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A critic protests about my previous post's claim that only the imprinted brain theory can explain the link between cancer and mental illnesses like autism--not to mention denying that any such link exists. The fundamental reproach is that I have overstated my theory. I haven't.
The reason is very simple. It is that the imprinted brain theory represents a completely new paradigm. The picture illustrates what I mean. On first sight, you see an abstract pattern of black and white, but in a few moments the light dawns: it's a bulb! Evidence from neuroscience suggests that bottom-up, basic visual perceptions like this need to be matched to top-down, organizing concepts to produce such a recognition. Indeed, and interestingly in this respect, autistic subjects show a measurable deficit. They seem to devote more processing power to the bottom-up than the top-down mechanism, and as a result are slower to see the light, so to speak.
It seems to me that much the same happens in science. As Thomas Kuhn argued in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a scientific paradigm is a top-down, organizing concept which makes sense of and interprets, basic, bottom-up fact-finding and experimentation. As such, it serves as a model, exemplar, or pattern for research.
The imprinted brain theory is like this--and indeed reveals an important aspect of paradigms in general. According to the theory, we have two, parallel modes of cognition which resemble and are probably built on top of the twin perceptual mechanisms described above: a bottom-up, mechanistic one adapted to the physical world of objects, and a top-down, mentalistic one adapted to the psychological, contextual world of people and their minds. Seen from this angle, paradigms--even scientific ones--begin to look mentalistic.
Indeed, this is an insight which immediately explains one of their most striking aspects: the fact that people tend to believe in them. Beliefs only exist in minds, and as such are quintessentially mentalistic, and perhaps this explains why fundamental scientific paradigms like the Copernican one discussed by Kuhn immediately become controversial. The reason is that, as beliefs, they challenge other beliefs, such as those with a purely mentalistic foundation in religion, philosophy, or politics. Basic, lab-level science doesn't do this because it doesn't necessarily have to be seen in a wider context or to invite belief as such. On the contrary, skepticism is a more appropriate frame of mind where basic research is concerned.
Fundamentally, this is why I claim that the imprinted brain theory is unique. There is no other theory currently on offer which explains so much with so little and which, like the Copernican paradigm, promises a complete and fundamental revolution in the way in which we think.
Admittedly, the "extreme male brain" theory of autism is comparable in some respects. But unlike it, the imprinted brain theory applies to psychotic as well as to autistic spectrum disorders. It also makes a controversial prediction about the so-called "extreme female brain" which has already been corroborated. Again, no other theory known to me--the extreme male brain included--links its cognitive, neuro-scientific paradigm (the diametric model in this case) to genetic/epigenetic causes with such provocative precision as the imprinted brain theory does. Finally, and as I was so rash as to point out in the previous post, no other theory has so many widely ramifying implications and predictions, like the one linking cancer-risk to the diametric model of mental illness via the role of key imprinted growth-factor genes like IGF2.
The problem here is that new paradigms inevitably get ahead of the game and begin to predict effects invisible to existing wisdom. For example, in 1651 Giovanni Riccioli published 77 arguments against the Copernican, sun-centered paradigm, which so controversially contradicted the traditional, and seemingly self-evident Earth-centered one. Of course, most of his 77 arguments were simply wrong, but not all them were false in principle. Riccioli rightly pointed out that if the Earth was indeed moving, bodies would feel what we now know as the Coriolis force (which causes uniformly moving bodies to curve relative to the Earth turning beneath them). But at the time no such effect had been observed, so its absence was considered yet another proof that Copernicus was wrong.
My belief is that the same will prove to be the case with cancer-risk associated with autism versus psychosis: highly controversial now, but likely to be proved eventually if the imprinted brain paradigm is correct. And of course that goes for the autism/psychosis distinction itself: a symmetry unique to the new paradigm, but evidently another cause for complaint by critics.
My final point is that, once you have seen the light in the picture, you can no longer ever see it again as just a black and white pattern. And the same goes for the light which new paradigms throw on things in science: once you see it, the picture changes irreversibly and for ever. That's what Thomas Kuhn called a scientific revolution, and that's what the imprinted brain theory is bringing about.
