Introduction
Why another book about Albert Einstein? The reason is that we have mistaken Einstein as icon and genius for Einstein the humanāand more significantlyāsocial being. If this were a murder mystery, I would now be giving away the identity of the murderer. Weāalong with Einstein himselfāhave made a mistake in reference. The tendency has been to view him as a unique individual and to look to genes and neurons (and more broadly biology) to explain his uniqueness. The label āgenius ā adds a divine factor to the explanatory narrative. I am not suggesting that we deny his uniqueness but that we revise our understanding of that uniqueness, that we contextualize it, and that we ground it. From the vantage point of social science , āEinsteinā is defined by the particular configuration of social networks that he engaged as his life unfolded.
History is awash with errors and corrections concerning mind, brains, consciousness, and self. We have made a mistake in looking for the roots of genius inside the brains of the dead and indeed have made a mistake in viewing the individual as the locus of genius . More generally, we have made the mistake of looking for consciousness and the roots of all of our behaviors and thoughts in the isolated biological brain. The very term āgenius ā has contributed to our mistakes. Brains living and dead and individuals do have stories to tell but their stories are not about genetic, neuronal , or divine roots of thoughts and actions. Instead, they are about lived experiences. One can already notice contradictions between those who claim that Einstein was destined to be a thinker and those who point out the influence of Einsteinās father and uncles on the direction of his intellectual life. To correct the myth of individualism we have to learn to recognize the reality and power of the social and cultural forces that shape our lives.
Social scientists who argue against the myth of individualism vary in the extent to which they assign agency or free will to individuals. In part this is a function of the extent to which they take their personal experiences of the āsense of selfā as introspectively transparent. Certainly, experience is in the end the final arbiter of what is going on in and around us. However, it is not individual experience that we rely on in science but the collective intersubjectively tested experience of a community over time. Historically, we have relied primarily on the generational continuity of communities of specialized knowledge makers from philosophers and natural philosophers to scientists. There are also locally and narrowly circumscribed communities of knowledge makers (e.g., women, traditional healers, bodybuilders, and activists in the LGBTQ communities). They are less likely to generate globally reliable and valid knowledge, but sometimes the knowledge they generate does get absorbed by the scientific community.
Consider that as individuals we do not experience the earth in motion. And yet it spins on its axis west to east (wobbling in precession) making one full turn roughly every 24 hours; it is rotating at any point along the equator at about 1000 miles per hour; it travels around the sun at 66,000 miles an hour; it is part of a solar system orbiting the center of the Milky Way at 140 miles a second. The Milky Way is part of a cluster of galaxies (The Local Group) and is traveling toward the center of the cluster at 25 miles a second. And The Local Group itself is speeding through space at 370 miles a second. None of this motion is accessible to individual experience. And yet we have knowledge of these motions through the collective generationally linked intersubjectively tested experiences of scientists. Since my approach and perspective are grounded in the norms and practices of science, it is important to point out the fragility and vulnerability of science. Intersubjective testing is a social process and subject to social forces that can interfere with its function in grounding objectivity. For example, bureaucratization and professionalization can interfere with this function. Therefore it is important not to take science, intersubjectivity, or the supposed self-correcting nature of science for granted (Restivo 1975).
In order to account for the introspective experience of agency, some social scientists have argued that there is some sort of āslippageā between āindividualā and āsocietyā where agency lives. I am more persuaded by social structural patterns of behavior and thought than I am by the illusion or fallacy of introspective transparency . I am at the radically structural end of the continuum on this matter, granting individuals no causal or willful control over their own lives. I do not challenge the experience of agency and free will but I attribute this to social and cultural configurations and not to the reality of these aspects of the sense of self. We can account for the experience by drawing on the concept of complex open systems which are variously indeterminate but lawful.
Einstein and his brain are iconic examples of the myth that we are our brains and that we are free-willing individuals. That is why they are the focus of this book. To challenge the myth that we are our brains and that we are individuals in the strong sense, we have to engage the social brain paradigm and the evolution of humans as the most social of the social species. This is the theme of Chap. 2.
Guide Posts on the Road to a Sociology of Einstein and His Brain
The Politics of Einstein
The politics of Einstein as an icon of science is about linking the social relations of Einstein with the social relations of science. What should we make of all those photos of him with leading political leaders from all over the world, and with leaders of the World Zionist Organization? Is there something sinister revealed about the relationship between science and society in all those photos of him posing with political leaders from Ben-Gurion to Ramsey Macdonald, from German political and business leaders to Churchill and Lloyd George, from Alfred E. Smith to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, President Harding to King Albert, and from Harry Truman to Einsteinās correspondent Ataturk? There is no need to impugn Einsteinās motives or the humanistic spirit that is behind some or all of these photos. But the humanistic side of these photos is a phenomenon of the individual and in particular and without doubt of Einstein himself. The photos, however, also reveal the nature of science as a tool of the ruling classes. The fact that in many of these photos we can feel the shadow of Adolf Hitler should make us wonder if these political figures represent the benevolence of the state and its love of science or as their understanding of science as a force for national defense and war. In recent times this relationship has become more complicated most notably in the United States as anti-science attitudes and agendas have nested in all parts of our society and penetrated all the way to the Oval Office.
I Meet Einsteinās Brain, I Meet Einstein
In order to understand the myth of the āIā we need to explore the notion of the social self . To say that the āIā is a myth and an illusion is to say that the very idea of a free-standing free-willing individual is incompatible with our radically social nature. To introduce the rationale for labeling the āIā a grammatical illusion , letās begin in an Einsteinian way with an exercise of the imagination. Imagine walking into the Museo Galileo (formerly the Instituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza) in Florence, Italy, coming across Galileoās middle finger in a display case, and remarking āI meet Galileoās middle finger, I meet Galileo.ā Now imagine viewing what is supposed to be Napoleonās penis inside a box in a private home in New Jersey and remarking āI meet Napoleonās penis, I meet Napoleon.ā These are imagined encounters. But the Japanese mathematician Kenji Sugimoto believed that when he āmetā Einsteinās brain (at the end of the day for him, a small piece of tissue cut off from the remains of Einsteinās brain), he met Albert Einstein. Unlike the first two examples, this example is real. All three cases are examples of relicism , the idea that encountering portions of a deceased person is the same as encountering that person in some way and in the extreme actually equivalent to meeting that person. This seems like utter nonsense in the case of Galileoās finger and Napoleonās penis but somehow more plausible in the case of Einsteinās brain.
When Dr. Thomas Harvey took Einsteinās brain (without permission) during his autopsy on the famed scientistās corpse, he set in motion decades of efforts to find in the dead tissue of Einsteinās brain the secret to his genius . Einsteinās brain moved into the landscape of urban legends. His brain actually was removed by Dr. Thomas Harvey during the autopsy. But Harvey did not disappear, and Einsteinās brain did not end up in a garage in Saskatchewan. The story of Einsteinās brain is told in many different works. One of the most interesting and accessible accounts is Michael Paternitiās Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einsteinās Brain (2000). Harvey took the first step in relicizing Einsteinās brain.
Hundreds of hours have been spent during the decades since Einsteinās death in 1955 examining the dead tissue of his brain with the objective of identifying the neuronal origins of Einsteinās genius . During this period, we have made tremendous advances in our knowledge of the brain. A...