The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

"JD Bernal was an Irish crystallographer who wrote this book in 1929. He was contemporaries with people like Aldous Huxley , who wrote Brave New World at around the same time. Clearly biology had progressed to a point where people were thinking about the future of human society, and how it could be affected by biology and biotechnology. Bernal wrote this book to talk about human history. He painted his ideas with a broad brush, arguing that humanity had three struggles to understand and control: The world, the flesh and the devil. By the world he means the physical world – advances in technology like electricity which involved the knowledge of physics and applications of engineering. The flesh was biology and biotechnology – the ability to understand how life processes work and to control them. And the final challenge, which he called the devil, was to understand and improve our own minds. The devil was the weakness of our minds. You can argue this question from an extremely philosophical point of view about the implications of physics. A physicist might say that the universe is like a huge assembly of billiard balls all bouncing off each other, representing atoms. Everything is determined by the equations which govern those billiard balls. Therefore, free will is an illusion because everything is determined. I think that is an interesting philosophical debate, but it may be a bit distant from the level at which our minds work. The other notion of free will versus determinism comes from our inability to change ourselves. For example I might smoke cigarettes and want to quit smoking, but I just can’t do it. In principle we know it’s possible to quit, but sometimes it seems almost impossible to change ourselves even if we want to. That is the level where people want neuroscience to have an impact. We know the old-fashioned ways of changing ourselves – the question is whether there are new technologies on the horizon which will enable us to make the changes that we want."