It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that Horace Barlow, FRS, has passed away on Sunday 5^th of July 2020. Horace was a titan of vision research, whose work set the basis for contemporary visual neuroscience. He came from a family of scientists: his mother, Nora Darwin, was a geneticist and Charles Darwin’s granddaughter. Horace studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then went on to complete his studies at Harvard Medical School and University College Hospital in London before coming back to Cambridge in the late 1940s.

From the very beginning of his academic career he was interested in vision, having given a talk on colour vision to an undergraduate club while studying Natural Sciences, and becoming fascinated by the subject. In 1953, Barlow made a key development in vision research when, while recording electrical signals from nerve cells in the frog’s eye, he discovered neurons in the frog brain that fired in response to specific visual stimuli, such as small insects. This study opened the way to many discoveries about the inner workings of the visual cortex in animals and humans. His work on visual inhibition was also essential to understanding how the brain processes visual information, discarding redundant stimuli. Horace had an interdisciplinary approach to his research and was a member of the Ratio Club, a group of prominent Cambridge scientists from different fields interested in the topic of cybernetics. He wrote extensively on the statistical processing of visual images and his work has been extremely influential in the field of image classification.

A Trinity College Fellow, Horace became Professor of Physiological Optics and Physiology at the University of California, Berkeley and Royal Society Research Professor of Physiology at the University of Cambridge. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and was awarded the Society’s Royal Medal in 1993. His academic accolades include the Australia Prize for research into the mechanisms of visual perception, the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience and the Ken Nakayama Prize from the Vision Sciences Society.

Horace was key member and a leading light for our Department, and was still involved with PDN events and seminars until very recently. Wolfram Schultz shares his memories of Horace and his contribution to our Department: “I knew Horace before coming to Cambridge in 2001 for his work on visual adaptation, which was also a basis for several of our studies on reward adaptation, and just today I cited him in a review article I am writing (his work from 1961, more than half a century ago). Horace helped me to start the Adrian Seminars in 2006 by suggesting them to me, and encouraging me, when the Anatomy and Physiology departments fused, and making contact with the Gatsby Foundation for many years of funding these seminars. He was an active member of our Adrian Committee and hosted several prominent speakers that also led to memorable dinners”.

Roy Patterson also remembers Horace’s focus and dedication: “Horace had the most amazing powers of concentration which I observed over many years in department talks and conferences around Cambridge. He sat motionless in the front row, never dozed off, and always posed an insightful, discussion provoking question at the end. It was absolutely amazing!”

Horace will be honoured with a private family funeral in the coming weeks. Horace’s former colleagues are organising a scientific tribute to his life and work, to take place on a date close to Horace’s 100th birthday next year.

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(Click on link below to hear Francis Schaeffer comments in 1968 on Michael Polanyi in part 4 of his message on evolution)

https://www.labriideaslibrary.org/IdeasLibraryDatabase/Chance-%26-Evolution-(Part-4)%3A-Michael-Polanyi-%26-the-DNA-Template-B

second letter Polanyi letter dated Sept 28, 2015

September 28, 2015

Dr. Horace Barlow,

United Kingdom,

Dear Dr. Barlow,

I must tell you how much I enjoyed your in-depth interview that you gave Dr. Alan Macfarlane. His series of interviews have been helpful to me and I wish more people would take time to ask questions as he does. Thank for you taking the time to do that interview.

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James Watson (1928-) and Francis Crick  (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004)

Recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi, LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:

Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.

I would like to send you a CD copy of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner. I WONDER IF YOU EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUN ACROSS THESE MEN OR ANY OF THEIR FORMER STUDENTS?

John Scott Haldane (2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936)

J. B. S. HALDANE
Haldane in 1914

(5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964)

Maurice Wilkins (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004)

Erwin Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961)

Sir Peter Medawar ( 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987)

Barry Commoner (May 28, 1917 – September 30, 2012)

Below is a portion of the transcript from the CD and Michael Polanyi’s words are in italics while Francis Schaeffer’s words are not:

During the past 15 years, I have worked on these questions, achieving gradually stages of the argument presented in this paper. These are:

1. Machines are not formed by physical and chemical equilibration. 
2. The functional terms needed for characterizing a machine cannot for defined in terms of physics and chemistry. 

Polanyi is talking about specific machines but I would include the great cause and effect machine of the external universe that functions on a cause and effect basis. So if this is true of the watch,  then you have to ask the same question about the total machine that Sartre points out that is there, and that is the cause and effect universe. Polanyi doesn’t touch on this and he doesn’t have an answer, and I know people who know him. Yet nevertheless he sees the situation exactly as it is. And I would point out what  Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) said and that it needed a Christian consensus to produce modern science because it was the Christian consensus that gave the concept that the world being created by a reasonable God and that it could be found out and discovered by reason. So the modern science when it began with Copernicus and Galileo and all these men conceived that the cause and effect system of the universe would be there on the basis that it was created by a reasonable God, and that is Einstein’s big dilemma and that is why he became a mystic at the end of life…What Polanyi says here can be extended to the watch, and the bridge and the automobile but also to the big cause and effect universe. You have to give some kind of answer to this too and I would say this to Michael Polanyi if I ever have a chance to talk to him.You need another explanation too Polanyi.

3. No physical chemical topography will tell us that we have a machine before us and what its functions are. 

In other words, if you only know the chemicals and the physics you don’t know if you have a machine. It may just be junk. So nobody in the world could tell if it was a machine from merely the “physical chemical-topography.” You have to look at the machineness of the machine to say it is a machine. You could take an automobile and smash it into a small piece of metal with a giant press and it would have the same properties of the automobile, but the automobile would have disappeared. The automobile-ness of the automobile is something else than the physical chemical-topography.

4. Such a topography can completely identify one particular specimen of a machine, but can tell us nothing about a class of machines. 

5. And if we are asked how the same solid system can be subject to control by two independent principles, the answer is: The boundary conditions of the system are free of control by physics and can be controlled therefore by nonphysical, purely technical, principles. 

In other words you have to explain the engineering by something other than merely physical principles and of course it is. You can’t explain the watchness of the watch merely by this. You can explain it on the basis of engineering principles in which the human mind conceives of a use for the machine and produces the machine. But notice where Polanyi is and that is in our argument of a need of personality in the universethough Polanyi doesn’t draw this final conclusion, though I thought that is the only explanation.

If you look at the watch a man has made it for the purpose of telling time. When you see the automobile a man has made it for the purpose of locomotion and the explanation of the difference is not in the chemical and physical properties but in the personality of a man to make these two different machines for two different purposes out of the same material. So what you are left here is the need of personality in the universe.

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Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher,

13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com

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