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The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing
Download The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing
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Amazon.com Review
If we're so smart, why are we still at the mercy of treacherous microorganisms? The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing asks readers to let go of brain worship and look at the incredible problem-solving skills of viruses, ants, and other lowly creatures. Neurosurgeon Frank T. Vertosick Jr. seems an unlikely candidate to write a book celebrating noncerebral intelligence, but his knowledge helps him draw comparisons that others might miss. The fast-moving genetic intelligence of bacteria and immune systems might not match the precision of digital computers, but they have devised arms races much more complex--and deadly--than our comparatively paltry efforts. Vertosick's grasp of what it means to behave intelligently comes through clearly, even if he is as stumped as anyone trying to define the I word. Exploring parallels between neural networks, insect colonies, and our own brains, he finds common ground and shows that, as far as evolution is concerned, we're not so bright. It's not all bad, though: we're very good at what we do, and Vertosick hopes that we can learn to use our intelligence more wisely. --Rob Lightner
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From Library Journal
All life is intelligent, according to neurosurgeon Vertosick: "To be alive, one must think." A practicing neurosurgeon, Vertosick maintains that intelligence the ability to store experience and to use it to solve future problems is an emergent property of groups. Thus, bacteria, the immune system, and enzymes can be as smart as the human brain. All of these entities operate within networks that communicate and adapt to change in true Darwinian fashion. He further believes that this network paradigm of problem-solving originated at the cellular level. Unfortunately, some of his ideas, which he admits are highly speculative, seem merely an exercise in semantics. He completely avoids the issue of consciousness, which he dismisses as "irrelevant to his argument." At times, he seems unnecessarily provocative, labeling those who would disagree with him as "brain chauvinists" and arrogantly rejecting nonclinical biologists as lacking in the proper perspective. On the plus side, Vertosick, who also wrote Why We Hurt, is a skillful writer who makes frequent, effective use of analogies. His engaging descriptions of biological, chemical, and physical processes will appeal to a wide readership. Appropriate for public and academic libraries. Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product details
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Harcourt; 1 edition (June 5, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0151005516
ISBN-13: 978-0151005512
Product Dimensions:
6.5 x 1.5 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.4 out of 5 stars
11 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,320,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
One of my all-time favorite books, especially the first half of the book. It changed the way I look at biological life, i.e., life itself. I had the good fortune to first read Darwin, and then read Vertosick. Together, they are both superb.
This is a relatively good book to read. However, the promisethat the author makes in not being technical is only particallytrue. First, he concentrates too much on the medical explanationsthat, at times, are not entirely relevant. Second, his analogiesare silly at times particularly when the concept isalready well understood without the analogy. One has to knowthat the number of analogies given is not directly proportionalto how clear the concept will become to the reader.But as I said, this is a good book and if you can live bythe parts of the book that are irrelevant you may learnsomething new about the concept of intelligence and howintelligence can be observed in seemingly "dumb" things.
I did not like the way any of the story lines.
In my opinion, this is an important but complex book. Vertosick presents ideas based upon a sound, but I think, poorly referenced scientific basis. He explores how basins of attraction help us understand all levels of biology, from chemical / cellular reactions to the immune system to the brain. His basic model is that large collections of relatively simple parts can act in a network based upon Darwinian selection principles. For example, chemical reactions, directed by enzymes, are driven to find their most energy efficient solutions. The most successful reactions will dominate the rest. Vertosick details how his ideas apply to the cell, to the immune system and to the brain. I have read a lot of the groundwork material and so was prepared for concepts like basins of attraction, the general reader could have used a better notes or reference section.
Vertosick puts forth a point of view that we need to start thinking a bit more open-mindedly about what intelligence is. He gives very convicing examples of how things like the immune system, bacterial colonies, even cancer cells are intelligent. And relates them all to a Big Concept: Networks. He proposes that not just brains, but all types of intelligent systems are networks with emergent properties from lots of interactions and from Darwinian processes. I feel as I read it that he has taken a number of ill-formed, fuzzy Ideas that I have been thinking about, and made them clear and tangible. He is a great writer, who uses a lot of analogies to help us through the sometimes very technical material. It is one of those books that every thinking person must read, and I promise it will change you.
"The Genius Within" is a must read for the non-specialist interested in science. It is a thought provoking work; very speculative, but grounded in mainstream scientific fact and theory. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it...twice. It's a bit technical at times, so some familiarity with the science involved is recommended. Also, if you happen to be more interested in "intelligent" animal behavior as such, rather than in its biochemical, microbiological and systemic underpinnings, you may want to look elsewhere.In this book, the author explores the notion the "networks" underlie the phenomenon we call life, and that life is synonymous with the information processing - intelligence - they architect. We tend to think of intelligence as a unique feature of brains, our conscious ones in particular (he calls this "brain chauvinism"), but he contends that all life is intelligent, or at least as "intelligent as it needs to be", and sets out to prove it.In simplest terms, he defines intelligence as the ability to solve problems related to survival. This seems to run counter to mainstream evolutionary theory, where the survival of species is basically as matter of, well, "dumb luck". But the author views intelligence as a collective phenomenon firmly embedded within this framework; as an "emergent behavior" of large groups of highly interactive biological entities (Including sub-cellular enzymes) otherwise engaged in a contingency-driven, random struggle for survival. The architecture that endows such groups with "emergent properties" is called, for want of a better word, a "network" by the author.The details of what the author means by a "network" is closely argued and beyond the scope of this review. In general, a biological "network" is a large collection of "selfish", randomly interacting entities whose components are capable of two or more relatively stable, but reversible, states (more active/less active, faster/slower, stronger/weaker), and whose components can variously enhance or impede each other's status over time, resulting in a collective "energy landscape" patterned by forces impinging on the network. The former allows for basic information storage (the biological equivalent of zeros and ones), and the latter for collective information storage (pattern recognition/memory) concerning the environment, allowing the collective to respond to environmental stimuli in, ultimately, a manner conducive to its survival. Overall, the architecture of a "network" harnesses the random, contingent interactions of its constituents into the directed or, as the author would claim, intelligent actions we associate with life at every level of biological organization.The author spends much of the book "fleshing out" these and other abstractions, particularly with respects to interacting aggregates composed of things such as cellular enzymes, bacteria and somatic cells, what he calls "party networks" as opposed to "hard wired networks", though he does give ample attention to the latter (he is, after all, a brain surgeon). To assess intelligence from the "outside in", he employs a modified version of the Touring Test throughout these forays. Without making any assumptions about them based on what they are or how they're organized, he queries each system with a problem, and waits for a response. He queries an infectious bacterial species with a new antibiotic and, within months, it develops immunity. He queries the human immune system with the aforementioned bacteria and, within weeks, it develops an effective resistance. In these and other instances, he argues for an "intelligent" response from each based on their participation in network architecture, no more or less effective for the overall survival of its hosts than the quickened responses of "hard wired" brains.I gave this book a five-star rating, and with good reason, but I'm not entirely in agreement with its conclusions. Although "networking" is arguably a characteristic of all living systems, it seems somewhat disingenuous to define intelligence as the ability to solve problems regardless of the time frame involved. Given enough time and numbers, "dumb luck" will achieve results that appear intelligent, and so will tempt teleological interpretations. Mainstream evolutionists have long had to contend with our compulsion to put a "forger" between the hammers of chance and the anvil of necessity. Like them, I suspect the author's hypothesis, however plausible, is just another in a series of attempts to inject Vitalism into biology, "networks" here replacing the less than scientific musings of an earlier age.But then again, maybe I'm just a "brain chauvinist".
I didn't buy the author's claim that the biological systems he discusses qualify as human-equivalent or human-superior intelligences. The problem is that the author's model of intelligence doesn't come close to encompassing all of the mental operations we humans use to solve problems. Nevertheless, I found the book to be an enjoyable thought experiment. I would like to see a 2nd edition featuring a more sophisticated model of cognition.
As easy to read as a novel and just as enjoyable, it will forever change the way you see the world around you. It is one of those rare books that links together a number of more or less well known ideas and arrives at an extraordinary and inescapable set of conclusions. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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