The Biology of Belief

The Biology of Belief is an overview of the recent findings in cellular biology, which are redefining the way we look at evolution, genetics and the nature of life.

I know, right? Reading this, you may at first think that it’s a misunderstanding. Surely we call Darwin “the father of natural selection” for a reason?

Lipton argues that not only have we got the author of the evolution theory wrong. Our common understanding of it, based on Darwin’s work, is also not correct according to the newest findings. The French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck came much closer to the truth with his theory of evolution. He worked a few decades before Charles Darwin.

There are two main differences between Lamarck’s and Darwin’s theories. Both have quite serious consequences for our thinking about natural selection.

For starters, Lamarck recognized cooperation between species as central to evolutionary processes. That stands in contrast to the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” and “interspecific competition.” However, Lipton argues that modern science confirms Lamarck’s rather than Darwin’s hypothesis.

The second important difference is in looking at the deliberateness with which species adapt to their environment. According to Darwin, the process of adaptation was to a great extent random. As various genetic mutations emerged, the ones that granted the biggest chances of survival simply persisted – and were passed down the generations.

Lamarck understood this process differently. According to him, species learn to fit their surroundings through interacting with their environment. This implies some kind of a built-in “intelligence” – which Lipton’s life-long study of cells seems to confirm.

The notion that our genes primarily determine our lives became widely accepted in the 20th century. As a result, people came to believe that much of their health, psychology, and disease predisposition is hard-wired into their biology and hence, beyond control.

In the introduction, Lipton describes himself as a victim of such thinking, too. As a hyper-rational scientist, he concluded that the misery he felt most of his life is simply genetic, and that “this is just the way he is.”

It wasn’t until his moment of epiphany while working in the Caribbean that he realized that this deterministic view of human biology was false. During one warm evening, he was looking through his notes once again, and finally, everything came together. In his own words:

That realization was a transformative moment, both for Lipton and for modern biology. It endorsed the notion that genes only determine a small part of who we are – and that we can shape our own destiny to a previously unimaginable extent.