Almost from the time I arrived in Adelaide in 1984 to work at Flinders University, Marcello and I began discussing many of the ideas that form the basis of his essay. Often, especially in the earlier years, it would be something to do with the interpretation of an experiment or exactly what was going on in the generation of an image in a microscope: how could we know what was real? What was an artefact? How much of what we understood about what we were seeing was influenced by what we already knew?
As the years, and our lives, progressed, we regularly would finish up a tiring day of teaching, meetings and research in a deep and invariably wide-ranging discussion of whatever had been niggling away at our minds: philosophy, politics, neuroscience, art, music, mathematics… The time would rapidly pass until one or other of us realised we really should be home! But even outside Flinders, we would pick up where we had left off or continue an overlooked thread: maybe we would be waiting for the wind to come up for a windsurfing session at the beach; or perhaps we were practising some South American music for one of our occasional performances…
Marcello and I shared a passion for communicating science to the broader public. Although we had our own projects, we enjoyed and were gratified by the success of our joint activities: challenging the strange ideas of Creationists; teaching an introduction to biology at the Workers Education Association; presenting a major course on the neuroscience of learning for school teachers; collaborating with leading artists of different genres to demonstrate the interplay between art and science to general audiences; and more…
Through spending so much time with Marcello outside the nominal boundaries of academic life, I came to understand well what he thought about most things, and, importantly, why he held those views. We often argued strenuously about the details of an issue, and usually resolved our differences, if only to recognise the validity of a different point of view or to accept an alternative conclusion from a given train of logic.
But I was only one of many people Marcello discussed these matters with. He had a wide range of friends and colleagues around the world and I always enjoyed him telling me about some conversation he had had with a notable scientist or a talk he had heard whilst away at a conference.
I’m not sure when Marcello began writing up his ideas that formed the basis of this essay. Round about the time I retired in 2014, he certainly had the core concepts reasonably well formulated and was giving seminars about them to the Centre for Neuroscience at Flinders as well as at other meetings and conferences. Somewhere along the way, I said that I’d be happy to be an early reader of the manuscript he was working on, his “Brick”, as he often called it.
And so Marcello started sending me sections to read and offer opinions on. There seemed to be no great rush and, as a natural extension of all the years of talking about the topics within The Brick, it was an enjoyable task for me to do. But then Marcello’s health began to decline quite precipitously and we realised that we no longer had the luxury of processing his manuscript at such a leisurely rate.
A critical part of the process at this stage was to get the skeletal structure of the manuscript locked down as much as possible to provide a framework upon which the various sections could hang. Key to achieving this was for Marcello to identify the endpoints he wanted to reach. Once we had them, the task of ordering and prioritising the various topics became much more easy. In doing so, I began to recognise the deep underlying reasons why Marcello was writing this work and wished it to be in the public domain.
Marcello had a deep conviction that science, the rationalism that underlies it and the arts that complement it, comprise the highest form of human intellect and endeavour. He had a total disdain for religious orthodoxies, authoritarian politics or any other set of beliefs that both lacked a rational evidence base and inflicted their proscriptions on others. From my reading, his essay aims to undermine repressive ideologies by showing how science runs as a continuous thread from the basic physical properties of the universe through to the neuroscientific underpinning of human experience, behaviour and culture. As such, it presents a positive and affirming pathway, giving the reader the wherewithal to tackle irrationality and prejudice whenever and wherever they appear to limit the potential of humans to be their very best.
The web-based essay…
One of the problems that we realised early on was to find the best way of publishing the essay. With more time, it was feasible that a suitable academic publisher could be found. But Marcello understood that this was a fraught process with no guarantee of success. In any case, time was running out. So we quickly resolved that a web-based format would be the ideal way to go.
Over the final weeks of Marcello’s life, we worked intensively on the manuscript: re-organising sections, setting priorities or hierarchies of topics, deciding which parts to fine tune first and which to leave until later. Meanwhile, I built the website with some sample pages so Marcello could see how it looked, and, more importantly, how it would work. Marcello also gave me the image sets and reference collections that he had used to create his essay.
The final form of the essay here on the website to a large extent closely follows Marcello’s manuscript along with some options for editing that we had agreed upon. Nevertheless, I ended up omitting a few sections that were either incomplete or repetitive and added little if anything to the core arguments of the essay. Although I have edited the text for clarity and consistency, I have retained most of Marcello’s phrasing
The essay is not, and was never intended to be, an academic treatise. Marcello wanted it to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. To that end, I have selected only the most important citations from Marcello’s extensive reference list, giving priority to those that are publicly available on-line, even if only in an abstract form. Nearly every named scientist in the main text has been hyperlinked to a Wikipedia or other appropriate website. Similarly, nearly every technical term has been hyperlinked to the most relevant Wikipedia article which contains a definition and further information about the term. I have checked each and every one of these linked references for accuracy and relevance and I am as confident as I can be that they present reliable information.
Some areas of research referred to by Marcello have progressed very rapidly in recent years beyond the examples given in the essay. In particular, studies linking the properties of neural circuits in the brain with whole animal behaviour have made substantial advances due to incredible new technologies. In general, I have not updated Marcello’s references in the light of more recent work, partly because I’m not sure what he had read himself, and partly because the new work does not substantially change the tenor of Marcello’s arguments.
Marcello had a large collection of Powerpoint slides that sampled data from papers he had read relevant to the essay, as well as figures and diagrams he had made himself. In the end, surprisingly few of these were useful for illustrating the points in his essay in this web-based format. Consequently, one of the pleasures of creating the web version was finding suitable illustrations for Marcello’s text. In addition to Wikipedia, I often went back to the primary sources that Marcello had quoted to find the original figures.
Right up until a few days before he died, Marcello was still sending me messages about the essay: ideas for (re)ordering; a reference to check; a suggestion for an edit. The last time I saw him, we went over as much of it as we could. In the end, we were both confident that wherever we were up to when he could do no more, I could finish it off in the way he had intended.
So here it is, Marcello’s “Brick”, set out section-by-section, hyperlinked to the rest of the world through the wonders of digital technology. For many reasons, it has taken me much longer than I anticipated but I am pleased with the result and I am sure Marcello would be too.
It’s been a real pleasure and a privilege to be able to continue spending so much time with Marcello. Now you, the reader, can enjoy a sampling of Marcello’s incredible mind, as he finds his way from the fundamental principles of physics to a set of suggestions on how we all can cooperate to build a better society, integrating science and art for everyone’s benefit.
If you find any obvious errors, typos, or incorrect or broken links, please contact me at
info[at]iangibbins[dot]com[dot]au
Ian Gibbins, April 2025