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| Why must it not be modified by the environment? To take a very simple example, a new-born baby's eyes are connected via other brain regions to the visual cortex, at the back of the brain. As the child develops, the eye grows, the different brain regions grow, and the visual cortex grow — but they grow at different rates. What you've got to do is keep an orderly relationship between the inputs from the eyes finally to the inputs to the visual cortex. Otherwise you'd cease to be able to see or make sense of what you saw. And you don't really want that to be too much screwed around by the environment. So you've got to have specific developmental mechanisms which hold that wiring and make sure that the connections are made and broken in an orderly way. That's specificity. On the other hand, you've also got to have plasticity, the ability to modify your response to the environment by depending on experience. Take the visual system again as an example — how the visual system is finally fine-tuned depends very much on the shapes and patterns that you experience as a young and developing child. Equally we have to learn, and learning means that we have to make and break and remold connections in our brains the whole time. This intense dynamism which is fundamental to understanding developmental processes, is lost in the argument that the ultra-Darwinians have that there is, if you like, almost a direct line between a gene and a phenotype, unmodifiable by environmental change. The crucial thing we have to understand, or that I want to understand as a scientist, theoretically and experimentally, is the way that this interplay occurs during development. And that's in a sense what memory is a special case of. Pat Bateson discusses this at some length in his new book Design For a Life. JB: Let's talk about your trip to the Galapagos with Pat. ROSE: The idea actually came originally from my partner
Hilary. She's a sociologist of science. She said to me one day, we've seen where
Marx and freud lived, and developed their ideas; isn't it time we looked at some
of the origins of that other extraordinary founder of modern ideas, and that's
Darwin. Of course you can go to Darwin's house just outside London and that's
interesting enough in itself, but the obvious place to go is the Galapagos. We
invited a group of ten social scientists and biologists, chartered a boat called
The Beagle III — Beagle I being Darwin's Beagle, Beagle II being the boat
that was owned by the Charles Darwin Research Center in the Galapagos which sank
it a few years ago — Beagle III is the new one. And we flew to Ecuador where
the group — an Anglo-American Italian party of biologists, and social scientists,
including Hilary and myself, Pat Bateson and his daughter Melissa, who works with
starlings, and Ruth Hubbard, who's the biochemist and critic of genetic determinism
and gene technology from Harvard. Pat Bateson is the colleague who I worked with
for many years on imprinting of a chick , and he and I have worked together and
shared ideas on many things over most of our lives, as it happens. But he knows
a tremendous amount, much more than I do, as an ethologist, a student of animal
behavior, about life in the wild.
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