All biochemical reactions are initiated in solution close to or upon a membrane. Even the membrane itself is a colloid of different and denser material than the cytosol and often behaves like a complex mixture of hydrogels. In the extracellular matrix, materials are both manufactured and broken up and the degradation products enter the stream towards their expulsion by the emunctory organs.
Fixation
The chemical nature of colloids is triangulated between hydrophilic and hydrophobic macromolecules and smaller solutes. The fixed oscillation between sol and gel depends upon circadian and the other tidal rhythms but a huge amount of stochastic variance operates as a response to external challenges and environmental pressure. Although bone cells have a constant metabolism (even if slower in turnover than other tissues), it is reasonable to describe them as permanent and persistent in that they may be observed by archaeologists many millennia after death. Ossification requires that minerals come out of solution to form tissues that give us enough rigidity for locomotion while conserving elasticity for adaptability to diverse types of ground.
Differentiation is necessary to multicellular life and separation of ions with different resting potentials enables the propagation of a wave. Just as a membrane allows cellular functions to proceed unhindered by the different environment of the surrounding fluid, animal speciation itself erects genetic barriers to allow experience to accumulate effectively and prevent a world of memory-less hybrids. The situation is much more plastic in plants but then they have only two food sources in the atmosphere and strive to bask in it rather than extract it from the biosphere.
The three tenses of time categorise personality as I discuss in Sections 14, 19 and elsewhere. At the larger scale of a population, the length of the present is arbitrary but could be said to be as long as half a generation, a nominal 14 years. Humans as with the other large social animals are unusual in having often three generations living together at any time, unlike the majority of animals that die at menopause. The personality of each of us reflects our development, the bios of which is relatively fixed though still contingent upon uterine life and the accidents and incidents of early social and family life. The psyche is reformulated at puberty but with material from the previous phases. The separation in time between the generations is variable within a fixed range. Our experiences with other members of our cohort may serve to strengthen this separation, depending upon experiences with our peers. The bonds and the conflicts in the vertical time series preoccupied Freud almost to the exclusion of the lateral relationships between siblings, cousins and contemporaries. As we move along the escalator (up or down depending upon our age), as our sinews desiccate and our capacitance lowers, we choose, in the face of inevitable change, to fixate on previous sources of comfort and relinquish our grasp of others.
Resistance and submission to ceaseless flux may be an index of personality, but it also consumes generations and societies. The attempt to fixate structures that will persist and not be eroded by time drives the resistance to cultural change but also motivates the less conservative artists, designers and authors, more so the male as we cannot give birth and nor can we have the certitude afforded by maternity. Writing creates stones out of words. Even stones weather, mostly by water: the “element” that gives life removes any possibility for permanence.
If the egg from which we sprang was made by our grandmother, and her by hers, we have direct biological input from five generative pairs. We might add their eight immediate progenitors, but beyond them the ancestors are too numerous to ascribe any real biological influence on ourselves, and certainly nothing of our culture, leaving aside the fantasy of aristocrats. Our children are the only contribution to inheritance. Yet, as they age, the power to influence their behaviour diminishes and, even with arranged marriages, our unique identity is soon dissolved and merges with the ocean of humanity. We cannot even know anyone beyond our great–grandparents and great–grandchildren.
Human psychosocial life is faced with an analogous challenge between preserving modes of cultural life that confer identity and provide comfort against the inevitable transitions of time, to say nothing of external threats. Small wonder that religions have evolved books to resist the deformations of time. Circadian rhythms provide the only stabiliser of flux in biological life from which psychological health derives. Cultures codify days, create weeks and determine a social response to season.
Poised as we are between past and future, any clues with predictive value will aid survival if stored but will lose that value if fixed. Cultures are less fluid than the families, peer groups and individuals that make them up and seem pained to understand that while substance remains, it is dissolved and reformed at each generation.
War, famine, pestilence, disease and mere unhappiness have kept doctors and priests busy for millennia. Natural philosophy has skirted around the great scourge of mental illness if it has considered it at all.50 Philosophy in its practical discursive sense as elaborated by some of the less dogmatic but strongly principled practices of psychotherapy have developed positive insights into our psyche.51 An ecological approach to health separates only briefly if at all the psychic and social territories from the biological source of existence. Medicinal plants are unique in sharing their biology with us; as for the psyche and the social context, the herbalist has the choice to rise to the challenge.52
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38 Although there may have occurred in evolutionary time, a progression from grazing to scavenging to death to predation, no successful progression can have happened without the concurrent preparatory development of the enzymatic and structural matrices.
39 Ed. David Crystal, Penguin Books 2002.
40 Referring to the Gaia principle formulated by James Lovelock (1919–), co–developed with Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) but fully anticipated by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859).
41 See Capacitance in Section 3, The biological basis of the adaptive response.
42 In Split Personalities in Section 2, Axioms, Theorems and Ideology.
43 McLaren, N. “The Biopsychosocial Model and Scientific Fraud.” Paper presented to RANZCP Congress, Christchurch, NZ, May 2004.
44 Revised version: “When does Self-Deception become Culpable?” Chap. 8 in McLaren, N. Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences. ISBN 978-1-932690-39-2.
45 E.g., the Thrifty Phenotype hypothesis promoted by the epidemiologist Professor David Barker formerly of Southampton University (Bibliography).
46 E.g., Dr Christopher Wild 2005, Complementing the Genome with an “Exposome”: The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology; Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention: a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, co-sponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology.
It must be said that he was talking about the disease of cancer not about illness.
47 Misogyny, in London Review of Books, 41 (5): 5.
48 At a meeting of the Linnean Society of London in June 2015 entitled Plant Conservation—now is the time to change our minds. Former director of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum, he was involved not only in species recovery programmes for both native and exotic plant species but also in the restoration of native habitats. He says, paraphrasing Norman Borlaug, another ecologist, “For too long the conservation of species has been focussed, to the point of obsession, on conservation of plants in their habitats. If the measurements of species extinctions are believed this is not working. It can be argued that now is the time to separate the conservation of plant species and the