“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born
is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless
it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
~ Cicero
********
For some reason I've been thinking about Ralph Holloway today, probably because I've been musing about how off-track my life has gotten since I had it all planned out when I was in university. If I went back in time and told my teen-age self what was going to happen to me and what I would actually do with my life I wouldn't have believed it. I wouldn't have considered it even possible. Oh, well.
Here's a short note I jotted down about Holloway on his passing.
I corresponded with Dr. Ralph Holloway of Columbia when I was a grad student. He was a very interesting man in so many way and I doubt his career path could be replicated today. He called human beings the most dangerous species on the planet because our brains create, via arbitrary symbols, delusional systems of patterned insanity. Lot of room for enormously interesting blue-skying there. But to do that blue-skying you have to know comparative neuroscience, molecular neurogenetics, and paleoneurology, things cultural anthropologists know nothing about, dismiss as irrelevant and leading to Nazithought.
Anyway, he started out at Drexel studying metallurgical engineering in a program that was half classroom and half working in industry, in his case at a company manufacturing stainless steel. But his family moved to New Mexico so he transferred to the university there, deciding that metallurgy was boring and he wanted to study anthropology but his dad told him he'd never get a job with that degree and he should study geology and get a job with an oil company.
To pay his way through college he didn't get a student loan or have pop pay, he went to work as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields. Alas, when he graduated he couldn't get a job with the oil companies but he did find work with Lockheed working on heat-resistant metals, just what he had been studying at Drexel. So getting a geology degree was a total waste.
Metallurgy still bored him and he still was interested in anthropology so he entered a Ph.D. program at Cal where he became interested in the evolution of the brain but was told there was nothing to learn there. His mentor wanted him to study baboon behavior in order to understand human behavior but Holloway thought that was stupid and found a mentor who would let him study the brain and he did his dissertation on certain aspects of the primate brain that was so well received he received multiple job offers, accepting the one from Columbia because his wife was a New Yorker.
Thus began his long career, starting off with studies of the lunate sulcus, which defines the anterior boundary of the primary visual striate cortex. The cortex anterior to the lunate sulcus is the parietal and temporal lobe association cortex, where higher cognitive functions occur. And from there he went deep into specialized brain research.
One big controversy he got into was whether an increase in brain size had to precede any organizational shift in brain components. It was generally believed that the brain did not reorganize until after there was an increase in brain size, and Holloway believed that reorganization took place before the increase in brain volume. He was convinced that the earliest hominids had brains that were fundamentally different from those of apes, despite their small size, and they were capable of more complex social behaviors than apes, as would be expected if the hominid brain's reduction in the primary visual cortex signaled a relative increase in the parietal association cortex.
Holloway also got into the differences between male and female brains, for example discovering that females have larger corpus callosa (connecting the brain hemispheres and facilitating communication and coordination of sensory, motor, and cognitive functions) relative to brain size than do males and that the splenium (important for processing visual and spatial information) in particular is more bulbous in females than in males.
Holloway's
life was, as he put it, a quest for truth, replication, and letting
data trump emotional biases. He got in trouble for insisting that an
understanding of the roles of nature and nurture in how IQ scores vary
among populations is impossible without knowing how the human brain
varies and why it does so. He also got in trouble for saying that human
physical and mental variation should be celebrated and its study
encouraged, rather than the opposite. It is strange that while the
dominant cultures shouts that diversity is our strength, discovering
just what that diversity consists of and why is forbidden.
________
I bet that you have never heard of Dr. Holloway. But I bet you have heard of Stephen Jay Gould. Holloway called Gould a charlatan. Grist for the mill.
********
“We write to taste life twice,
in the moment and in retrospect.”
~ Anaïs Nin
