TY - JOUR T1 - Book reviews: WHY US? HOW SCIENCE REDISCOVERED THE MYSTERY OF OURSELVES JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 864 LP - 865 DO - 10.3399/bjgp10X539434 VL - 60 IS - 580 AU - Iain McGilchrist Y1 - 2010/11/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/60/580/864.abstract N2 - Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves James Le Fanu 2009 Harper Press 303 £18.99 9780007120277 James Le Fanu’s new book sets out to argue two things. We can’t, he says, simply be the chance products of a materialist evolutionary process; and, however much we may learn about ourselves as machines, we could never learn enough to account for the awe-inspiring complexity of our nature.The argument centres on essentially two phenomena. One is the discrepancy between our ever more detailed knowledge of the human brain and the failure of this knowledge to tell us anything much about the mind. It’s true that, as he says, the complexity of experience cannot be reduced to a few patches of neural tissue lighting up on a scan. But nonetheless, such patches do tell us at least something — pretty crude though it may be — about the mind of the person whose brain we are inspecting. Where I agree, is that it still tells us nothing whatever about what it is to have a mind at all. To expect amassing scientific information ever to do so is a basic philosophical error, a category mistake.The other phenomenon on which Le Fanu focuses, and to me this is both the more interesting and the more controversial part of his argument, is the apparent ‘decoding’ of the human genome. This mighty project, which came in ahead of schedule, and was confidently expected by many to be the key that unlocked the secrets that would enable us to treat and even eliminate disease, has been a resounding disappointment. The clinical rewards have been so far meagre, to say the least. But Le Fanu goes further. … ER -