not worth living', how on Earth can studying biology possibly be of any use whatsoever?'

With that reading of the title, one is more likely to respond with 'Well surely it must. After all, biology is supposed to be the study of living things'. But a niggling doubt creeps in. Does biology help us examine life?

It is important at the outset to note a distinction between 'the examination of life' and what I have just called 'the study of living things'. Let us not assume that they are necessarily the same thing.

From a brief glance at your website, I appreciate that there is likely to be a range of different biologies represented here this evening. Thus, wanting to offer something that can be as helpful as possible to as many as possible, I propose drawing from my particular interests some general points that I hope you will find thought-provoking and applicable in some way or other as you see fit. To borrow a quote, 'As a biologist, I am more a bookworm than an earthworm.' I no longer do what you might call 'hands-on biology'. Instead, I do a great deal of reading and thinking about it. Indeed, thinking about things is something I have always been particularly keen to encourage.

Towards the end of last year, without as much fanfare as I'd expected, some of us reflected on the first manned space flight to the moon: Apollo 8 in December 1968. One of the most important things the astronauts said they found when they got there was the Earth.

Earth Rise - Apollo 8 (1968)

Close up, the Earth is something we rather take for granted. At a distance, it is perceived quite differently. There is something of a moral in this. Often, what we begin to explore ends up showing us things that we could never have envisaged at the outset. That is certainly my experience. In essence, my interests relate to the problem of the definition of the terms 'disease' and 'health' – or more broadly how these terms might be understood more meaningfully. It has been suggested that a definition does not have to be true. A definition helps explain what we mean. The trouble is, when it comes to 'disease' and 'health', we do not seem to know exactly what we mean. At least, nothing is agreed upon. Disease and health are words that are bandied about by anybody and everybody without much thought. They are non-technical, everyday words. We all know what disease and health are, until we look more closely and have to say what we think we mean. Then it's not so simple.

Defining disease and defining health are problems that a number of philosophers have spent a great deal of time and effort on without success. Defining one does not necessarily mean that one defines the other. Disease and health are not necessarily opposites or the converse of each other. So there are perhaps really two problems here. Even then, there is disagreement. Indeed, it may well be that there will never be agreement when it comes to these terms. In that case, you might well ask why I am interested in this. Scientists usually like problems that can be solved – not least during the tenure of their contract and the availability of their research grant. The simple answer to why I am interested in this is largely for the things it throws up in the process. The things I did not envisage at the outset. These include questioning how we think about ourselves as physical entities rather than as persons. Our corporeal existence comes under scrutiny.

For example, what we call disease is important not merely for how it affects us but for what it can tell us about what we are and how we are.

As the philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), has suggested:

'[I]f we want to learn anything really deep, we have to study it not in its 'normal', regular form, but in its critical state, in fever, in passion. If you want to know the normal healthy body, study it when it is abnormal, when it is ill.'

When somebody is in the critical, ill state that Lakatos mentions, our natural ethical reaction is to sympathise with the sufferer from a personal perspective and try to offer them some sort of comfort. In this respect, we are not being particularly scientific; we are being humane. We do not find biologists descending on hospital wards asking to look at patients in a critical, ill state so as to be able to understand our normal selves really deeply. But why not?

Human beings have been trying to explain their sufferings since they became human – and perhaps even before that. There is evidence that our cousins the Neanderthals and, before them, our common ancestor Homo Erectus, helped those of their own kind who were suffering or incapacitated. We might reasonably surmise that that fellow-feeling also went hand-in-hand with some form of interpretation or explanation – so far as their intellect allowed. Explanations of our sufferings did not begin with clinicians and do not belong to them alone. In fact, defining disease and health is something in which medical people have shown very little interest. Their role is to alleviate suffering not sit around cogitating about it. Their role is to find out what is needed and wield tried and tested remedies as appropriate.

Convention now has it that when it comes to studying our bodies, the abnormal belongs almost exclusively to medicine. Thus, a whole biological perspective on what it is to be a human is largely missing from biological study because biology is now, by convention, largely confined to looking at what is considered normal. Although informative, simply going to a pathology textbook does not instantly fill the gap. We should not assume that the pathologist is looking at things in the same way as a biologist. Understanding the mechanics of a pathological process at molecular or cellular level is not the same as understanding disease or health at organism level.

Some of my points may sound a bit philosophical. That is deliberate – they ought to given that I have referred, in my title, to Socrates. Some are put off by the very mention of the word 'philosophy' as if it were something difficult or esoteric. 'Philosophy' it has been suggested is merely 'thinking about thinking' – that is, thinking critically about what other people are saying. In thinking critically, we seek to take an idea as far as possible to its logical conclusions.

If somebody suggests to me that the Earth is flat, it must follow that ships will NOT disappear over the horizon but continue in view on the same flat plane for as far as my telescope can make out. That they do disappear over the horizon suggests that the Earth is at least curved. In being curved the Earth is, therefore, not flat.

Significantly, I have not set out to prove a point of my own. I have not tried to promote my belief that the Earth is a globe. I did not suggest that all one has to do is just look at the Apollo 8 picture shown earlier.

What I have done is interrogate a view that has been put to me. I am subsequently free to make a proposal of my own but in so doing it would be wise to interrogate my own thinking thoroughly before exposing it to interrogation by others. So philosophy is also 'thinking about one's own thinking'.

To engage in critical thinking, one does not have to have a degree in philosophy or the like.

It is not even necessary to be highly educated. Socrates was a case in point. Although the Delphic oracle stated that 'no one [was] wiser than Socrates', he in fact claimed to have no special knowledge: something that is often referred to as 'Socratic ignorance'.

And yet, Socrates marks something of a watershed in the history of thought. Such is his place in intellectual history that those who went before him are now referred to as the pre-Socratic thinkers. The work of these thinkers is known from written fragments that have survived or more indirectly from references to their ideas and sayings quoted by later writers. Interestingly, the ideas found in the pre-Socratics are what many people assume Ancient Greek philosophy to be all about. That is not the case.

For example, among the pre-Socratics was Zeno (c495-c430 BC), famous for the paradoxes that now bear his name. These include paradoxes about the seeming impossibility of getting from one place to another. For example, to get to the fire exit I must first travel half the distance from here to there. Then I must travel half the remaining distance, then half the remaining distance, ad infinitum. As a result, we must face the bleak prospect that we can never get out should the alarm sound.

We have all heard, I'm sure, these paradoxes in one form or another. We may have thought how amusing or how ridiculous. We may even have wondered who in their right mind would have come up with this stuff? However, it does perhaps help us understand the notion of a mathematical limit – an asymptote – more easily. In practice, Zeno and his paradoxes are closer to home than we might realise. Margulis and Sagan in their book 'What is Life?' suggest that…

'...science is asymptotic: it never arrives at but only approaches the tantalizing goal of final knowledge.' (Lynn Margulis & Dorian Sagan - ‘What is Life?’ - 1995)

By all accounts, Zeno lived to his early/mid-sixties and, as far as I know, did not die in a fire or, more significantly, of hunger or thirst through an inability to reach the dining table. So, this leads us to wonder whether the point he was really trying to make was, perhaps, more subtle than is generally assumed by those who fail to think deeply enough about what he was saying.

The questions the pre-Socratics were frequently asking were what we refer to now as metaphysical questions. Questions such as 'What is…', 'How is it so…', 'How came it to be…' etc. These questions are still important and have not gone away. They continue to permeate many of our modern scientific questions and so the metaphysical questions the Ancients posed – albeit in a way that seems odd to us today – continue to resonate. The big difference is that we now have access to data they lacked. We can now begin to address their questions more meaningfully.

Socrates (470-399 BC)

Socrates lived in the fifth century BC. As well as for his thinking, he was also renowned for his lack of good looks. He never wrote a book but what we have of his work comes from much more than mere fragments. Instead, quite sizeable, intact pieces have come down to us chiefly via his student Plato (c420s-340s BC). Plato not only wrote his own philosophy when his time came but related what Socrates had to say as well. This, of course, raises questions of how much of Plato comes out of the mouth of Socrates and how well Plato understood and conveyed what Socrates had previously said. These are technical points that, fortunately, need not worry us, this evening. What I want to do is draw a lesson not so much from what Socrates said but from his overall approach – what is now referred to as 'the Socratic method'.

Socrates did not so much teach as tease, or rather interrogate and tease apart ideas that others were rash enough to state in his hearing. Hence my flat Earth example earlier. The Socratic method is a thorough and careful interrogation of other people's thinking by a process of questioning. It is a form of intellectual dissection. It is not about two opponents slogging it out verbally until one is somehow cowed by the other. To perform the Socratic method, one does not necessarily even need specialised knowledge of a subject. One is testing the other thinker's thinking using what must follow from what they are saying. All it really takes is commonsense.

Socrates described himself as a gadfly. Athens was described as a lumbering old horse that needed to be bitten into action by such creatures. Socrates cast himself in that role. In so doing, he irritated people through his questioning; he exposed the weaknesses and flaws in their positions in simple and, therefore, quite devastating ways. Thus, among some – not least those who wanted their point of view to prevail – he made himself quite unpopular.

In due course, Socrates was accused of impiety and of corrupting the minds of the Athenian youth. It is in Plato's account of the resulting trial — known as 'The Apologia' — where the dictum 'the unexamined life is not worth living' may be found.

Although innocent – certainly to our minds – Socrates was found guilty. Although the possibility of fleeing into exile was available, that would have meant an end to Socrates' activity as a thinker. The value Socrates put on being free to think was such that he chose the punishment decreed: death. He chose to drink hemlock and die rather than accept a life that was no longer at liberty to examine life. Such a life would have been mere existence: a life of just staying alive – a life less than human; a life we might describe as mere Darwinian survival.

In the same position – and if he could have got his lip all the way to the poisoned cup – it is doubtful whether Zeno would have drunk the hemlock. Whereas the pre-Socratics were concerned with metaphysical questions, the life that Socrates and others of his ilk sought to examine was concerned with how best to live. This was a largely moral issue. How best to live was a question that exercised many minds in the Ancient world. The best or ideal life was held to be one of eudaimonia.

This is a difficult word to translate accurately. It literally means having a 'good spirit' but it is used to imply much more than just that. It denotes a human life that is 'flourishing'. Eudaimonia had a physical, bodily element to it but, to the Ancient mind, it was primarily about living a noble and honourable life.

This is perhaps good news for us since, as Socrates also states in 'The Apologia':

'the simple truth is, O Athenians, that I have nothing to do with physical speculations.'

This may well reflect something else about the wisdom of Socrates. As noted, the Ancients had the questions; they did not have the data. Unlike others, Socrates did not indulge in the idle speculations that typically followed from this. Lacking evidence, Socrates did not speculate about the physical nature of things. He was content to have gaps in his knowledge about the world.

If Socrates had nothing to do with physical speculations, that is good news for us as it leaves a quite sizeable area of life and living open for us to investigate using critical thinking and the data now available to help us.

In what ways then can we understand life in its sense of (non-moral) physical eudaimonia – that is, physical or corporeal flourishing? And what do impediments to that flourishing tell us about ourselves (à la Lakatos)? However, just going off and doing science – and in particular biological science – in the same old way that has been handed down to us is unlikely to be enough.

In the introduction to his lectures on logic, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) states that:

'The field of philosophy… can be reduced to the following questions:

(1) What can I know?

(2) What ought I to do?

(3) What may I hope?

(4) What is Man?

Obviously this is how he saw things in the 18th century and there will be those who do not now adopt this precise division. Philosophy has diversified somewhat since Kant's time. Nevertheless, these are questions of such a fundamental nature that I would like to use them as a convenient baseline.

Of these four questions…

…the first relates to Metaphysics, as already met;

the second to Morals, which concerned Socrates but not us;

the third to Religion, which we will omit;

and the fourth is related to Anthropology – using the word in its most general sense.

That is, the study of humankind – and not necessarily as currently encountered in academia where one finds Cultural/Social Anthropology and Physical Anthropology as distinct, circumscribed disciplines.

The first three questions relate to me as an individual: they are 'What… I…?' questions. The fourth relates to me as an individual but, at the same time, to us all. We might justifiably modify Question 4 to read 'What are we?' 'What are our characteristics?' From my focus on humans as physical entities, this is not the same as asking about the labels one attaches or finds attached to oneself or to others. It is not about personality or society; psychology or sociology. I wish to ask, 'What are we fundamentally?' My primary focus is the human body as it exists in the world. That focus is not simply the body as it presents itself lying open on the dissecting table or connected up in the physiology laboratory. But since I spent many a happy hour there, let me reminisce about the dissecting room for a moment.

I recall a conversation I once overheard at morning coffee in the Anatomy Department at Cardiff University, when I was a postgraduate student there in the mid-1980s. Somebody asked 'Where does Anatomy end?' What the questioner was asking about was how small does one go before one is no longer doing anatomy in the usual sense?

Anatomy literally means 'cutting up'. Does it stop with what the scalpel can cut or with what the microtome can cut for light microscopy or with what the ultramicrotome can cut for electron microscopy? And what about trypsinization? Using the enzyme trypsin, one can, in effect, cut cell-to-cell adhesions, thereby, reducing a piece of tissue to a suspension of individual cells.

In this vein, this is my all-time favourite illustration.

OHT-1

I used it first when our teaching relied on overhead projectors. Hence, I always refer to it fondly as OverHead Transparency 1 (OHT-1) as it was often the very first transparency I used when teaching anatomy and physiology courses. It dates from the 1980s but, in one form or another, one now finds a version of this image in all textbooks of anatomy and physiology as well as textbooks of biology – usually in the first chapter.

There is a variety of things that one can do with this picture above and beyond what the textbooks do with it. The textbooks speak only about structure and organisation – which they tell us increases from left to right with the arrow. One can take a variety of other views though.

For example, I used to work up to asking a particular question as follows:

On the right is a person – who is alive. Slit them open, look inside – one would describe their bodily or physiological systems as alive. The organs that make up those systems one would describe as alive. The tissues that make up those organs one would describe as alive. The cells that make up those tissues one would describe as alive. The atoms and molecules that make up those cells… are in no sense alive.

This is not a smooth transition. Between the cellular and the sub-cellular one jumps between the living and the non-living. This is the level of light and electron microscopy so this is not going on out of sight. When we look, what can we see? Is seeing alone enough to solve this conundrum?

Note the words used. The jump is not between the living and the dead but between the living and the non-living. While 'dead' does mean inanimate, lifeless, in this context, it is better to reserve 'dead' to mean 'once living but no longer so'. And since we are about it, somebody can be dead, in the 'once living but no longer so' sense, and yet their organs can still be alive or alive enough that they can be transplanted into somebody else and live on for quite some time. Dead, it seems, does not mean completely dead.

I said that this is my all-time favourite illustrations. This is not for nostalgic reasons – a yearning for overhead projectors – but because I return to it again and again when thinking about the body. What do diagrams like this tell us? Are they, in fact, correct? Are there any bits missing? Are there bits that should be removed, renamed or represented differently? These are questions upon which we should continually reflect. This diagram should not simply be put to the back of one's mind – the usual fate of the stuff in the first chapter of a textbook.

Diagrams like OHT-1 are now so common that one suspects authors feel obliged to include them.

But, in so doing, inclusion is done without much, if any, critical thinking. We need to supply that.

So, let me highlight something else using this diagram.

As we go across OHT-1 – right to left against the arrow once again – there is a gradual loss of uniqueness (if there can be gradations of uniqueness!). Put another way, there is an increase in 'generality'. The figure on the right is a unique individual occupying their bit of space-time: they are something/somebody quite specific. The term 'individual' is most appropriate; there is nobody else that is exactly the same. As a corporeal entity, there was never a 'you' before and there will never be another 'you' again. Immunologically, each organ is specific to a particular individual but what each organ does is much the same as any other organ of that type taken from any other individual. Organs from different individuals will vary in shape and size and in their efficiency but their set of processes is much the same in everybody. Hence, they can be transplanted from one person to another – immunological considerations notwithstanding. They do not have the kind of uniqueness that the individual enjoys. The same can be said of the cells and tissues; perhaps more so. The cells and tissues that comprise these organs have a turnover rate; they are self-replacing. This structural level may even be considered as characteristically impermanent. For a given organ, the set of cells and tissues of which it is composed is different at different times in an individual's life; there is constant change. Yet, (on the right) the individual seems almost invariable.

When we get down to the chemical level, we go from biological things to things of a quite different order. The things that comprise this level can make up anything. Give or take the odd isotope, the atoms that make up our bodies are identical with all others of their kind wherever one goes in the entire universe. Were we to proceed to the subatomic level, things there are best considered simply as classes of particles.

Something else goes on at this level. When the individual on the right is unwell, one thing we do is introduce chemicals – we call them drugs – at this level (on the left – below the living/non-living jump we mentioned a moment ago) and the life of that individual (all the way over to the right) is enhanced. Another set of chemicals that operate in a similar way enhancing the life of that individual on the right and also introduced at this level, we call nutrients.

So, what are we as corporeal beings? Remembering that we said that this was, in effect, an anthropological question, looking back at the academic anthropologies of the past, we see that there was, albeit unwittingly perhaps, a cultural bias. It was once implicit that white male adults held a special position in the natural order of things. In OHT-1, it is an adult male – who has perhaps a European outline – that is represented.

What do we have in mind when we use the phrase 'human being' though? They come in two sexes, in a range of shapes and sizes, ages and stages of development; in a range of pigmentations and other external and internal characteristics. Some of these also change with use, non-use and abuse and over time – accidents notwithstanding. There is no human type specimen in the way that many plants and animals have type specimens in collections around the world.

Were we to think of a human type specimen, it is possible that we may slip into imagining some sort of Adam- and/or Eve-like figure. Before the Fall, they were human ideals, both physically and morally. Whatever else one thinks of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, it may reflect a human characteristic: that of envisaging and looking to ideals rather than realities.

In the absence of ideals though, we often resort to simple averages and means. In the mid-twentieth century, the American obstetrician, gynaecologist and sometime sculptor, Robert Latou Dickinson (1861-1950) made two alabaster statues: one a male which he entitled Normman and the other a female entitled Norma.

Normman and Norma

They were not life-sized statues but their proportions were based upon averaged physical dimensions. Clearly, these are adult American proportions and not only that, the proportions of Americans of European ancestry.

Having made these statues, a competition to find a man and a woman who fitted these respective proportions was then undertaken. I do not know the outcome but Would you want to be Mr or Ms 'Average'? Would you want to be the partner of Mr or Ms 'Average'? (And out of interest, if Mr and Ms 'Average' had been found, what would they have thought of each other? Would they have inevitably found each other desirable?)

It has been objected that all that averaging such data does is produce a 'Dirty Grey Man' set of data – and similarly a 'Dirty Grey Woman' set. However, next time you have a blood or urine test, consider what the doctor is doing when evaluating your results. Against what do they make comparisons?

A similar attempt at a pair of representative human beings came with the image used for the plaques put on the spacecrafts Pioneer 10 in 1972 and Pioneer 11 in 1973.

The Pioneer Plaque

These were the first spacecraft that were ultimately to leave the solar system once they had achieved their missions. Therefore, some indication of who had sent these craft was proposed – should they ever be found by another civilisation. All manner of arguments swirled around this seemingly innocuous intention – not least the charge of obscenity given that these figures were naked. For our purposes, let us simply ask, are these representative human beings? So far as I know, no attempt was made in the 1970s, to find a man and woman resembling this couple.

Here, instead of relying on averaged proportions, the artist – Linda Salzman Sagan – relied on her own aesthetic sensibilities to project an impression of what she thought a typical pair of humans to be like.

Artists are sometimes taught that the human form is subject to a canon – a set of rules relating to proportion. The best recognised is the canon of Vitruvius (c. 80/70 – after c. 15BC). This forms the basis of Leonardo da Vinci's (1452-1519) drawing 'The Vitruvian Man' (also known as 'The Proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius').

The Vitruvian Man

We immediately recognise this as the draftsmanship of Leonardo da Vinci but overlook the fact that it is the thinking of Vitruvius. But who looks like him? And where is his female partner?

The anatomy and physiology which I used to teach (and you continue to learn) also has a canon in that it corresponds to a fairly consistent pattern; in effect, a set of unwritten rules. While it goes without saying that what one finds in a body is never exactly what one sees in a textbook – and vice versa – we, nevertheless, fail to appreciate fully the considerable range of variation that exists between individuals when we take a canonical approach.

Normman and Norma, the couple on the Pioneer plaques, notions of mean, average, ideal and now the canonical, should serve as warnings. The human body is in no way perfect. It does what it does but it could do a lot better. It could be arranged better internally. It could be more efficient physiologically. It could be less susceptible to a variety of common problems resulting from how it is organised. Textbooks do not dwell upon the body's shortcomings. They dwell on what is normal.

The trouble is, we assume 'normal' to mean what works well. As a result, it is easy to think of ourselves on a pedestal or worthy of the plinths upon which Normman and Norma were displayed.

Furthermore, canonical anatomy is not immune to error. A case in point is the cysterna chyli.

The Cysterna Chyli

This structure was first described in the 1650s by Jean Pecquet (1622-1674), a French anatomist whose work relied upon dissections using dogs. Notwithstanding this, the cysterna chyli went on to find its way into human anatomy texts – and there it has remained. Generations of medical students dissecting the posterior abdominal wall and not finding it have blamed their poor dissecting skills. However, modern studies using human material suggest that the cysterna chyli is actually present in only about 14% of cases.

I have now been around long enough to have even witnessed changes in the canon. When I was starting out, there was no such thing as the lower oesophageal sphincter – which is now said to be present at the bottom of the oesophagus where it joins the stomach.

The Lower Oesophageal Sphincter

Reflux of stomach contents up the oesophagus, we were told, was prevented by the acute angle at which the oesophagus met the stomach. Now, textbooks (mainly of American origin and spelling) suggest that a ring of muscle – the lower oesophageal sphincter – does that job.

Which is correct, I do not know. The rights and wrongs of the case do not really worry me. What we should learn instead from these examples is to be less dogmatic and a bit more circumspect about what we think we know, lest we confine ourselves within an intellectual straitjacket.

Although there is some scepticism, rumour has it that the American palaeontologist and anatomist, Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), bequeathed his bones to serve as the human skeletal type specimen.

Edward Drinker Cope – (1840-1897)

However, after his death they were found, upon examination, to show evidence of syphilis and were, therefore, rejected. Be that as it may, should his offer have been rejected if his only flaw had been having bad teeth? If we define as 'typical' something that is most frequent, then by that standard, it may be argued that tooth decay is 'typical'. Yet we call tooth decay a disorder – some even call it a disease. Some have even gone so far as to use the word ‘epidemic’ in association with tooth decay and so highlight just how typical it really is. It is at this point that philosophical discussions about what is normal and abnormal – What is health? and What is disease? – often go off in directions that end in what have been described as cul-de-sacs and blind alleys.

Returning to Lakatos' suggestion earlier what might tooth decay tell us about our corporeal selves? Let me pick out two things.

First, we have scope for decay. This may seem an odd thing to point out. The usual focus is on the consumption of too much sugar or exercising poor dental hygiene but what gets overlooked is our potential for decay in the first place; we have the ability to decay. We are decay-able – we have decay-ability.

Similarly, we might describe ourselves as disease-able – we have disease-ability. The nineteenth century French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), went so far as to suggest that a characteristic of living things was their susceptibility to disease and to death. Only living things could become diseased; only living things could die. The ways in which we can become unwell are characteristic of us as a species and as individuals. Humans get human diseases. Characteristic of humans are the conditions to which they succumb and also those to which they do not succumb.

Furthermore, this also points to our impermanence as organisms and the inevitability of our physical breakdown. None of us is immune to entropy. Our physical orderliness is only temporary. While we may think of the second law of thermodynamics as something to do with physics, it is just as relevant to biology.

The second thing I want to pick out from the example of tooth decay is something associated: we prefer to avoid pain. Tooth decay almost invariably leads to toothache – or odontogenic pain. This is one of the more commonly experienced pains. There are those who are even willing to forfeit a whole tooth just to be rid of the pain. Some will even go so far as to extract the tooth themselves. That we can feel pain – be it a minor irritation or severe agony – is important to our very existence. Those born with an inability to experience pain have – until quite recently – typically failed to live much beyond their second decade of life. Being unable to react to something as trivial (to us) as a paper cut can actually lead to quite debilitating – even life-threatening – infections.

Clearly, some system of awareness coupled with an ability to respond is important. Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher and cognitive scientist points out that even very simple organisms benefit from such a mechanism and even goes so far as to associate the term 'mind' (or 'something like') with this.

'Everything that moves needs something like a mind, to keep it out of harm's way and help it find the good things; even a lowly clam, which tends to stay in one place, has one of the key features of a mind – a harm-avoiding retreat of its feeding "foot" into its shell when something alarming is detected.'

(Daniel Dennett - ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ - 2006)

Notice here we have the idea of a mind without the necessity of there being a person associated with it. We can, at the very least, refer to this as a reflexive mechanism; even perhaps associate with it some notion of auto- or self-awareness in its most rudimentary form.

The Reflex Arc

We are, of course, familiar with the idea of the reflex arc formed by simple chains of neurons at all levels throughout the spinal cord; something like this being associated with the withdrawal of the clam's "foot".

It is very amusing to be tapped on the patella tendon and to see one's own foot kick up seemingly of its own volition. We think nothing of this test and yet it reflects perhaps one of the most significant features of our whole evolution. Were it not for the ability of neurons to form a simple chain of just three, then we would not be here thinking about the fact that they do. Once an input and an output neuron are chained together by an inter-neuron, then variation on this theme – that is, evolution within the number and arrangement of neurons – can give rise to all sorts of things, not least our whole nervous system.

We are usually informed that the nervous system is a vast and complex array of neural pathways and connections, one seemingly minor part of which we happen to call a reflex arc. However, it may be more accurate to consider the whole nervous system as, in effect, a reflex arc that has come to be modified into a vast array of neural pathways and connections.

The Edifice of the Central Nervous System (After R.C. Garry)

What was initially a simple aid to survival now, in a highly modified form, allows us to reflect on and examine life. Or would do, were it not for the canons by which our thinking is so often constrained.

In the textbooks of canonical anatomy and physiology, there is a missing final chapter. The overall textbook approach is to de-construct the human body in a fairly predictable way. Having done that over numerous chapters, there then follows, for me, something of an anticlimax. Having de-constructed him, nobody ever puts Humpty together again. There is no integrating final chapter; no making sense of it all.

For Socrates, 'the unexamined life [was] not worth living.' In the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle (1627-1691) said something in a similar vein declaring that...

'It is highly dishonourable for a Reasonable Soul to live in so Divinely built a Mansion as the Body [it] resides in, altogether unacquainted with the exquisite Structure of it.'

{Boyle refers to the 'Reasonable Soul' as 'she' because the Greek for soul – ψυχη – is a feminine noun.}

Television game shows have benefited greatly in the past from 'locate your organs' games. People's ignorance about where their own organs are located has proved to be a source of much hilarity and entertainment. There are people who do not know what's where within themselves. Lamentably, some even prefer not to know! We, however, must not only do as Boyle suggests and become acquainted with the structures – and the processes – of our bodies, we must try to make some sense of it all by asking those sorts of questions that the textbooks do not ask and perhaps cannot ask.

I used to say, when I taught a physiology module, that mine was the most important module of the lot. This was not because it had been given a special place in the degree programme as a whole. What allowed me to make such a bold statement – by which I still stand – was the simple fact that it was a module about us in our most fundamental sense. That being the case, it had to be the most important module of all. What is more, from what we are and how we are, everything else then follows. So, my module was not only what I claimed it to be but it was also only a starting point for an ever deeper and unending examination of our whole existence and how we find ourselves in the world.

So, for us biologists – earthworm and bookworm – done in the right way, 'examining life' – and not simply 'studying living things' – I suggest, can actually offer us a form of intellectual flourishing – or intellectual eudaimonia.