Introduction: Exploring the Breadth & Depth of Being Human

This book derives from public lectures given in Oxford during Hilary Term 2010, based on the presumption of man-in-God's image as proclaimed in the first chapters of Genesis. Yet I deliberately turned that precept round to enquire – 'Are we made in God's image?' – and if so, what characteristic(s) make us so special in claiming that divine resemblance. The alternative, perhaps a little less impressive, relies on origins from apes. This book elucidates our evolutionary origins and status as human beings: but, in addition, it enlarges the curriculum in dealing not only with the various disabilities which confront us in this world, but also with our beginnings and endings, including abortion and infanticide, as well as the legalities and theology of assisted dying. The chapters included thereby provide a comprehensive picture of human life as lived by many on this planet.

The reader is first invited to become conversant with human physical anthropology through evolutionary time (Chapter 2), and the biological specifics contributing to each individual lifehistory, through genes (Chapter 3), conscious-awareness (Chapter 4) and the acquisition of language (Chapter 5). Those aspects define Distinctiveness. In dealing with our physical evolutionary origins, I suggest that we are more distinctive than 'unique', relative to the higher apes. Despite sharing surprisingly closely linked genetic endowments (genomes) with them, our bodily features (phenotypes) are markedly different, as well as our cultural differences.

The widely held belief in human uniqueness is perhaps a biblical hangover from us being supposedly made in the image of God. The problem is in knowing what that axiom precisely conveys. Evolutionary novelty usually emerges from re-use of preceding material. Thus, in the step from invertebrate to vertebrate the existing genome was doubled thereby providing scope for newer, original developments. Humans do not possess genes that have arisen de novo, instead through genetic mutations and reduplications, helped by sexual forms of reproduction which reconfigure the genetic elements or 'genotype' contributed, and which influence bodily configuration or phenotype. Nowadays, we should realise that defining a 'gene' is very difficult (Chapter 3: Genes). Genes often work in 'groups', with multi-genes controlling the activity of many others in a different part of the DNA sequence.

Environmental influences on gene expression are being seen to play increasingly more important roles in their overall (Darwinian) activity and control. Thus the field of 'epigenetics' (non-Darwinian inheritance) relating to environmental effects is now emerging as an overwhelming super-dominant element in the way through which genes are activated and regulated, and thus how they are expressed. We come upon this in Chapter 7 (Can We Ascribe Moral Status to the Human Embryo-Foetus?), for example, where epigenetic influences witnessed through The Dutch Winter of Starvation, November 1944-April 1945; the impressive Avon County (Bristol, UK) Long-Term study of parents and children (ALSPAC); and the Swedish long-term observations of families in terms of dietary effects on the future lives of grandchildren and their health, have been documented with some surprising outcomes. Some of these latter effects, amazingly, are manifested through the male (paternal) line, bringing further important moral issues to play in relation to a prospective embryo-foetus in utero, apart from the more obviously well-known strictures applicable to women during the period of gestation itself.

We are beginning to progress beyond the idea that humans are driven by 'selfish' genes, and, derivative of that outmoded idea, the similarly overblown concepts of Evolutionary Biology, Evolutionary-Sociology, Evolutionary-Psychology and other neoDarwinistic 'Evo-this-and-that' things. Collectively, Raymond Tallis, and a former medical colleague of mine, refer to much of that as 'evo-rubbish'. The philosopher Roger Scruton dismisses it as 'neurononsense'. Nevertheless, the increasing role of environment in configuring what we become is of far-reaching importance to our understandings of bodily function and hence of personhood.

We do not have consciousness, we are conscious: that is, each individual is a conscious being, being conscious (Chapter 4: On Being Conscious). I am unsure whether science can solve the emergence of this quality from an astoundingly complex brain possessing around 30 billion nerve cells (known as neurones) and an even astronomically higher number of inter-neuronal connections, or 'synapses'. We know that a single neurone may be attached synaptically to as many as 10,000 other neurones, resulting in phenomenally intricate connections throughout the brain. Indeed, it is the vast and unimaginable synaptic connectivity in our brains which confers humankind's outstanding levels of cognitive and affective capacity.

However, the major conundrum centres on how subjective conscious-awareness is able to control an objective physical organ (when thinking, for example) when consciousness itself originates from that physical organ. Clearly there is a very tight connection between neural processes and cognitive outcomes about which we can only have speculative ideas. We need to be aware that the brain operates at several different levels, concurrently, but not necessarily within our conscious-awareness. Next, I touch on the evolutionary history of consciousness, and further consider when conscious-awareness develops in the foetal brain – an aspect of consciousness hardly considered in many other books on brain function, but functionally important. Despite the restricted lack of sensory input which obtains in the womb, it is evident that much conscious activity is present, at least during the last ten weeks (probably longer) of gestation: there is no such thing as a 'blank slate' at birth.

Apart from that, we all have the innate ability to render ourselves unconscious when we sleep: likewise when undergoing general anaesthesia. Many new insights about being conscious have arisen from the various studies into these latter phenomena.

On the other hand, much of learned conscious activity operates efficiently at sub-conscious level: so, why do we need to be conscious? For example, just...