Programs of the Brain By J. Z. Young, and: The Man-made Future By C. H. Waddington (review)

reading it, I am pleased to own a copy, and I expect to find it useful for reference for some years to come. Sidney Schulman Division Biological Sciences University of Chicago Programs of the Brain. ByJ. Z. Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Pp. vi+325. $14.95. The Man-made Future. By C. H. Waddington. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978. Pp. 355. $19.95. Since the revival of secular learning in the Renaissance, "the humanities" have suffered progressive pruning of what was thought irrelevant to the development of a cultivated mind to a point where Samuel Johnson's Dictionary described the humanist as a philologer or grammarian. That was 200 years ago! Today the new American Heritage Dictionary specifically excludes both content and method of the biological and physical sciences from its definition of the humanities. I suppose it is legitimate for a term to embrace neither more nor less than its users wish. I must confess 1 am puzzled, however, by a convention that invites a cultivated mind to consider a subject such as natural law in the absence of a firm grasp of what we know about nature.. In April 1961, J. Z. Young spoke at a Conference on Interhemispheric Relations and Cerebral Dominance at The Johns Hopkins University on the question , "Why two brains?" He ended that talk with a speculation: "Perhaps the non-dominant one is a vestige, but personally I would rather keep mine than lose it. Maybe it is the two together that serve to make the most truly useful representation of the world, partly map-like, partly abstract." In his most recent book, Programs of the Brain, Dr. Young pulls together his lifetime of research on brain structure and function, this time for the general reader. The product is a remarkably satisfying one. The book is based on his Gifford Lectures, given 1975-1977. In its final form, it becomes an up-todate textbook of human neurobehavior that transcends the mechanical connections and carries the reader through an ascending scale of brain functions from the most elementary physiological ones to units of memory, children's night terrors, aggression, attachment, believing, and worshiping. He leads us to the realization that, rather than talk about the dominant hemisphere of the brain, we must learn to understand and appreciate the differences between the hemispheres. We must also recognize that there is increasing evidence that they are interrelated to make one functioning whole which gives a unique and characteristic direction to the pattern of life of that one individual. To illustrate, he points out that in a computer program there are no short cuts—data meshing has to go on to the end no matter how long the program. In his concept of the single integrated brain program, however, he raises the fascinating possibility that with the interaction of digital and analog programs in the brain, analogs between situations may become quickly clear so that the brain may jump to Perspectives in Biology and Medicine ¦ Spring 1980 \ 491 conclusions without going through the elaborate processes of calculating and testing every possibility. As a psychiatrist, 1 can see the advantage in this economy of processing as well as its wealth of opportunities for mischief in matching the analogs. His extensive bibliography makes every topic touched upon the opening of another mine shaft into a deeper understanding of man. Together with a glossary , this makes Programs ofthe Brain an ideal undergradute text for a liberal arts education. I plan to use it this fall quarter for just that purpose. I always thought microbiologists and geneticists studied populations but C. H. Waddington is an embryologist who would not stay put. His extrapolation of the population biologist's skills and insights to the broadest human issues is a splendid example of the mature scientific mind at work. In reading The Man-made Future I found it necessary to double back and read his companion volume, Tools for Thought, in order to have some grasp of how people manage to think about such complex interacting problems as population, food supply, energy, urbanization, pollution, controlling man's nature, war, and so on. The tools themselves are fascinating—ranging from Venn...