Denyse O'Leary

In response to my profile of Cap’n “I don’t read the stuff I review” Zen, whoever he may be, a friend – with some experience dealing with these types  – kindly writes to say, … many members of the militant atheist set will often write “canned” reviews of a book with either minimal reading or no reading whatsoever. Most actual users of Amazon will give such “reviews” a negative vote. However, the goal of these writers is not so much to provide their particular slant on the book as it is to try to crowd out serious or thoughtful reviews on a topic they dislike. To further this end, they post a link to their reviews on various “science” (read Read More ›

Some guy here not convinced: In “Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?”(March 24, 2011), Colin McGinn notices materialist neuroscientist V.S. Ramachadran’s A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, Tell-Tale Brain: Neurology is gripping in proportion as it is foreign. It has all the fascination of a horror story—the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain. All those exotic Latin names for the brain’s parts echo the strangeness of our predicament as brain-based conscious beings: the language of the brain is not the language of the mind, and only a shaky translation manual links the two. There is something uncanny and creepy about the way the brain intrudes on the mind, as if the Read More ›

Massively. In “Fire did not spark human colonisation of cold Europe”, we learn that one particular treasured Darwin myth – humans accidentally discovered fire, and then everything happens – might not be so. “The European evidence strongly suggests that the habitual and controlled use of fire was a late phenomenon,” Villa and Roebroeks conclude.  The findings controversially suggest that people migrated from Africa to the below-freezing winter temperatures of Europe without fire. These early hominins might have combined a high-protein diet with a highly active lifestyle to survive, the researchers speculate. The conclusion also questions Wrangham’s hypothesis that an increase in human brain size was tied to the invention of cooking. Wrangham remains to be convinced. He points out that Read More ›

Sure you are. Someone in your household won’t rest until they find bocconcini cheese for a recipe for guests. Here Michael Marshall, (New Scientist 10 March 2011) tells us, “Fluid societies powered human evolution”: Human hunter-gatherer societies swap members more flexibly than groups of other animals do. That could help explain why humans developed such powerful brains and advanced technology, while chimpanzees didn’t.People have been hunter-gatherers for almost all our 200,000-year history, so modern hunter-gatherer societies are a window on our past, argues Kim Hill of Arizona State University in Tempe. Hill and colleagues gathered census information on 32 hunter-gatherer societies around the world. In all of them, both males and females could leave the group into which they were Read More ›

Escapes trampling by troll competitors – Tells reporters: “Real thinkers don’t read books” Here, at Amazon, the indispensable Nature of Nature (a compendium of the pro- and anti-ID writings of many of the world’s best champions on either side), has attracted a “review” by one, Colonel Zen, who allows us to know that he actually has not read the book. Well, I haven’t read this … and at their vanity press price am unlikely to, but I’d take bets. I say “review”, not review because if the Colonel has not read the book, it is not a review, by definition. If you would like to go to the linked site and join the commenters by pointing out that fact, please Read More ›

Dimmer switch here: NASA’s Hubble Rules out One Alternative to Dark Energy ScienceDaily (Mar. 14, 2011) — Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have ruled out an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy.Some believe that is because the universe is filled with a dark energy that works in the opposite way of gravity. One alternative to that hypothesis is that an enormous bubble of relatively empty space eight billion light-years across surrounds our galactic neighborhood. If we lived near the center of this void, observations of galaxies being pushed away from each other at accelerating speeds would be an illusion. This hypothesis has been invalidated because astronomers Read More ›

Recently, Bantay, a commenter on a post addressing the origin of language, quoted

…because Darwinists need to chase their tails by denying precisely what language itself affirms (meaning, order, and purpose)”

and asked

Does that mean that when Dawkins speaks, it is meaningless, orderless and purposeless?

Well, let me try to unpack that a bit.

Conversation with friend

Recently, I was on a road trip with a friend who wanted me to listen to this wow! CD by a dynamite Catholic preacher, who was into Thomism. (Thomism, sometimes neo-Thomism, is an attempt to use the teachings of medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas to counter materialism, Darwinism, etc.)

He made clear he was not talking about (nonsense like) intelligent design or creationism when he offered “proofs for God” going back to ancient times. I listened carefully, and then my friend asked me what I thought.

I sensed I’d better not just make social noise (= Isn’t he wonderful! Isn’t he profound! Take that,atheists!). So I thought about it, then said,

He is a good preacher, but I believe his arguments will have no impact whatever today, and at present are merely a distraction. Here is what I learned, writing The Spiritual Brain:

The Darwinist does not believe in the reality of the mind, and as a result, arguments from reason and logic are dismissible, because they are simply the natural selection of your successful genes operating on your neurons to produce delusions that cause you to pass on your genes. Tht is why people continue, through the generations, to find them persuasive. As materialist cognitive psychologist Steve Pinker, has said, “Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth.”

To get some sense of how this plays out, Read More ›

Since self-organization theory, the Darwin lobby, and the Texas science standards have all been in the Inbox lately, it’s only fair that we have a look at the Texas Darwin  lobby’s view of self-organization or self-replicating life (standard proposed in 2009):

(9) Science concepts. The student knows the significance of various molecules involved in metabolic processes and energy conversions that occur in living organisms. The student is expected to:

(D) analyze and evaluate the evidence regarding formation of simple organic molecules and their organization into long complex molecules having information such as the DNA molecule for self-replicating life.

The response from the Darwin lobby’s house expert John Wise is

This is a clear example of the incorporation of intelligent design/creationist language into student expectations and parallels the “complexity of the cell” language found in the new TEKS (7)(G). The problematic assertion here stems mainly from the writings of Discovery Institute Fellow William Dembski. Dembski asserts that an intelligent designer must be involved in the creation of meaningful information whenever “specific complexity” is found because his own “Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information” prevents natural selection from increasing the amount of information in a genome (see reference 1 and citations within). Dembski’s argument requires that information be complex (have a very low probability of being produced by random processes) and that it be “meaningful.” Meaningful information in the case of genetic sequences such as in DNA can be inferred to be those that increase the fitness of an organism (make it well adapted or better adapted to its environment).

Gosh, whatta reason. A lot of us here are Bill Dembski fans/friends/friendly critics/people he lets park in his back yard for free. So far as I know, Dembski was never a self-organization of life fan and has nothing to do with the development of the theory. Indeed, the self-organization guys have been known to critique his theories too.

The skinny: Read More ›

Here’s an introduction to Henk Rijkers’ review/profile/interview with me about The Spiritual Brain (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary) in a Dutch Catholic newspaper. The book covers the failure of materialism to fulfil its promises and offers a look at a non-materialist approach to neuroscience, hence the controversy.

Update: Here’s the complete text.

You’ll need Google Translate (just below Navbar) to follow that, so I thought I’d post a few English language comments I made: Read More ›

Okay, it’s not Stephen King, but no scholar ever is. Recently, the journal Synthese had to put a disclaimer on an article written by a Darwin lobbyist about Baylor scholar Frank Beckwith (philosophy and church-state studies*). I am happy to say that, as of this date, his has become the most downloaded article. That is a positive sign for academic life in general, just when we thought they’d fall clear down to China, and out into space. But there is, after all, a bottom somewhere. here is the first story on the subject (what happened), here is a backgrounder, and here are some reflections. * In previous posts, I had assumed he was a law prof, and will correct that Read More ›

Reading further into Suzan Mazur’s Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry, I learned something interesting: Scientists and philosophers who explore self-organization in evolution  also battle the armies of Fortress Tenure (trolls commanded by tax burdens). Mazur notes that zoologist and natural philosopher Stan Salthe, visiting scholar at Binghamton University says “his skepticism about natural selection has made him “poison” in some science circles.” He’s not by any means the only one whose name comes up. Materialist atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor (MIT) joked that he was in the Witness Protection Program for his skepticism of evolutionary psychology.[!] Meanwhile, Stuart Newman of New York Medical College warns, Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the Read More ›

Here tragic mishap says something I could not quite understand, and maybe Phaedros did: In discussing speech controls , as here, I said, Anyone who doubts the story should consider that, in the modern world, huge empires imprisoning billions of people and killing tens of millions, have been based on speech control (implicitly, thought control) backed by violence. Usually, the empires’ theories were wrong, their projects useless or destructive, and their end welcome. The pity is that no one was able to shut them down quickly by making everyone mutually incomprehensible about everything. he thought I sounded “like Jared Loughner” (the alleged perpetrator of the recent Tucson, Arizona, shootings at a handshaker where the Congresswoman was seriously wounded, and many Read More ›

While preparing a lecture, paleoanthropologist John Hawks considers the following division of opinion on the origin of language, grammar, etc: Whether language evolved as an accidental by-product of tool use, etc. or how the rules of grammar evolved, and the way in which language originated as a byproduct of tool use and how the rules of grammar evolved by natural selection (discussing Chomsky, Pinker, and Ramachandran. He is not satisfied with what he hears:

I still don’t believe it. Some archaeologists fetishize stone tools in this way, making them the end-all of human cognitive evolution. But let’s face it: chimpanzees and even capuchin monkeys perform multistep tool operations using the brains they have. Hafting a point on a stick seems like the pinnacle of progress only when points are all the ground yields up.Consider how many times a child will witness tools being crafted. Now consider how many times the same child hears spoken communication. The second is at least two or three orders of magnitude greater than the first. It’s not statistically credible for toolmaking to provide a cognitive basis for language. The opposite is vastly more likely.

Ironically, my current view is that much of language cognition really may be a spandrel – at least, in the broad sense promoted by Gould. (March 11, 2011)

Essentially, the spandrel is a supposed accidental byproduct of evolution by natural selection.

Now, in the face of a subject as momentous as language, just what project engages Hawks and his lecture subjects: Not to discover the origin of language but to develop a theory that follows with utter regularity from Darwinian evolution. That, of course, is precisely where the trouble begins.

As a lifetime professional communicator, I would say we know a few truths about human language: Read More ›

Lots of people think David Brooks’s evolutionary psychology romance (The Social Animal) flopped. That surprised me. Who knows, it may signal a wholesome change in the wind: Not every stale idea or exhibition of poor taste can be rescued by throwing the word “evolution” about or invoking “neuroscience.” Consider “Mean Street: What David Brooks Got Wrong and Montaigne Got Right” by Evan Newmark (The Wall Street JournalMarch 11, 2011): …sorry, but I won’t be reading the entire book. The magazine piece was enough for me. It just didn’t ring true – and for good reason. It isn’t. To make his case, Brooks invents “Harold” and “Erica”, two imaginary 21st century overachievers, and tells how their lives and fates are determined Read More ›

“Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began” (Scientific American, Feb 28, 2011) :

Exactly 20 years ago, I wrote an article for Scientific American that, in draft form, had the headline above. My editor nixed it, so we went with something less dramatic: “In the Beginning…: Scientists are having a hard time agreeing on when, where and—most important—how life first emerged on the earth.” That editor is gone now, so I get to use my old headline, which is even more apt today.

He mentions Dennis Overbye’s New York Times origin-of-life story (A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life” (February 21, 2011)), about which I had asked here, “Is this the kindergarten of science or its dotage?”, observing that Overbye “sounds like a man who knows a comic scene when he sees one.”

The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation. The most startling revelation in Overbye’s article is that scientists have resuscitated a proposal once floated by Crick. Dissatisfied with conventional theories of life’s beginning, Crick conjectured that aliens came to Earth in a spaceship and planted the seeds of life here billions of years ago. This notion is called directed panspermia. In less dramatic versions of panspermia, microbes arrived on our planet via asteroids, comets or meteorites, or drifted down like confetti.

Horgan ends on a really classy note: He trashes creationists, as if they had anything whatever to do with how this mess originated, grew, deepened, and then sucked a whole lot of people in.

At this point, one wants to pull up a chair, pull out a notepad, and make some notes: Read More ›