Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose draws my attention to her post on David Brooks’s column, “The Young and the Neuro” (New York Times, October 12, 2009), extolling the eager young neuroscientists who – in my view – know just enough to get it all wrong, as follows: Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.    The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. … Read More ›

I found this chilling:

Abstract:
This paper questions criminal law’s strong presumption of free will. Part I assesses the ways in which environment, nurture, and society influence human action. Part II briefly surveys studies from the fields of genetics and neuroscience which call into question strong assumptions of free will and suggest explanations for propensities toward criminal activity. Part III discusses other “causes” of criminal activity including addiction, economic deprivation, gender, and culture. In light of Parts I through III, Part IV assesses criminal responsibility and the legitimacy of punishment. Part V considers the the possibility of determining propensity from criminal activity based on assessing causal factors and their effects on certain people. In this context, the concept of dangerous individuals and possible justifications for preventative detention of such individuals in order to protect society is assessed. The concluding section suggests that the law should take a broader view of factors that could have determinant effects on agents’ actions.

The part that bugs me is “possible justifications for preventative detention”.

That’s what always happens when free will is denied. Somehow or other, the idea gets started that we can detect in advance who will commit a crime. Then you needn’t do anything to get arrested and put away. Someone just needs to have a theory about you.

But no one can truly predict the future in any kind of detail.

What about the Fort Hood massacre, you ask? Well, according to a number of reports, that guy had been advertising his grievances for some months. You sure wouldn’t need a brain scan or materialist theories about free will to figure out that he wasn’t happy in the Army and should just have been discharged – which is what he wanted. You’d just need to listen to what he actually said.

Also just up at my neuroscience blog, The Mindful Hack: Read More ›

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

RationalWiki is reprinting large portions of an article I did with Robert Marks that far exceeds anything permissible under “fair use” copyright protections. I was getting ready to contact my attorney about having them remove our article from their website (go here — I’ve saved this page in case it changes as a consequence of this post), but couldn’t find any contact information on the site. Question: Who is running this site and how to contact them?

Do you remember when I said “when a thing is untrue, if we say it is true we get contradictions” (The Darwinism contradiction of repair systems)? Here I will deal with another contradiction of Darwinism: that we could name its “bionic antinomy”.

According to Wikipedia “Bionics (also known as biomimetics, bio-inspiration, biognosis, biomimicry, or bionical creativity engineering) is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.” In fact, whether we analyze the history of technology, we find how often technical innovations and systems take inspiration from natural models. For some of the more recent examples of biomimetics see The 15 Coolest Cases of Biomimicry. This article synthetically defines bionics as “biologically inspired engineering”. Read More ›

The cloud patterns in two photos taken during the Spanish Civil War are identical, according to a column by George Will: In a slightly less dramatic photo of another falling soldier, taken by Capa at the same time – the cloud configuration is the same as in “Falling Soldier” – the soldier falls on the same spot. The interesting thing is, don’t blame photoshop; these pix were created in 1936. Will goes on to note, quite properly, that photographer Capa had an honourable career as a war photographer (a highly dangerous profession), which came to an abrupt end when he stepped on a land mine. But it seems likely now that he manipulated an iconic photo. For the evidence base Read More ›

Intelligently Designed Nanotechnology

As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.

Listen here.

Yes, but sometimes people don’t see the forest for the trees. Read More ›

The following is a crude 1-minute silent animation that I and members of the IDCS Network put together. God willing, there will be major improvements to the animation (including audio), but this is a start. Be sure to watch it in full screen mode to see the details.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrIDjvpx7w4

The animation asserts that if harmful mutation rates are high enough, then there exists no form or mechanism of selection which can arrest genetic deterioration. Even if the harmful mutations do not reach population fixation, they can still damage the collective genome.

The animation starts off with healthy gingerbread men as parents. Each spawns ginger kids, and the red dots on the kids represent them having a mutation. The missing ginger limbs are suggestive of severe mutations, the more mild mutations are represented by ginger kids merely having a red dot and not severe phenotypic effects of their mutation. The exploding ginger kids represent Selection doing its thing and removing the less functionally fit from the population. The persistence of red dots on the ginger kids represents persistence of bad mutations despite any possible mechanism of selection.

Nobel Prize winner HJ Muller (of Muller’s ratchet fame) suggested that the human race can’t even cope with a harmful rate of 0.1 per new born. The actual rate has been speculated to be on the order of 100-300.

The animation uses a conservative harmful rate of 1 and argues (with some attempts at humor) that deterioration would thus be inevitable even with a harmful rate of 1 per new born.

I save discussion in the comment section the relevant but technical topics of truncation selection, sexual reproduction, recombination, synergistic epistasis, compensatory mutations, relief from Muller’s ratchet etc. These highly technical topics should be addressed and were not included in the animation. We can discuss them in the comment section.

However, the essential problem of mutation rates and deterioration is depicted by the animation. How this cartoon is illustrative of reality (when we consider the technicalities such as recombination, sexual reproduction, synergistic epistasis), can be discussed in the comment section.
Read More ›

Check out this editorial in the Washington Examiner by Casey Luskin. The title is “Let’s restore civility to the debate on evolution and intelligent design.” Casey was superbly rational, reserved and eloquent, as usual. But check out the comments, which reveal trademark, frothing-at-the-mouth, apoplectic, near-convulsive, Darwinian-fundamentalist hysteria — which validates Casey’s thesis. Why such hysterical, vulgar passion? I’ll let UD readers reach their own conclusions.

Neuroscience is, unfortunately, increasingly taken over by what I often describe as neurobullshipping. You know, neuroeconomics,, neurolaw … It basically amounts to determining which regions of the brains of carefully chosen subjects light up when certain propositions are introduced.

Relief at last!

Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics (“Neurotrash”, Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). ‘Bout time someone did, I’d say. What’s really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.

He writes,

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix “neuro-”. Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers – who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism – have entered the field with the discipline of “Exp-phi” or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced “neuro-ethics”, in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people’s moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet’s experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like “evolutionary” psychology all the time.

Responding to Tallis’s article’s title, “Neurotrash”, I wrote to friends to say, more or less, Read More ›

In the post below Andrew Sibley links to an extraordinary article in The Times about the link between Darwinism and the recent spate of school shootings, and in the comments Leviathan steps up to give us the obligatory “this doesn’t disprove Darwinism” response.  Leviathan, you are missing the point.  I read the article and there is not one word in it that attacks Darwinism per se.  For all you or I know the author could be a Darwinian fundamentalist.  I take it that the point of the article is that some school shooters are influenced by Darwinian theory.  That is undeniable.  Actually, I take that back.  I am sure there are Darwinian fundamentalists out there who would deny that any Read More ›

A friend has alerted me to this book and article in The Times online. Charles Darwin and the children of the evolution The headline makes the statement “The naturalist outraged the church, prompting a bitter debate that still sets creationists against evolutionists. Now a sinister link has emerged between his work and the recent spate of high-school killings by crazed, nihilistic teenagers.” Read the article here The book is available “The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics” (Picador, £18.99) by Dennis Sewell is available at the BooksFirst        or at amazon.co.uk http://science-and-values.blogspot.com/

When I was a kid we used to learn useful stuff in school, one item of which is never get between a she-animal and her offspring. Here’s some stuff that happens in the Canadian wilderness: A defence of angry bears. (Actually, I think the bear in this case is a he-bear, but a she-bear would behave exactly the same.) In this next one, the cat wins, and you will see why: This is a defence of angry cats. But, if you watch it through, it is not a defence for bear behinds.

I’ll be speaking on the Texas A&M campus at Rudder Theater from 7:00 to 9:00pm tomorrow (Thursday) November 12, 2009. For the flyer describing my talk, click here: www.uncommondescent.com/images/flyer