Introduction
You see from the title just called The psychopath inside and I had to think of it. The scientists are never satisfied with just titles, always has to be ‘:’ and then something else. It is as good or as bad depending on how you look at things, which is one. The other could be something strange that happened on my way to the lab one day, which is really a part of what this is about, the heart of it is about. This is kind of a weird talk, it is not a science talk, it is a sort of an oops personal story. And there is enough in it. A lot of my friends, who are very religious, think that, because of my resistance to many things, this was God’s way of telling me that I should shape up. I do not look at it that way. I just look at it as serendipity. I just wish I had good serendipity at the casinos and at the racetrack.
I will talk about two things. One is a personal story. I will start out with what identity is about because, when you talk about a personal story, “Who am I, what is this all about?” is something you start thinking of when you are very young. Then, from that, I will talk about the way my mind has changed on why certain things occur in the world and why there might even be good, or what we really would call good, or it is just an effect on the world of the way things are, the different types of people. I will talk about that.
I tried to pick something topical at the end about psychopathy and politics. I will never be able to get through a part on business, religion or, unfortunately, the military. It is great to see Jack Pryor here, he is a real war hero from the Vietnam War, but also a war hero now, because he works so much with veterans issues, PTSD, and all sorts of things that you just can’t believe. It is really great to see you, Jack. I have worked with him at the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense – by my association with Jack. It is kind of the hero and the crazy guy get together and we work there; it seemed to work out. We have been very good friends since then. So I will talk about identity and the nature vs. nurture problem.
The nature – nurture problem
The nature vs. nurture problem goes back to Aristotle and Plato. It turns out, from what we know about modern neuroscience and genetics in the past 10 years, Plato was correct and Aristotle was wrong. I will leave it at that. For those of you who have a background in philosophy, you know what I am talking about. In terms of the idea of tabula rasa that we are born either blank slates, or with all the capabilities that we know, like knowing what morality is, we do not have to be taught morality, we do not have to be taught language, we are just tuning up stuff we have already known for many, many millions of years of evolution. It is just tuning up. Now, it is looking more and more like we are not tabula rasa, we are born with a very full slate that is just then refined depending on the ecological niche we are in, what language we are going to learn, we live around mountains or in a city, all these different things. We are able to deal with all of them. That is part of the problem.
I said: “how many combinations of humans can there be, just based on all the genetic, epigenetic, genomics, and all the combinations?”. It turns out to be 10 to the 81st power (note: 1081), which is one sexvigintillion, which is a big number. I looked at that number for a number of days and every few days I said: “I have seen this number before”. And that number turns out to be one order magnitude off the number of atoms in the universe. For all of us who were born in the 30s and 40s and 50s, we know about the 60s and 70s, so in that sense we really are stardust. It also means that there will never be two humans alike ever and we could go on for five million years. This is a number beyond belief, basically infinity. So the chances of there being another you are really off.
But, beyond that, I tried to look at this once I went through my own personal story. I started to think about identity and who we are, but I immediately went to the biological side of this and I said: “the question for biologists is how many different individual human beings have there ever been and will ever be, in a reasonable amount of time, let’s say two million years”. I went through the permutations and the combinations and I said: “we got 21,000 coding genes, but there are many more regulators of each gene, and regulators of regulators of the genes”. If you look at those numbers, you start to get many combinations, not just from genes that you measure by sending your blood or saliva to 23andme.com, but way beyond that. If you take those combinations, which makes up about fifteen to twenty percent of the genome, the coding genes, the rest of it is really where the action is in terms of biological psychiatry, it sits in this non-coding part, which makes up over eighty percent. Now we study schizophrenia; when we are looking at it, it seems to be this non-coding part, many of which are transposons[1], which are really key players in making us who we are. Because we are based, at least in part, on our genetics or, really, our genomics, what is expressed beyond the coding gene.
Having some obsessive-compulsive disorder through most of my youth, I had to get to that extra order of magnitude – 10 to the power of 82 (note: 1082). I hunted the answer and I found new combinations for transposons. And these new transposons, which we are studying for different psychopathologies, get us up to 1082. But this is just the numerology aspect of that.
1. A transposable element (TE, transposon, or jumping gene) is a nucleic acid sequence in DNA that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating other times reversing mutations, thus altering the cell’s genetic identity and genome size. Transposition often results in duplication of the same genetic material. The transposons make up to two-thirds of the human genome.