It is good to see the growing impatience of religiously motivated pseudo-science. Too often science has been, and continues to be, religion’s handmaiden. In fact it is surprising there hasn’t been a stronger backlash. But now it may be coming on too strong—the backlash may be more of whiplash. Witness Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington’s recent remarks: Read more
Norbert Smith, a.k.a. “Doc Gator”, author of Passive Fear and many children’s books has edited a collection of essays called Sacred Cows in Science, mostly on controversial issues in science: Science was at one time defined by its method. Carefully controlled experiments, provisional conclusions, and considered debate once defined the field. But those days have passed. Today, science is defined by public policy statements, consensus, and a set of metaphysical assumptions that cannot be directly tested. Students are told that science is in conflict with “faith” or, worse yet, that faith operates in a different “magisterial” with no real application to the world we inhabit. I have an article in the collection on neuroscience, sense, and nonsense.
In “A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life” (February 21, 2011), New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye sounds like a man who knows a comic scene when he sees one: Two dozen chemists, geologists, biologists, planetary scientists and physicists gathered here recently to ponder where and what Eden might have been. Over a long weekend they plastered the screen in their conference room with intricate chemical diagrams through which electrons bounced in a series of interactions like marbles rattling up and down and over bridges through one of those child’s toys, transferring energy, taking care of the business of nascent life. The names of elements and molecules tripped off chemists’ tongues as if they were the eccentric Read More ›
Earlier, I had mentioned the problem created by negative expert opinion, when dealing with children who are missing all or parts of their brain. A friend kindly sent me this in response, from one of the Cambridge Journals. Note the line in the abstract below, “The relative rarity of manifest consciousness in congenitally decorticate children could be due largely to an inherent tendency of the label ‘developmental vegetative state’ to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology (1999), 41: 364-374 Copyright © 1999 Mac Keith Press Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy D Alan Shewmon MD a1c1, Gregory L Holmes MD a2 and Paul A Byrne MD FAAP a3 a1 Pediatric Neurology, UCLA Read More ›
Here I commented on the reality of human crowds, as I have experienced them: Largely passive waves, moving along, but intelligently anxious to hurt no one. The harmlessly mentally ill are simply tolerated. Occasional boors (and couples who insist on airing private business in public) suffer social reproach. Given the multicultural diversity of the setting with which I am familiar, I suspect that this is the normal approach of humans under some territorial stress, but not under any other kind of stress. The Toronto (Canada), subway crowd is not a lynch mob or a riot, just tens of thousands of people heading in the same geographical direction all at once, but all to different eventual destinations.
In response, here, commenter Zephyr adverts to the work of a serious researcher of crowds, work that certainly illuminates my own decades-long experience (in an admittedly peaceful part of the world). Some perceptions of crowds may be coloured by too much emphasis on the behaviour of lynch mobs. Anyone on the Toronto subway last Friday night was using it only to get somewhere else. Comparisons to herds are perverse. We’re not a herd. Everyone has an individual destination, but when crammed together, we must act as a passive crowd.
Given the low human population of Stone Age man, I am sure that the “evolutionary psychology” explanation of the individual selective genetic advantage enjoyed by enormous, compacted passive crowds will be “interesting.”
All this said, a commenter here, responding to this at Salvo, writes,
I imagine though to a religious person, and Christians especially, these line of questioning could be seem rather threatening, and maybe that’s the real reason for such animosity to EP from Ms O’Leary.
Whaa?? Read More ›
In his 1987 seminal work entitled Impossibility In Medicine the American psychiatrist Jean Goodwin presented to the world the following acutely insightful vista of the brain: “Despite many assertions to the contrary, the brain is not “like a computer.” Yes, the brain has many electrical connections, just like a computer. But at each point in a computer only a binary decision can be made—yes or no, on or off, 0 or 1. Each point in the brain, each brain cell, contains all the genetic information necessary to reproduce the entire organism. A brain cell is not a switch. It has a memory; it can be subtle. Each brain cell is like a computer. The brain is like a hundred billion computers Read More ›
here: Every cell a densely populated ocean. I’d be interested to know whether wave mechanics can be used to interpret many of the behaviours of life forms.
Last Friday night, I was crammed tight into the Toronto subway along with thousands of other warm bodies moving slowly north. The train slowed to inchworm pace and we received a message: Personal injury at track level. You know as well as I do what that means. Everyone did. Thousands of us were dumped out against a chill north wind at the city’s central intersection (Yonge & Bloor), milling around, waiting for shuttle buses that rarely came. A great opportunity for violence, right? You know, competition, selfish genes, survival of the fittest … Nah. There was none. A few crazy people were yelling at themselves and a splitting couple was yelling at each other. People passively cleared whatever space was Read More ›
A friend writes to advise me of a “vicious” review by Scott Atran of Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in the most recent issue of National Interest, which – he tells me – otherwise focuses on foreign and defense policy. Atran, an anthropologist connected with U Michigan, doesn’t like Harris anyway, I gather, because the latter wouldn’t dismiss the effects of laboratory research into telepathy and telekinesis. Atran, for his own reasons, doesn’t think that “science” is in any position to determine morality. Harris tells us: “I find reasons for hope” because “moral progress seems to me unmistakable. . . . Consider the degree to which racism in the United States has Read More ›
(targeting customers of the more familiar bodice-ripper and cherry-chomp brands)
David Brooks, who used to know tripe when he saw it, now gives us this, praising pop evolutionary psychology:
Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophyA core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.
Yes. There is a name for that: fascism
Fascism, at heart, is a belief that surrendering to an emotion engendered by an idea can bring about an earthly utopia. In politics, the idea is usually appears as a messianic leader, but in current psychology, anyone with some neuroscience training can generate these visions using machines, drugs, or narratives that get published as research on human subjects.
And it is always very difficult, at best, to explain to people that, on Earth, utopia is the trade name for hell.
Anyway, Brooks unintentionally outlines the problem better than any detractor could by retailing this loathsome love story: Read More ›
I do enjoy reading ID’s most vehement critics, both in formal publications (such as books and papers) and on the, somewhat less formal, Internet blogosphere. Part of the reason for this is that it gives one something of a re-assurance to observe the vacuous nature of many of the critics’ attempted rebuttals to the challenge offered to neo-Darwinism by ID, and the attempted compensation of its sheer lack of explicative power by the religious ferocity of the associated rhetoric (to paraphrase Lynn Margulis). The prevalent pretense that the causal sufficiency of neo-Darwinism is an open-and-shut case (when no such open-and-shut case for the affirmative exists) never ceases to amuse me.
One such forum where esteemed critics lurk is the Panda’s Thumb blog. A website devoted to holding the Darwinian fort, and one endorsed by the National Center for Selling Evolution Science Education (NCSE). Since many of the Darwinian heavy guns blog for this website, we can conclude that, if consistently demonstrably faulty arguments are common play, the front-line Darwinism defense lobby is in deep water.
Recently, someone referred me to two articles (one, two) on the Panda’s Thumb website (from back in 2007), by Arthur Hunt (professor in Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Kentucky). The first is entitled “On the evolution of Irreducible Complexity”; the second, “Reality 1, Behe 0” (the latter posted shortly following the publication of Behe’s second book, The Edge of Evolution).
The articles purport to refute Michael Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity. But, as I intend to show here, they do nothing of the kind!
From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism has morphed into a Templeton-funded book. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, Read More ›
That was the title of one of my recent lectures at our church. You can download the PowerPoint presentation here.
Cautiously introduced as a “guest voice” in the Washington Post, commentator David Klinghoffer talks about Alfred Russel Wallace, co-theorist of natural selection, as a voice for healing the current social divide between the elite sinless Monkeyman and the traditional popular Adam: Pro-Darwinian educators were frustrated this week to find that most public high school biology instructors in their teaching do not wholeheartedly endorse evolution. The teachers reflect a stubborn division across American culture. For the past three decades, Americans have been locked into a basically unchanging split of views on the subject, with only about 16 percent believing in Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. Darwinism is, at bottom, a theory about us (trousered apes, meat puppets, etc.). Now, obviously, when Read More ›
This is one of those stories about which one says, I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.
These three Ohio bucks somehow locked antlers while battling near a small creek. When one deer slid into a shallow pool, it sealed the fate for all three, who drowned together, antlers still locked. Steve Hill talked to the men who found and recovered the deer and their combined 400-inches of antler to bring you the story of this sad, almost poetic scene.
Some said, heartlessly, that they’d make a nice chandelier. Others asked sensible questions:
Wildlife biologists are taught that anthropomorphism—endowing the animals they study with human qualities—is not good science. Yet, says Mike Tonkovich, deer project leader for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, “I can’t help wondering what was that third buck thinking? Whatever possessed him to get engaged when the two were already entangled?”
Mmmm … Stupidity? He wasn’t thinking anything? Question: How many times has this happened when no human was around to see it?
But others outgassed on Darwinism: Read More ›