CCR5 and Biological Complexity: The Need for Data Integration and Educational Materials to Address Genetic/Biological Reductionism at the Interface of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications

In the age of genomics, public understanding of complex scientific knowledge is critical. To combat reductionistic views, it is necessary to generate and organize educational material and data that keep pace with advances in genomics. The view that CCR5 is solely the receptor for HIV gave rise to demand to remove the gene in patients to create host HIV resistance, underestimating the broader roles and complex genetic inheritance of CCR5. A program aimed at providing research projects to undergraduates, known as CODE, has been expanded to build educational material for genes such as CCR5 in a rapid approach, exposing students and trainees to large bioinformatics databases and previous experiments for broader data to challenge commitment to biological reductionism. Our students organize expression databases, query environmental responses, assess genetic factors, generate protein models/dynamics, and profile evolutionary insights into a protein such as CCR5. The knowledgebase generated in the initiative opens the door for public educational information and tools (molecular videos, 3D printed models, and handouts), classroom materials, and strategy for future genetic ideas that can be distributed in formal, semiformal, and informal educational environments. This work highlights that many factors are missing from the reductionist view of CCR5, including the role of missense variants or expression of CCR5 with neurological phenotypes and the role of CCR5 and the delta32 variant in complex critical care patients with sepsis. When connected to genomic stories in the news, these tools offer critically needed Ethical, Legal, and Social Implication (ELSI) education to combat biological reductionism.

Chaos and the speaking body: spitting on Hegel with Lygia Clark and the limits of language in psychoanalysis

The Hegelian dialectics, inherited by Lacan, assume a division between the Subject and historical time, or, assuming a Symbolic system that is mediated by the phallic law, that only re-produces subjugated subjectivities, without a chance to create something new or be in touch with any chaos outside this phallogocentric system. So, echoing the 1977 essay by Italian feminist Carla Lonzi: “let’s spit on Hegel” – maybe with Lygia Clark’s Anthropophagic Slobber. [...] Guided by Clark’s chaotic vibration, we can think through what happens to the body in/of the world and to the world with/of bodies through the potency of a subjective full/void that vibrates independently from any Other. In chaos we avoid the total reign of language and identity as well as materialist biological reductionism of experience. We meet chaos in the frontier of the vibrating ‘full-void’ of bodies.

Reformulating the network theory of mental disorders: Folk psychology as a factor, not a fact

Borsboom et al. (2019) argue that the network theory of mental disorders, if correct, blocks the biological reduction of mental disorders. This is mainly argued through a partial reformulation of network theory which combines multiple realizability of symptoms with a realist interpretation of folk psychological explanations. In this article, I argue that (a) the latter is problematic and that (b) the combination of these arguments voids the previous predictive and explanatory power of network theory. I then present a novel way in which network theory could avoid biological reductionism by considering folk psychology not as a fact, but as a structuring cause of causal connections between intentional state symptoms, together with culture and time period. Drawing from this, a novel principle for network theory is proposed, which allows it to retain force against reductionism while also retaining predictive and explanatory power.

The neurosociology of Auguste Comte

This article explores the role of phrenology in the work of Auguste Comte. I begin by reviewing the historical and contemporary significance of this doctrine to show the direct lineage that exists between phrenology and what we now call cognitive neuroscience. I then demonstrate the impact of phrenology on Comte’s sociological theory and make the claim that his paradigm exemplifies what TenHouten called ‘neurosociology.’ Following this, I show how Comte’s social epistemology rejected biological reductionism and considered neurophysiology a subfield of sociology. This results in a somewhat startling assertion: Comte saw sociology as a cognitive science. After outlining Comte’s original vision for sociology as a discipline, I place Comte’s system in critical contact with 21st century neuroscience and suggest fruitful ways to move the neurosociology paradigm forward. In this I demonstrate that Comte’s vision for sociology is worth pursuing today, even while the specifics of his doctrine are not.

Psychosomatic subjects and the agencies of addiction

Addiction science and public policy have for some time been articulated in conformity with a broader antinomy in Western thought between biological reductionism and liberal voluntarism. Hence, mainstream debates have concerned whether and how addiction might be understood as a disease in the biomedically orthodox sense of anatomical or physiological pathology or whether and how addiction might be understood as a voluntary choice of some kind. The fact that those who staff these debates have appeared either unable or unwilling to consider alternatives to this antinomy has resulted in a rather unhappy and intransigent set of intellectual anomalies both on the biomedical and the social scientific sides of this divide. Perhaps more importantly, it has also resulted in a striking isolation of scientific debates themselves from the vicissitudes of therapeutically caring for those putatively suffering from addictions both within and outside clinical settings. After briefly demonstrating the conformity of debates in addiction science with the broader antinomy between biological reductionism and liberal voluntarism and the anomalies that thereby result, this article considers the scientific and therapeutic benefits of a psychosomatic framework for the understanding of both self-governing subjects and the experience of a loss of self-control to agencies of addiction.

The Emergence of Religion

The communicative practices that comprise religions have their roots in human niche construction. But this is not a cognitivist argument that locates religion in particular regions of the brain, or a naturalist, biological reductionism that maintains the hegemony of the genes; rather, it contends that forms of communicative practice that are constitutive of religions, while being rooted in human biology, function at a cultural level that has autonomy from the cellular. Religions are niche constructions that create worlds of meaning through imagination within which people can live complete and competent lives and that function eschatologically to facilitate self-repair; their roots are in the pro-social emotions, language development, and ritual behaviour.

The value of clinical and translational neuroscience approaches to psychiatric illness

Borsboom et al. confuse biological approaches with extreme biological reductionism and common-cause models of psychopathology. In muddling these concepts, they mistakenly throw the baby out with the bathwater. Here, we highlight recent work underscoring the unique value of clinical and translational neuroscience approaches for understanding the nature and origins of psychopathology and for developing improved intervention strategies.

The network takeover reaches psychopathology

Borsboom et al. have written a trenchant critique of biological reductionism in psychopathology. After commenting on recent controversies concerning the network perspective, I discuss ways of integrating biology into the network enterprise.

De schapen horen naar zijn stem. Neurowetenschap en het vermeende determinisme van de Dordtse Leerregels

It is often argued that the Canons of Dordt are so profoundly deterministic that Calvinists shouldn’t blame neuroscience for its ‘biological reductionism’. This essay examines Turrettini’s refined analysis of freedom and concludes to a profound difference: whereas the dominant modern philosophical interpretation of neuroscience is indeed deeply reductionistic, Turrettini explicitly rejects biological reductionism, arguing that any naturalistic determination of the human will (e.g., biology) violates its essence by considering it a mixed entity of intellect and a free two-way capacity. Yet God’s determination of the will, so he argues, does respect the essence of the will. Thus, Reformed thought rejected the modern identification of freedom and autonomy.