The Last Post

Yaksha (from Wikimedia)

In that great book of ours, the Mahabharata, one chapter I find worth reading and rereading is that of the Aranya Parva, which has to do with the Yaksha, and his many questions. (The idea of an examination where the consequences of failure are dire is an interesting one, and the resemblance to a vice-chancellorship is quite unmistakeable.) In the final parts, the Yaksha asks, “What is most wonderful?”, and Yudhishthira (who by then is the only survivor) answers,“… Day after day, countless creatures go to the abode of Yama, yet those that remain behind believe themselves to be immortal. What can be more wonderful than this? ”

A Vice Chancellor is appointed at the University for a five year term. I came here on the 1st of June 2011, and so should have stayed until the 31st May, 2016. However, that is not to be. I shall be leaving somewhat sooner than that.

The reasons for this early departure from the position are purely personal, and I appreciate all those who will respect and protect my privacy on this count. While some aspects of why I wish to leave are known to some, the interpolations and extrapolations are many, all of them incomplete and in the end, all probably incorrect as well.

As my term at the UoH draws to a close, it is impossible to not try to take stock, and also impossible to not make a wish list of what still needs to be done, the miles to go… Difficult though it is, I shall do neither. Three years and a half is not a short time, but it is also not long, and I am sorry to leave when so much that I had in mind remains unfinished. There’s really not much point making any evaluation on such timescales- as I have said earlier on these pages, the race is not always to the swift.

I have valued my time at the University and am grateful for the great opportunities that it has provided me. In particular, for the chance to take the road less traveled by. The UoH has completed forty years in 2014, so one is also reasonably secure that ours is a robust system, one that has weathered many storms and one that is strong in its foundations. I am therefore confident that work that is started today will be continued if it is truly in the best interests of the University, and that the best traditions of the University will be upheld.

Since this is “The Unofficial Blog of the VC, University of Hyderabad”, this particular post is going to be the last from my pen or (to be more factually accurate) the last that I will type out on my keyboard as VC. It has been a good way to get some things communicated more widely, and I have certainly enjoyed writing it as much as I have enjoyed being here. And that is probably a good note on which to end.

Republic Day, 2015

Friends-

This is the fourth time I have had the privilege of addressing the UoH community on the occasion of Republic Day. Like all anniversaries, this provides for a stocktaking and gives an opportunity to reflect upon our goals as a university.

My inspiration for the few words I wish to share with you today come from our Chancellor, Prof. C H Hanumantha Rao (see the previous post)  who’s term formally came to a close earlier this month. Hanumantha Rao-garu has been a wise counsel, an elder on whom we could always bank upon at all times, not just times of crisis. Recently, when he was speaking of his alma mater, the Delhi School of Economics, he recalled the early days of the School and the founder, Dr. V K R V Rao, and some of the ideals that guided the formation of that great institution.

The main impetus to form such an institution- indeed the main aim we should have for our own university- is to have a place where “scholars can enjoy freedom of thought and expression”. This is important in order for them to be able to contribute to policy-making in a fearless manner, he pointed out, but I would add, it is important also that scholars should have complete freedom of thought, speech and expression so that they can create new modes of thinking, new works, and lead others to think along new and creative lines. At a time when freedom of expression can be curbed in so many ways, it is necessary to underscore the importance of spaces such as our University.

A second ideal that will strike a chord with all of us is the goal of achieving academic excellence. There are so many ways of achieving this goal, and all of them are difficult. Bringing together a group of excellent and committed individuals is one way, but that has its own challenges. To a very large extent, our University did try that route and some of the initial faculty were truly stellar. Keeping up the tempo is more of a challenge, and we are only slowly recognizing the difficulty of this path to academic excellence, the need to keep building up and maintaining a team of competent faculty. It is also important to not flag, and to not give up in any dimension of endeavour…

A third ideal which VKRV Rao appears to have passionately held and communicated to teachers and students was a dedication to social commitment, which Prof. Hanumantha Rao says he thought was as important as technical competence. I think that it is necessary to recall this most strongly in these very trying days- the pursuit of individual goals has slowly but surely weakened this social commitment, and this has not been to our advantage as a society which continues to face nearly as many challenges today as it did forty years ago when our University was founded.

It is interesting that one means of achieving this, in the eyes of VKRV Rao, was in an “interdisciplinary approach in addressing socio-economic problems”. I need hardly emphasise that we too share this ideal in our University, and in the way in which we have developed in the past few decades, in particular under the rubric of the University with Potential for Excellence. Much as we bridle under the implications of the word “Potential” in the phrase, it should be acknowledged that it is fair: our goals of excellence are some distance away and need our concentrated and concerted efforts.

Our University has recently been awarded an additional grant under the UPE scheme, a grant that will help us better realize the goal of providing space to explore scholarship with complete freedom. We should use this to reach the excellence we are capable of. One of the things we need, paradoxically, is more spaces to study and more spaces where we can train ourselves to meet the challenges of the outside world. The University is committed to providing these and in the near future, we plan to construct a Reading Room in the South Campus (it would be fitting to name it after Savitribai Phule when it is done). A second structure that is planned is the Samatha Bhavan, a unified space where students can come together to train themselves and be trained in dimensions – other than just academics – that are needed in order to be better prepared when they leave the University.

As before, I would also like to draw our attention to the very special privileges that being at a comprehensive University such as ours give us all automatically. The University is very young and has just started along its path of growth- we need to pay special attention to how we expand and how we share our good fortune with others who have less by way of facilities, infrastructure and expertise. The UoH has a leadership role to play in the community of Universities, and we should find the way to do so responsibly, as well as to do this with generosity.

We have many goals as a University, the main one being to provide a space where there can be complete freedom of thought, and the freedom to explore all scholarly modes of expression. This needs both dedication as well as imagination, catalyzed by collaboration across disciplines. No discipline has all the answers- indeed no discipline has all the questions! We should see how best to use our freedom for public good- not just in terms of educating larger numbers of our citizenry, but also to bring about important interventions in the public space and to mold public policy, thereby strengthening the fabric of the Republic.

Jai Hind!

A Chancellor Speaks

The Chief Guest at the Inaugural Session of the Annual Day Celebrations of the Delhi School of Economics on 16 January, 2015 was our Chancellor, Prof. C. H. Hanumantha Rao. When I read the text of his address, I was struck by several of the observations he made and  felt that many among us would be keen to learn some of the history of major institutions such as the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) and the Institute for Economics Growth (IEG), and also of the personal history of stalwarts who were associated with these institutions.  Prof. Hanumantha Rao has been kind enough to let me reproduce the address in this blog.

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The Delhi School of Economics was founded by Professor V. K. R. V. Rao with a high ideal of training economists and other social scientists for their effective participation in nation-building. The existence of the Delhi School of Economics on the pattern of the London School of Economics inspired many among the younger generation in different parts of the country to benefit from this opportunity opened up for advanced learning. The same inspiration brought me with a zeal to the Delhi School of Economics in August 1957 from  the Osmania University. I was lucky to be registered for Ph.D. at the DSE with encouragement from Prof. A. M. Khusro.

My first opportunity to listen to Prof. V. K. R. V. Rao at the DSE was in this Vivekananda Hall on the occasion of its Founder’s Day on 14th November, 1957. He spoke with great passion about the ideals of the DSE. First and foremost among these ideals he said was  freedom of thought and expression. I came to know years later that his founding the DSE owed primarily to his own struggle for freedom of thought and expression. He narrated how, while speaking as a member of an official delegation in those days, he was interrupted by its head, a civil servant of the ICS cadre, by saying that economists are expected to ‘produce’ arguments in support of the official line and not air their ‘own’  views! This infuriated Prof. Rao who decided to resign from his post in the government the very next day to start an autonomous institution where scholars can enjoy freedom of thought and expression to be able to contribute to policy-making in a fearless manner.

Achieving academic excellence was another great ideal for him. For this purpose he recruited professors of great distinction from different universities in India and abroad. Apart from Professors B. N. Ganguli and P. N. Dhar who together with him formed a trio in the then small department of economics working tirelessly towards shaping the DSE, he brought, in the first round, eminent scholars like professors K. N. Raj, B. V. Krishnamurthy, M. N. Srinivas, M. S. A. Rao, Tapan Roy Chaudhury, A. M. Khusro, Siva Subramanyan, George Kuriyan, V. L. S. Prakash Rao and others.

The third ideal which he passionately exhorted the teachers and students to follow was social commitment which he thought was as important as technical competence. Drawing inspiration from the freedom movement, he felt that ensuring a just social order in the country was not possible without social commitment. Towards this end, he strongly believed in the need for an inter-disciplinary approach in addressing socioeconomic problems. Therefore, in all the institutions he established, namely, Delhi School of Economics, Institute of Economic Growth, and the Institute for Social and Economic Change at Bangalore, he took great pains to accommodate different disciplines in social sciences to facilitate fruitful interaction.

Thanks to the functioning of our democratic set-up for over 60 years and the existence of institutions such as the University Grants Commission and the Indian Council of Social Science Research, we enjoy today far greater measure of autonomy and freedom of thought and expression when compared to the immediate post-independence period.

In respect of academic excellence too, we are today in a much better position than in the early years of the DSE. I was a witness to the virtually demoralizing intellectual atmosphere in the room where the Ph. D. scholars used to be seated. I found that quite a few of them had already spent 5 to 7 years or more groping for the subject. To a considerable extent, this reflected the research culture in a typical Indian university in those days. The emphasis then was on producing a bulky thesis after a great deal of reading and summarizing the literature, with an objective of making a ‘lasting’ contribution to the subject! Happily, the focus gradually shifted to the quality of research questions addressed in the thesis, methods of analysis followed and the significance of the findings arrived at.

At the time of founding of the IEG in 1958, certain sections of the DSE, including the Economic Development Section, headed by Prof. A. M. Khusro, and supported by the Ford Foundation, where I was a Ph. D. scholar, were shifted to the IEG. Having been associated with the Institute of Economic Growth in the neighbourhood for 50 years until its Golden Jubilee Celebrations in 2008, I can testify to the beneficial impact that the DSE had all along on the research work done at the IEG.

Many in the IEG faculty had completed their Ph.D. from the DSE and continued their academic links with the parent institution. IEG faculty has had an active collaboration with the DSE in providing guidance to the M. Phil. as well as Ph. D. students. The use of econometric techniques was virtually non-existent in the early years of DSE, but very soon became popular with the stalwarts in the subject like Prof. A. L. Nagar and Prof. K. L. Krishna coming on the scene. The IEG and DSE have had major collaborative projects in Macro-Econometric Modelling for India with Professor K. Krishnamurthy of IEG and Professor V. N. Pandit of DSE as leaders of the project. When academic institutions happen to be next door neighbours with common interest, scholars across these institutions easily walking into each other’s rooms, not uncommon in both the institutions, for exchanging views and engaging in discussions could perhaps prove to be as fruitful as projects jointly undertaken.

The scholars of both the institutions are well-known for their broader approach to development. For example, the issues of sustainability and social justice have figured prominently in their research agenda. Besides, they have actively participated in shaping socio-economic policies in the country as members of various expert committees and commissions. Prominent among economists well known for their broader approach to development are Professors V. K. R. V. Rao, P. N. Dhar and Raj Krishna who starting from the DSE made substantial contributions at the IEG. Similarly, the contributions made by scholars like K. N. Raj, Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen from the DSE on broader issues of development have greatly inspired scholars in both these institutions and in the country at large towards engaging themselves on socially relevant issues. We from the DSE and IEG are proud of the fact that Prof. Manmohan Singh, the architect of economic reforms in the country as Finance Minister in the early 1990s had been a professor at the DSE before he joined the government, and is president of IEG. Again, as Prime Minister he brought in the perspective of ‘inclusive growth’ which has been widely supported in the country.

All these scholars have been open to inter-disciplinary approach to development.  Carrying this tradition forward requires harnessing satisfactorily the potential for collaboration between scholars working in different disciplines. Some interaction between such scholars is inevitable when they are working under the same roof, as, for example, when they meet every day at tea in the common room! A more serious exposure to each other’s work takes place through participation in seminars. Attending each others’ seminars apart, it needs a deliberate effort to formulate projects where scholars from different disciplines collaborate on issues of applied nature. Most of our failures on the policy front are traceable to the lack of such a broader inter-disciplinary approach.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the organizers of this event for remembering me as an old boy of DSE and providing me the opportunity of meeting so many friends at these celebrations.

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The emphasis added above is mine. I believe that we can all benefit from more interaction, by enjoying each other’s work in whatever way possible. Institutions like the DSE and the ISE or indeed the CSEC or CESS in Hyderabad have all benefited from a strong emphasis on interaction and collaboration, and there is much to learn from examples, especially when they have touched our lives so strongly. Prof. Hanumantha Rao’s tenure as our Chancellor ends this month. We are truly fortunate to have been associated with him.

New Year Greetings!

Here’s wishing the UoH family a very Happy New Year! I hope the year will bring us all closer to our own goals as a University, and also closer to our own individual goals and closer as a University! And I hope that we will also find a year of peace that will allow us all to grow in every important way.

I hope we learn better to enjoy the very special environment in which we work and live, and that we appreciate, nurture and protect it even more than we already do! Our campus is a very special place, and it is a wonderful gift that we already have, a gift that renews itself each day!

May 2015 be a happy year for all of us!

15=6+8+22

No, its not the title of Chetan Bhagat’s next novel (though it could well be). A colleague in the School of Life Sciences pointed me to a new site, Nature Index, “A global indicator of high-quality research” that “tracks the affiliations of high-quality scientific articles. Updated monthly, the Nature Index presents recent research outputs by institution and country.”

The 15 in the title above, is the overall ranking of the UoH, relative to all Indian institutions, based on our publications in all scientific fields, with 6, 8, and 22 being the rankings separately in Chemistry, Life Sciences and Physics. This is for the year 1 September 2013 to 31 August 2014, and presumably other time periods can be queried on the NI site as well.

There is reason to be pleased. We are the highest ranked University overall, and above us are only institutes like TIFR, RRI, IISc and consortia like the entire IIT system or all the CSIR laboratories put together. And this has happened in spite of the poor funding for science in the country, and for Universities in particular. As we are painfully aware, the real level of funding that we have to contend with has been very very meagre…

The ranking is based on the Article Count, namely the number of articles published from the institution. More formally, “a count of one is assigned to an institution or country if one or more authors of the research article are from that institution or country, regardless of how many co-authors there are from outside that institution or country” in computing the AC. There are other measures that can make us look even better such as the Fractional Count (FC), “that takes into account the percentage of authors from that institution (or country) and the number of affiliated institutions per article. For calculation of the FC, all authors are considered to have contributed equally to the article”, and the equation in the title then becomes, if we use the FC, 8=6+11+19. And to normalize, the corresponding equation for another Central University with which we share many similarities is 18=22+3+29.

In all these lists, there are no Universities that are ranked above us in Chemistry, one in the Life Sciences, and very few in Physics, so these country specific rankings say as much about us as about the funding patterns, the focus on research, and on infrastructure and support. Nevertheless, if anyone out there is looking, its pretty clear which among the Central Universities really is a University of Excellence.

An Elegiac Gulzar

The many treats on campus in the last couple of weeks- that included the concert by Hariprasad Chaurasia, the lectures by Sivakami, Sharankumar Limbale, C. Rangarajan and by Gopalkrishna Gandhi– were capped, as it were, by the short but intense visit of the poet Gulzar.

Gulzar (aka Sampooran Singh Kalra) came to collect the honorary doctorate that we had conferred upon him at the convocation in October this year, and in the hour-long ceremony, interacted with a full audience in the DST Auditorium. To welcome him to the UoH the Head of the Department of Urdu, Professor Muzaffer Ali Shahmiri had written four stanzas, reproduced on the left (in the Devnagari script).

Gulzar’s acceptance speech was gracious, and much of the question and answer session that followed centred around his poetry and the films that he had written and directed. As the brief discussion drew to an end, though, he let his regret show, that although he had stopped making movies nearly twenty years earlier, the audience focused mostly on that and not his books…

And his books- there are as many as 74 listed on Goodreads, with four on the Penguin current list (in English)- are on varied topics for diverse audiences. Poems for the environment, for children, and many collections of short stories, some familiar from the movies that were made from them, but all of them touching several chords. “Kitaabain jhankti hain band almari ke sheeshoon se,” he said, a touch of sadness, “badi hasrat se takti hain maheenon ab mulaqaatain nahi hoti”.

So much of Gulzar’s legacy is accessible through the visual medium of the movies, but there is also the socially conscious poet and writer who insists that we need to read his work, not just to be spoken to by his songs and dialogues, in order to truly understand what he is all about.

There is much truth in that, and his books not only beckon from behind the closed doors of almirahs, they now also come to us on other devices and platforms, waiting and indeed wanting to be read. One cannot but agree;  opening a book is a good way to also open a mind…

An autumn stillness

Boris Pasternak’s poem Let’s drop words… has these evocative lines,  No need to analyse why, with such ceremony, foliage is sprinkled with madder and lemon.

The words acquired new meaning for me when the landscape matched the mood one recent afternoon outside the Munch Museum in Oslo, the clouds, the shadows, the trees, and the sky, all conspired to create a scene that evoked hidden memories.

Life, like an autumn stillness, is all detail.

The things that stand out sharp in the mind’s eye, the colour of the sky another October morning, the stillness of a pond, another set of leaves changing hues, the goldenness of carp as they swam lazily in the cooling water. Many images flit by, some remembered, some reminded, and some imagined too, I suppose.

There are places that are gifted with seasons that change so drastically that they can punctuate the year. In some latitudes- regrettably not ours- autumn is like a semicolon; the sentence of the summer pauses before the winter period sets in. Or maybe the autumn is more like an ellipsis… much indicated, but leaving much unsaid and much implied.

There’s something to having certain times of year reserved for certain feelings- like not being able to eat a mango after August. It is a sort of emotional self-discipline really, that certain times should be preserved for certain things. And while one can do different things best in different seasons, the fall is a time like no other that invites reflection, when hope is tempered by experience.

But yet there is a sadness that the passing of autumn captures, the rich burst of colour in the leaves that will fall, the flamboyance of that final lonely passage, that cummings wrote so cleverly about. The various shades of lemon or madder, of orange, and of yellow- indeed no reason to analyse why, or even more unnecessarily, how.

You’ll ask, says Pasternak, who ordains it? The omnipotent god of details. That god of very small things…

Genes, brains, and unpredictability

About fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay with the above title, based on a talk that I had given at the Dongguk University in Seoul. The subtitle of the talk, Developments in the sciences and reflections on what it means to be alive, was my attempt to integrate some ideas of complexity in dynamics, namely the chaos theory that is one of my main research interests with what I was learning then about the human genome. It was delivered to an audience that largely consisted of ordained monks, Dongguk being a Buddhist University, and was later published in Current Science (Bangalore).

The article is somewhat dated, but a recent news item rang a few bells…and as it happens, I’ve talked about chaos theory and fractals in recent posts. So I thought I would risk putting up the essay here in case there are things that bear retelling, bear being refuted, and perhaps bear being corrected. Here goes.

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The most dramatic statement of the reductionist approach in the biological sciences is the ‘astonishing hypothesis’ of Francis Crick that something as central to our sense of self, namely the human soul, is in effect ‘no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’. Recent advances such as the sequencing of entire genomes (the human genome being a well-publicized example) or the elucidation of some of the neuronal mechanisms associated with memory, for instance, appear to support this point of view, that we can eventually possess the recipe for human individuality. This essay contends that the essential limitation of such a programme stems not from the remaining problems of working out the details, but from the fact that living systems are fundamentally complex. Drawing on the ideas of deterministic chaos and complexity theory, it is proposed that while the broad contours of the connection between biological functioning, genetic information and the organization of its nervous system will be accessible, the unique developmental trajectory of any organism – that which constitutes the essence of individuality and confers a notion of being alive – will remain beyond the realm of precise scientific prediction.

In our never-ending quest to understand more about the relationship of man with the rest of the universe, spectacular advances in modern science have made it possible to ask increasingly detailed questions about the essence of what it is to be human. On the one hand, the process of unraveling the DNA of any organism and deducing the sequence of nucleotides that make up this long and complicated molecule has become a routine task, routine enough to be automated to the point where it can be carried out by robots, and fast enough that the entire genome of any organism can be sequenced within a few years at the most. On the other hand, increasingly sophisticated experiments and techniques have made it possible to probe brain function in increasing detail, to the extent that a map – howsoever primitive – of the brain and its functions is slowly emerging [1].

What does this hold for the future? Will relentless scientific onslaught on such problems eventually, as this picture seems to suggest, give a completely deterministic description of any ‘living’ organism? Although ultimately we are interested in describing humans, we can start with less ambitious goals: can we hope to capture the essence of what it means to say, that any organism, however primitive, is alive?

It seems unlikely, given the complexity of the problem. But it is not unlikely for the obvious reason that getting a complete description of something as complex as a living creature is difficult. As already alluded to, there have been significant advances in understanding the brain (human or other), tremendous progress in sequencing DNA in order to get at the genetic structure, and so on. The unlikelihood lies in the essential unpredictability of complex systems [2]. Mathematical developments in the study and exploration of nonlinear phenomena and studies in the theory of chaos [3] since the 1960s have contributed to a major paradigmatic shift in the physical sciences. The discovery that completely deterministic systems can show dynamical behaviour as ‘unpredictable as a coin toss’ has had profound consequences on the way in which any number of physical phenomena have been viewed and analysed.

The issues that have been raised by these advances, namely the successful completion of genome projects, the brilliant breakthroughs in neurobiology research and the revolution of chaos theory, strike at the roots of some of the fundamental questions that have occupied human thought for centuries. There is a zeitgeist bringing together a number of different strands of thought so that we seem nearer the goal of understanding the questions themselves. In the process, we may be close to some of the answers. These will not be complete, but the offer of any answer, however partial and however incomplete, on what it means to be human is one that must be accepted and explored, as must the concomitant necessity to re-evaluate the reductionist programme in the natural sciences.

Genome projects: Finding all the genes

The announcement of the (essential) completion of the sequencing of the human genome is both a scientific event of great significance and an event of great importance. That a group of scientists and entrepreneurs could, within the span of a few years, completely unravel the structure of the DNA of any individual is a tour de force, among the highest scientific achievements of man.

What exactly has been done? It requires some background in order to fully appreciate the significance of the Human Genome Project, or any other genome project.

One of the major advances in biology in the last century has been in deciphering the importance of the DNA molecule and the laws of inheritance. It has been a long journey from Mendel onwards, a journey that painstakingly crossed a number of milestones, starting from the idea of the ‘gene’, through the discoveries of chromosomes, the DNA molecule, its structure and the genetic code [4].

We are still learning the details, but the major facts are largely known. In essence, they are that each organism, be it a mammal or a bacterium, has within each of its cells, a DNA molecule which carries all the information required for its functioning. The information lies encoded in the structure of the DNA molecule, which is a double-stranded polymeric entity composed of four different kinds of molecular subunits, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, denoted A, T, G and C. The size of the DNA molecule and the order in which these subunits are placed determine the function, the biochemistry and therefore the biology of the organism. How big is the DNA molecule? It is more useful to characterize the size of the DNA in terms of the number of subunits comprising it and since the molecule is a double helix, as was discovered by Watson and Crick, it is actually enough to know the sequence of one half of it: one strand of the double helix of DNA determines the other half, the other strand, by complementarity (A hydrogen bonds with T, C with G). On the molecule itself, the information is carried on certain portions of the DNA whose function it is to carry out any number of tasks such as the synthesis of proteins, the initiation of reactions and other tasks involving regulation within the cell or for groups of cells.

Each organism is unique. It is unique in its DNA. However, we have all – all life on this planet, that is – evolved from a single event that took place around 3.5 or so billion years ago. That event of creation laid the foundations for all life forms on earth, which therefore share a common genetic code and a common evolutionary history. In this history, the DNA molecule has played a central role, as the replication of the DNA molecule allows for both deliberate and accidental errors, and mutations which are internal catalysts for evolution. Another important catalyst for evolution comes from the physical environment, which, as we observe, continuously changes, putting forward a continuously changing set of challenges to any organism which may evolve in order to adapt and must adapt in order to survive.

The DNA of a human – the human genome – contains 6 billion or so bases, namely it consists of a long series of the letters A, T, G and C placed in a particular order. Does this make man? At one level it does, because the 3 billion letters on one strand of the DNA contain all the information needed to make the individual.

What has been done so far is to get a very detailed map of this molecule, so that almost all the regions containing the genes are known in great detail. Spectacular advances in chemistry and molecular biology have made this almost a matter of routine. Since one now knows the complete list of the 3 billion letters one after the other, the next task is to find all the genes. For a number of other organisms, especially yeast and several bacteria, this task has been accomplished in totality. For the human genome this task is somewhat more complicated, but it has, in essence, been done.

What of it, then? The prospect that every single gene on our DNA or on that of any other organism’s DNA can be known is one that has fueled the hope that eventually we will be able to understand an organism from the most fundamental level upwards. This is the sense in which I wish, in this essay, to explore what it means to be human, or more generally, what it means for any organism to be alive.

Are we more than the sum of our genes?

Finding the genes on the DNA is one part of the task of decoding the DNA [5]. Finding out what exactly the genes do is much more involved. As we realize now, a given trait is not always the result of a single gene and groups of genes need to act in concert to produce so called ‘genetic’ effects. Indeed, rarely is a single gene responsible for any characteristic in any organism, which, by its very nature, is an entity of enormous complexity. (In a sense, we were fortunate that Mendel chose to study those traits in peas wherein there is a nearly one-to-one correlation to genes.)

Today it is believed that not more than 40,000 genes are all that are involved in determining the function of an organism as large and as complex as man. For a bacterium it can be much fewer: some have just around 1000 genes in all. While it is generally true that the more ‘advanced’ the organism, the more the number of genes that are required for it to function, the reverse is not necessarily true, so the relationship between the complexity of an organism, length of genome and number of genes is a complicated one.

One of the big targets of the genome projects is to try to identify the gene or the set of genes that is responsible for a given medical condition, say diabetes or asthma or cancer. Already the genes that cause certain kinds of cancers or other diseases such as Huntington’s disease or the predisposition to Alzheimer’s, etc. have been ‘identified’. The hope that by discovering the genetic cause of a disease one can find a cure for it provides a very strong impetus for such studies.

But is there more that one can expect from genome projects? Are there genes for other aspects of our behaviour? Can we hope to understand not just the genes that may cause specific diseases or conditions, but also genes that may determine different behaviours in organisms as complex as us?

What indeed do we mean when we say that one organism is more complex than another? Or that one thing is more complex than another? Complexity, most simply defined, is measured by how much it takes to fully describe an object: the more complex something is, the more you can say about it [6]. Even with this admittedly limited notion of complexity, it is clear that humans are more complex than any other organism on the planet. The distinction usually takes the form of enumerating what it is that humans do which sets us apart from other living things – some of these are language, emotion, philosophy, a sense of religion and culture. There is evidence that we are not the only beings with some of these attributes, but we are likely to be the only ones with all of them developed as highly.

One other feature of complex systems is the phenomenon of emergence: the whole has properties that the parts need not have [2]. Emergence is a collective phenomenon. Consciousness is an example: it is a property of the human brain, but an individual cell that goes into making up the brain is not, in any sense, conscious. Simpler examples can be found. A molecule of water is not a liquid, but a collection [7] of molecules of water has this property. Thus emergence is at once both simple and profound, and most significantly, it is an important attribute of complex systems.

The question thus becomes: Are all these attributes that we take to define the human condition dependent, in any direct and determinable way, on the genes we possess? And therefore then, are these a consequence of the DNA in our cells? In a trivial way, the answer is, of course, yes. The DNA must determine everything since it contains the blueprint for all that goes into making us. But the question is directed more specifically: How is this thought, this memory, this action, governed by this set of genes? Or is it? We are a very long way away from a comprehensive answer to any of these questions. These are among the most profound that can be posed (Who are we? How did we come here? Where are we going?), but in some limited spheres, some crucial experiments are being carried out to determine the physical basis – if determinable – of particular emotions.

The astonishing hypothesis

The most explicit statement in support of this level of reductionism is that by Francis Crick who, in 1990, advanced what he calls ‘the astonishing hypothesis’ [8]. Crick is concerned with that most ephemeral of human qualities, the soul. The main thesis, Crick states, is that ‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more that the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’.

The idea of the soul, that there is more to us than just a complex interaction between molecules, is central to the mind–body problem. How does one understand the emergence of consciousness above and beyond the billions of cells that make up a human brain? Must there not be more to a being human than biochemistry?

Apparently, from some points of view, at least, not. Crick’s astonishing hypothesis is remarkable not just because this is a daring idea. It forces one to examine, to the extent that current knowledge allows; just how much of brain function is presently understood and how much, it can be inferred by extrapolation, can be understood. Many of the experiments described by Crick relate to visual perception and while they are not near explaining awareness, they give some indication of the level of effort that will be needed to understand the visual system completely. The inescapable conclusion, however, is that this will, eventually, be within the realm of the possible.

What is the immediate consequence of this chain of reasoning? If a ‘complete’ understanding of visual awareness is possible, then, presumably, so is essentially every other sensory awareness. By slow degrees, therefore, by more and more experimentation, it should be possible to get to the molecular basis of each emotion. To what extent is this an accurate estimation of what is possible?

The role of selection

It is necessary to appreciate that evolution may have played a role in the process. Is the nature of human thought a consequence of the way in which our brains have developed? This is a question that has occupied many seminal thinkers and in particular some physical scientists who have attempted to analyse the nature of scientific thought. For instance, in 1921, Einstein, while discussing the significance of mathematics in the development of scientific thought, remarked [9] ‘. . . an enigma presents itself which in all ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought that is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things’? Fifteen years later, he went on to say [10], ‘The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking . . . it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility” (Kant)’.

Has evolution shaped us for reasoning? Would there have been some form of Darwinian selection that gave an advantage to those with the ability, or at any rate, the trait that would lead eventually to the ability, to make a model of reality in the brain? This evolutionary advantage, amplified over time, has led to the human brain that has great skill in describing the world. At the same time, then, the brain has also retained all those features that helped it along the path and gave selective advantage and among these could be those attributes of the human mind that we find so difficult to describe and define – creativity, imagination, emotion, philosophy and religiosity, for instance.

Therefore, argues Hamming [11] in an insightful article on the effectiveness of mathematical thought, ‘We can cope with thinking about the world (only) when it is of comparable size to ourselves and our raw unaided senses . . . . Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts’.

What about other, thinkable, thoughts? If evolution has ensured the development of the human brain with its billions of interconnected neurons to be capable of mathematical thought, are there other aspects of consciousness that are similarly the product of evolution? Indeed, perhaps the sense of soul has also conferred evolutionary advantage, bringing us to this stage of humanness. To a limited extent some recent experiments give indication that this may be so.

Religion, memory and brain function

Regardless of whether (or how) consciousness is an emergent property, one aspect of human behaviour merits some discussion, namely, the pervasive practice of religion [12]. It is a fact that religious experience and religious feeling is central to what one may term the human condition. There is no culture, however primitive, which does not have some manifestation of it, and in less primitive cultures, traditional religions have been replaced by other communal activities. In a sentence, religion may be necessary for human evolution.

This point of view has been bolstered by experiments [13] carried out by Ramachandran and his research team, on what they term a God module in the human brain. This could underpin an evolutionary instinct to believe in religion. ‘There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion, which may have evolved to impose order and stability on society.’

It is well known that any thought process or emotion is correlated with specific neuronal activity. The temporal lobe connection to artistic creativity has been known for some time; patients with temporal lobe epilepsy often manifest a characteristic obsession with philosophical issues and become excessively religious [14]. Similarly, recent experiments on memory, for instance, where magnetic resonance imaging of the brain is used in real time, go even further. They correlate specific mental activities with specific regions in the brain. Thus every thought, it is suggested, can ultimately be traced back to a specific sequence of activity of a specific set of neurons. There are, admittedly, billions of these which are interconnected in a complex co-dependent web, but nevertheless, the problem of thought is reducible, in some sense, to the behaviour of a complex network, each unit of which one can understand in as much detail as one wishes [15].

On the matter of memory, significant progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms of memory at the neuron level. It is now believed that memory is encoded in the brain as a spatio-temporal pattern of activity in the neural network and stored by modifying the connections between the neurons themselves. Recall involves retracing the pathways through the network, involving specific molecules, activation of different molecular networks, and even perhaps, most unexpectedly, it may involve the DNA. Neural networks may be modified by the rapid activation of many genes. Will a similar deterministic description of consciousness also become possible?

The nonlinearity of almost everything: Deterministic chaos

A major paradigmatic shift, the so-called third revolution in physics, in the latter part of the last century, has been the discovery of deterministic chaos [3]. This is the realization that very simple (but nonlinear) systems have the potential to display dynamical behaviour as complicated as one can imagine. It is not possible to give a full description of chaos theory here, but the implications of the theory are profound enough to warrant being described. These have become summarized as the ‘butterfly effect’, namely the possibility of systems being so unpredictable that the quality of a prediction is sensitive to effects as unimaginably small as that of a butterfly flapping its wings thousands of miles away. Nonlinearity makes it possible for small effects to get magnified exponentially rapidly, so that the very small translates into the very large very quickly.

The generality of the arguments, which are ultimately mathematical in nature, makes chaos theory applicable to a wide variety of disciplines. What are its implications? When applied, for instance, to systems such as the weather, chaos theory says that accurate prediction is not possible beyond a certain time frame. When applied in other contexts, it often gives a rationale for the intrinsic unpredictability of certain phenomena and gives an escape from the certainty of Laplacian determinism by which it is claimed that the past and future of the universe can be predicted by an ideal observer who knows the positions and velocities of all the particles and the laws governing their motions. Chaos theory says that for nonlinear systems this is in general impossible because the smallest error in specifying the positions and velocities would, in the presence of chaos, magnify so rapidly as to make all predictions meaningless. The only requirement is that there be chaotic dynamics in the nonlinear system; our present understanding is that indeed, chaotic dynamics is abundant, in the sense that most nonlinear systems will have the potential to show chaos. Indeed, the more complicated the system, the more likely this becomes and in systems as complex as those we are considering here, like the brain or a cell, for instance, it is a certainty that the system will, in all senses of the word, be chaotic.

Having chaos does not preclude all forms of prediction, however. The property of complex systems to have attractors, namely a set of states to which the system eventually settles, allows for some level of prediction. The motion on attractors can be chaotic, in which case these are termed strange attractors: the chaos makes precise prediction impossible, but the existence of attractors makes it possible to give some idea of what behaviour will obtain.

Studies of models of many cellular processes, their chemistry and biochemistry show the presence of chaotic dynamics and attractors. There is also evidence that brain activity, as evidenced by EEG signals, may show deterministic chaos. Experimentation in this area is still in its infancy, but the methods of chaos theory have found some application in these studies and they suggest that there may be complex attractors that describe the dynamics of electrical signals in the brain. This observation is consistent with current models of neuronal activity. Any mathematical model of neural networks has a dynamics that is chaotic, showing extreme sensitivity to perturbations.

Synthesis

If a completely deterministic description of any living organism was possible, one somewhat disturbing consequence would be the necessity to re-evaluate some of our beliefs about what it means to be alive or what makes us human. A concept which is central to this is that of free will [16], that our consciousness allows us to determine our actions rather than that our actions are merely the outcome of the inexorable laws of motion of the several billions of atoms and molecules that constitute our being. Where, for instance, is there any scope for choice, creativity or argument?

Full determinism appears to go hand in hand with complete predictability, at least in principle. But experience, be it with humans or with other species, shows that one of the main features of a ‘living’ organism is that there are aspects to its behaviour that are only approximately predictable.

I believe that a reductionist approach to biology is ultimately untenable for a variety of reasons, but the principal one is this. If every gene were to be known (and in principle they all will be), if every biochemical network in every cell were to be known (and, again, they can eventually all be determined), if every neuron in the brain could be described in as much detail as possible with all its connections, as deterministic as the resulting system is, it will be chaotic [3]. The unpredictability of the detailed behaviour of a system as complex as a living organism is itself an emergent property.

This is in contrast to our knowledge, say, about the structure of atoms and molecules, which are described by the laws of quantum mechanics. The quantum theory, which is intrinsically non-deterministic, has built into its structure the uncertainty principle. Yet this theory is capable of precise predictions, which can agree with the results of experiments to an astonishing level of accuracy. Shortly after the solution of the Schrödinger equation for the simplest atom, namely hydrogen, Dirac remarked, in 1929, that ‘The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of large parts of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus fully known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved’. He was correct in a gross sense, because once the right equation is known, all that remains is to solve it, however difficult and intractable that might be. But as he also mentioned, this was not going to be easy. Even today, with the computational power that is currently available, accurate calculations for all but the smallest molecules are intractable. In a deeper sense, he was wrong because several features of the real world cannot be embodied within something as microscopic as the Schrödinger equation, collective behaviour and emergent properties being among them. Yet, the complexity that he refers to is nothing like the complexity of systems such as those we are discussing here. Complex atoms or molecules are difficult to describe exactly because of the sheer computational difficulty, although the underlying equations are linear. Owing to the intrinsic nonlinearity, the level of complexity of a living organism is entirely in a different class.

What then of the soul or what it means to be human? While it may be true that all human genes will be discovered very shortly and that we will gradually acquire more and more knowledge about the circuitry of the brain in all its detail, the sheer complexity of this ‘system’ which has inbuilt dynamical chaos necessarily precludes complete description. This is not only true for us, but also, in a fundamental way, even for the lowest organisms. In this sense, unpredictability is both the consequence, as well as the defining quality of what it means to be alive.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

The original essay appeared in Current Science in the 10 June issue of 2001, and already then I acknowledged two articles where some of the ideas presented here find resonance. These are ‘Is the genome the secular equivalent of the soul?’ by Alex Mauron, Science (2001) 291, 831, and the final chapter of Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, London, 1999. The one obvious error that needs correction is that the human genome appears to house only about 25000 genes, and not 40,000 as stated, the estimate that was prevalent when the article was written.

References

1. Blakemore, C., Mechanics of the Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977.
2. Waldrop, M. M., Complexity, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992.
3. Gleick, J., Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking, New York, 1987.
4. See, for example, Watson, J. et al., Molecular Biology of the Gene, Complete Volume 4/e, Benjamin-Cummings, New York, 1987.
5. For a pedagogical review, see Tiwari, S., Bhattacharya, S., Bhattacharya, A. and Ramaswamy, R., Curr. Sci., 1996, 71, 12–24.
6. Informal description attributed to Parisi, G., in a talk by Virasoro, M. at the TIFR, Mumbai, 1996.
7. The question of how many molecules of water can have the property of being ‘liquid’ is a tricky one. One or two is too few, but a few tens or hundreds may be enough. Here I mean more like an Avogadro number, of the order of 10 or so, as in a glass of water.
8. Crick, F., The Astonishing Hypothesis, Simon and Schuster, London, 1994.
9. In an address to the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin on 27 January 1921.
10. Einstein, A., Physics and Reality, reprinted in Einstein, A., Out of My Later Years, Citadel, Secaucus, NJ, 1956, p. 61.
11. Hamming, R. W., Am. Math. Mon., 1980, 87.
12. There are many common points between science and religion.Central to the quest that either discipline entails is a search for what is perceived as the ultimate ‘truth’. However, as Eddington stated nearly 70 years ago, ‘We have no creed in science, but we are not lukewarm in our beliefs. The belief is not that all the knowledge of the universe that we hold so enthusiastically will survive the letter; but a sureness that we are on the road. If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth.’
13. The actual experiments that were carried out were as follows: Ramachandran and his colleagues studied highly religious volunteers and those whose religious beliefs were not known. The subjects were shown a list of 40 words, which included sexual, violent, religious and ‘neutral’ terms. Responses were measured to track the amount of communication between parts of the brain. The non-religious group showed sweaty palm activity (a gauge for arousal and an indirect way of measuring certain neural activities) when presented with sexual terms. Patients with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), though, were disproportionately aroused by the religious words, leading the Ramachandran team to conclude that human beings may have evolved specialized circuitry in the brain for the purpose of mediating religious experiences, and that the TLEs are at the extreme end of the spectrum. The experiments further point to a specific location in the brain – the temporal lobe – where this activity takes place. Some details are to be found in Ramachandran, V. S. and Blakeslee, Sandra Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, Quill Press, New York, 1998.
14. Coen, C. (ed.), Functions of the Brain, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986.
15. Amit, D. J., Modeling Brain Function, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.
16. Searle, J., Minds, Brains and Science, the 1984 Reith Lectures, BBC, London, 1984.

 

Meditations on Meditations

As I mentioned in a comment on a recent post, I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius‘ Meditations. Its not the kind of book one just happens upon, there is a time when one turns to the thoughts of a long dead Roman and finds enough there that rings true today, an echo across the centuries…

Its difficult enough to avoid the comment banal, that there has been no essential change in human nature in all of recorded human history, so I shall get it over with as soon as possible. As a fraction of evolutionary time, all recent history is vanishingly fleet, so it would be almost surprising if one did not find that there are words of Marcus Aurelius that sound like a discourse on contemporary events.

Meditations is a book designed to be dipped into, randomly, letting serendipity guide you to something that strikes, at that time, in that place… Which is always useful when looking at our situation on campus. The other day, for instance, I chanced upon his comment,  That which does no harm to the state, does no harm to the citizen. (He repeats this idea many times in many ways- for instance in the quote I mentioned in my Convocation address this time around, That which is good for the swarm is good for the bee.) In the case of every appearance of harm apply this rule: if the state is not harmed by this, neither am I harmed.  This adapts so well to us here and now: That which does no harm to the University, does no harm to the UoH faculty/student/staff. In the case of every appearance of harm apply this rule: if the University is not harmed by this, neither am I harmed.

Of course, this is only part of the quotation, since Marcus A goes on to say, But if the state is harmed, thou must not be angry with him who does harm to the state. Show him where his error is. In the face of those that harm the state or the University by throwing a spanner in the works- usually a legal one- it is difficult not to be angry… The amount of working time that is wasted in responding to those that file frivolous lawsuits against the University due to slights imagined and entitlements assumed,  as well as to those that demand information that they have a right to, but demand for the wrong reasons… One could do so much that is useful with that time. But it does seem that MA was also plagued by similar demands, when he says,

…remember withal that no man properly can be said to live more than that which is now present, which is but a moment of time. Whatsoever is besides either is already past, or uncertain. The time therefore that any man doth live, is but a little, and the place where he liveth, is but a very little corner of the earth, and the greatest fame that can remain of a man after his death, even that is but little, and that too, such as it is whilst it is, is by the succession of silly mortal men preserved, who likewise shall shortly die, and even whiles they live know not what in very deed they themselves are: and much less can know one, who long before is dead and gone. 

So much for legacies, and so much for the grand design. A deep message that runs through Meditations is that we are all connected–the intelligence of the world is social.  This is fractally true, at level after level: more so the closer we look, the more connected we seem to be. So to adapt this aphorism to our time and place, the intelligence of this University is also social. This community needs to cohere: it can either be well-arranged […] or just a chaos huddled together, but still, it is our University, and it behooves us all to do the best we can with it, by it, and for it.

My chaos theory

For many years now I have been working in the area that is popularly called chaos theory. One idea that is central to this subject is that for systems that are nonlinear- namely those that do not give an output that is proportional to the input- small changes can have huge consequences. This is variously termed the butterfly effect or (more sedately) sensitive dependence on initial conditions. (The field is replete with evocative names- beyond chaos, there are attractors, some of which are strange, and so on… the image of the “butterfly” on the left is actually a view of an oscilloscope, and comes from a study of the equations that more or less created the field back in 1963…)

The basic idea is a simple one. Were one to plot the evolution of a system schematically as a graph on a sheet of paper, then for nonlinear systems it can happen that starting at one location, the large black dot in the figure on the right, one sets out, over time, to move along the blue line, looping back and forth, to reach the point A after some period of time.

But were one to start every so closely from the point- even imperceptibly away from there, say the change that might be effected by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, one would be on the red orbit, staying close to the blue for some time, but eventually moving away in as unpredictable a manner as possible, landing up at B at the same time when the blue line reaches A. The small change in “initial conditions” results in large changes in outcomes…

One is used to this, of course. Setting off marbles (in my head, but also, possibly in reality) from two nearby spots on a mountain peak, could easily lead to them rolling into different valleys- very different outcomes indeed. The “system” of the preceding paragraphs is a catchall for any situation with many variables that change over time- indeed anything that can be suitably abstracted and described by a set of attributes. Systems that have been studied by the methods of chaos theory range from the weather and climate to cardiac problems and the stock market, very diverse areas of interest indeed.

Regrettably, though, the terminology of chaos theory has spawned any number of largely incorrect definitions in the urban dictionary, not to mention the very contrived movies that draw upon the name, and so the public perception of this rather simple and deep idea can be quite flawed. But the metaphor has substance beyond that, whether applying to something as unpredictable as the weather or whether applying to the unpredictability of the human condition… Small changes, different choices, perturbations in the environment- how different the outcomes could have been!

Surely this strikes a chord. I can recall reading the first papers that described the chaos theory in the late 1970’s  and being fascinated by what the implications were. Complexity could come out of very simple structures, the only requirement was nonlinearity. And anybody who has gone shopping, for potatoes or diamonds, it hardly matters which, knows that the price is not a linear function of weight. Other examples can be drawn, but the basic lesson is that most natural systems are nonlinear, and so one should find the effects of chaos everywhere. And one does, all the time!

For many  who come to the UoH- the students, the teachers, or for that matter, the administrators- there is a lesson here. What changes should one make, what little extra effort to put in, what to do, or not do… the eventual result can be so different, depending on the initial conditions. In the end, I suppose that state A and state B, whatever they are, should both be acceptable, both being logical outcome of living in a complex world. Does it really matter if a meeting is held on one day or another? Does it matter that colleagues and friends show consideration or not? An exam on one day or another, a lecture given or not?  One cannot but think of what might have been, what some other small initial differences in wisdom or generosity might have led to.

But then again, one makes choices, and as Frost put it so eloquently, the difference eventually comes about from the road taken… Or was it the road not taken?