Abstract
The common premodern transcendental understanding of life is explored here as a basis for alternative explanations to some biological mysteries, in particular, a collection of intelligence-related phenomena, and more generally, the missing heritability problem (transcendental will be used herein in place of a number of existing terms including transmigration and reincarnation). An extended introduction considers possible carryover from previous lives as a complementary component of life and, specifically, as an additional vehicle for apparent heredity. This introduction also touches on two relevant examples - the innate spiritual or religious understandings of young children and the mysteries associated with monozygotic twins. The subsequent discussion section then considers a constellation of three intelligence-related mysteries - a childhood behavioral syndrome, the Einstein Syndrome; the somewhat overlapping phenomena of savants and prodigies; and then the observed rise in IQ's or the Flynn Effect - which together with the inability to identify a significant DNA basis for the variations in intelligence, represent a significant challenge to the modern understanding of humans. Alternative explanations from the transcendental perspective are considered along the way.
Highlights
A basic pillar of the modern scientific understanding of life, as Richard Dawkins has put it, is that our DNA "created us, body and mind" [1], and as such, we are very fortunate "to be alive, given that the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA will never be born" [2]
Goldstein was quoted on the outcome of thorough comparisons between the million or so common genetic variations and the apparent inheritance patterns associated with the occurrences of common complex diseases [4]
Thomas Sowell's book The Einstein Syndrome - Bright Children Who Talk Late considered a very interesting behavioral phenomena named for the late physicist, Albert Einstein [28]. (Sowell is the well-known economist and author.) Sowell pointed out that children with this condition have "speech development [which] lags far behind that of other children their age, while their intellectual development surges ahead of their peers" [28]
Summary
A basic pillar of the modern scientific understanding of life, as Richard Dawkins has put it, is that our DNA "created us, body and mind" [1], and as such, we are very fortunate "to be alive, given that the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA will never be born" [2]. Collins' recent book about DNA, The Language of Life, and the enormous efforts to identify and understand the DNA bases for the variations in complex disease susceptibilities and eventually for other individual-distinguishing features [3]. This vision has turned out to be difficult to confirm, though. It had naturally been assumed that some of these common variations in DNA blueprints would be correlated with the patterns of susceptibility to common diseases
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