In his review for The Sunday Times (January 11, 2009) of a new book on the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo of the Science Museum of London, John Carey begins by noting that Paul Dirac was the greatest British physicist since Newton:

In the 1920s and 1930s, together with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Pauli, he opened up the field of quantum physics, changing the course of science. In 1933, aged 31, he became the youngest theoretician to win a Nobel prize.

pathologically silent and retiring, and as a thinker he was unintelligible except to mathematicians. Even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. For his part, he insisted that the quantum world could not be expressed in words or imagined. To draw its picture would be “like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it’s gone”. Its beauty revealed itself only in mathematical formulae.

A friend on his lunch break sends me this – the latest nonsense from “evolutionary psychology”:

Google News Alert

Bruce Schneier: More on the Broad View of Security CSO – Framingham,MA,USAFor example, a lot of the seemingly irrational security trade-offs that the behavioral economists have documented can be explained by the evolutionary …See all stories on this topic

Have you heard? Gossip can be good for you Chicago Tribune – United States Gossiping about neighbors, co-workers and, increasingly, celebrities all grows from the same evolutionary root: survival. Back in the day, if you didn’t …See all stories on this topic

Does religion provide an evolutionary advantage? Science a Gogo – USA He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains – including neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology – that religious beliefs and religious …See all stories on this topic

Look at that middle story: I wonder whether a study detailing how gossip isn’t good for you – relative to minding your own business and getting on with the job at hand – would see the light of day … ?

One thing to note about EP is its utter predictability. It always seems to be about whatever foolishness is noised about in pop culture. If the talk show circuit likes it, it is definitely science. And who could possibly argue with that? Read More ›

Last October, there were some unaccustomed hisses on the Madrid catwalk—directed against gaunt girls. Size 0 scored 0. One in three models, at less than size 8, was ordered offstage by the audience.

Spain isn’t the hottest fashion walk in Europe, but some star-studded runways are grudgingly following its bold move. Maybe the starvation trend has peaked—about time, say many disgusted fashionistas.

In recent years, according to the UK’s Sarah Watkinson, who manages attractive models of normal proportions, “some designers especially like to use incredibly thin girls to wear their clothes because they like the shock aspect. These days more and more very skinny, size-zero models are being used.”

The real shock is that underneath the duds, zeros may hover wispily close to death’s door. One model fell through it last year. Read More ›

I’ve been reading Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself, and in Chapter 5, Midnight Resurrections, he tells the compelling story of Edward Taub, who bucked the establishment and won.

In the mid-twentieth century, a central dogma of neuroscience was that the brain does not change. This had a major impact in decision-making about treatment for strokes and other disorders that create brain damage. Treatment was deemed useless, and patients were typically warehoused in chronic care centres.

I remember this well because in1966 I was a teenage volunteer in one such centre in Toronto – rows and rows of closely packed beds. Curiously, one patient (among many hundreds) had simply got better on her own and went home. It was considered a near miracle that gave much hope to the hard-pressed staff. I wonder, looking back, whether she had figured out something on her own – but not being an educated or prominent woman, she then took her secret with her to her grave. Here’s why I wonder about that:

Early in his career, Taub started investigating neuroplasticity – a radical new idea that you change your brain according to what you think about. Some describe neuroplasticity as “use it or lose it” and others as “what you think about, so you become.” Obviously, when we are discussing thinking, these two ideas are different ways of saying more or less the same thing. Of course, what makes the idea of neuroplaticity controversial is that it implies a subject who makes choices about what to think about – a non-materialist idea. But that is not the focus of this story.

Taub had, according to Doidge, started out in graduate school studying with behaviourists, who were interested neither in the mind nor in the brain, but only in measuring behaviour, according to stimulus and response: You = Pavlov’s dog in trousers.

Well, Taub realized that that idea wasn’t really going anywhere, so he made a risky choice – he took a job in an experimental neurology lab, to better understand the nervous system. This job included “deafferentation” experiments, using monkeys as subjects.

The basic idea is to sever the sensory nerves’ connection with the brain, so the monkey no longer feels the limb. Typically, the monkey stops moving the limb too, which doesn’t completely make sense, as the motor nerves are not severed. Taub discovered, as a graduate student, that if he put a monkey’s good arm in a sling, the monkey would start using the deafferented arm again. Essentially, the monkey had stopped using the deafferented arm as a form of learned behaviour. It preferred the arm that continued to sense things (of course).

As Doidge puts it, Taub realized a couple of facts. One was that “behaviorism and neuroscience
had been going down a blind alley for seventy years.” (P. 140) There wasn’t anything “hardwired” about the monkeys’ behaviour. They had simply made a choice; one that was reversible, given an incentive. Second, this finding could have dramatic implications for the treatment of brain damage in strokes. How much post-stroke paralysis is learned paralysis? Learned, in the sense that – having failed to use faculties for many months – the patient no longer has the nervous system connections to make movement possible or efficient. That was worth investigating.

Or so Taub thought. But he was mostly alone in that. Neuroscientists did not want to rethink their position on a fundamental issue, irrespective of what his findings clearly pointed to. “Most scientists in his field refused to believe his findings. He was attacked at scientific meetings and received no scientific recognition or awards.” (P. 140) He was accused of “insolence” and had to get his PhD at New York State University rather than his original choice, Columbia.

There, Taub discovered by experiment that if the monkey was surgically deprived of feeling in both arms, it would use both arms. He had also learned, working with the monkeys, the importance of small rewards for just trying rather than a large reward for achievement. That insight could be put to use in developing exercises for humans as well.

So, in May 1981, he found himself head of a Behavioral Biology Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, when Alex Pacheco, cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), took a job in his lab, professing an interest in medical research … Read More ›

I defended myself, pointing out that “Among journalists I know, it is not necessarily a term of abuse. It means “one who lives by writing.” That’s why I called my neuroscience, spirituality, and popular culture blog, The Mindful Hack.

Enough of this. Forrest went on to say something I want to share, namely that he is proud of being an “amateur” scientist, meaning that he has many science publications but no science degree. Indeed, he notes,

Discover Magazine has named 10 amateur scientists to its list of “50 Best Brains in Science,” including my colleagues Ely Silk, Bill Hilton Jr. and me from the Society for Amateur Scientists.

Here is a Fox News interview with Japanese physicist, Michio Kaku, who is quite convinced that in the near future we will be able to read people’s minds – high tech phrenology, really.

(= Bumps on the brain explain your mind.)

You know, I heard all this a zillion years ago when video killed the radio star.

As I recall, computers were going to think like people. That didn’t happen, but … on to the next thing, no delays!

Evolutionary psychology! You ARE the cave man! Okay, so that didn’t turn up a single piece of useful information, and just got further and further from science? Well, obviously, .. More money for research is needed …

Oh yes, and … chimps think like people! Didn’t you know? When was the last time you tore off your neighbour’s arm and ate it before her eyes?

Was it last summer at the block barbecue? I guess her aunties must have been kind of cautious about offering her bracelets for Christmas …

Actually, it makes more sense to argue that dogs think like people than that chimps do (at least dogs like being around people, which is a beginning …. )

Anyway, look, welcome to the latest schtick: Neuroscience will soon read your thoughts, as per this video. Wowza! Or maybe not …

A couple of thoughts, to orient a reasonable person: Read More ›

I recently watched a PowerPoint presentation that neurosurgeon Michael Egnor gave at Birmingham, Alabama last month on “why we got eugenics.” He said pretty clearly something that I have been driving at for some time:

Evolutionary explanations are merely stories appended to the proximate (scientific) explanations. They contribute nothing to the scientific understanding of the disease beyond the contribution of the proximate explanations.

Evolutionary stories are ad-hoc and generally untestable guesses, and offer no meaningful framework for science. The proximate explanations (anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, microbiology, etc.) are the framework for science.

Strategies for disease treatment and prevention depend on data from the relevant medical sciences, not on speculative stories about origins.

Darwinian medicine is scientifically vacuous, and the Darwinian theory of human origins is the antithesis of human exceptionalism and human dignity.

Of course. The whole concept of evolutionary medicine is a waste of time for a very simple reason: Read More ›

Having connected the dots of the vast conspiracy run by the Discovery Institute so as to include non-materialist neuroscience, Steven Novella goes on to cheerlead, for methodological naturalism – about which I will say only this:

Methodological naturalism is usually described as meaning that science can consider only natural causes. But by itself that doesn’t mean anything because we don’t know everything that is in nature. For example, if – as Rupert Sheldrake thinks – some animals can demonstrate telepathy, then telepathy is a natural cause. And so?

And so Richard Dawkins goes to a great deal of trouble to attempt to discredit Sheldrake because the hidden assumption is that nature mustn’t include telepathy.

In practice, methodological naturalism frequently becomes a method of defending bad – and often ridiculously bad.- ideas in order to save naturalism. Think of the persistent efforts to “prove” that humans don’t “really” behave altruistically. In fact, we sometimes do. Here’s a recent story, for example, about a Texas woman named Marilyn Mock who went to an auction of foreclosed homes, ran into Tracey Orr – an unemployed woman she had never met – who had come to endure the sale of her home, and … Read More ›

In “Atheists Pick on God” (Sydney Morning Herald, November 2, 2008), Simon Webster explains:

LONDON buses will carry the slogan “There’s probably no God” next year, in a campaign paid for by an atheist organisation. Transport chiefs say it would never work in Sydney, where commuters wait at bus stops for so long that they eventually die and go to heaven, where God tells them: “There’s probably no bus.”

The British Humanist Association and prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, are paying for the ads. They believe God is nothing but a figment of the human imagination, much like the T-Card and the North West Rail Link.

The news comes at a time when record numbers of Sydneysiders say they have lost their faith: despite all the promises of a second coming, there never will be an extension to the light rail network.

Premier Nathan Rees has called on them to find it again quickly: if Sydney Ferries is privatised it may be necessary for commuters on the less popular routes to learn to walk on water …

The rest here. The campaign would never work in Toronto either. Here, once you give up waiting for the bus and call a taxi, the bus turns the corner just as the taxi pulls up – which proves that the atheist’s explanation of the universe cannot be quite right.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack Read More ›

A few days ago, a friend alerted me to an interesting development: In its Perspectives section, New Scientist – the National Enquirer of popular science magazines – had published a hit piece on the non-materialist neuroscientists, including Mario Beauregard, my lead author on The Spiritual Brain. (“Creationists declare war over the brain” Amanda Gefter, 22 October 2008)

Non-materialists, essentially, think that your mind really exists; it is not simply an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in your brain. In fact, your mind is one of the key factors that shape your brain. On the medical side, non-materialist neuroscientists use this fact to alleviate illnesses such as obsessive compulsive disorder and phobias. They have good evidence for their case, and that is addressed here in an introduction to a recent symposium at the UN in New York. This post, however, will focus on the hit piece.

For me, the New Scientist piece was a gift. I sometimes teach non-fiction news writing. And it struck me as an excellent teaching opportunity (“the structure and function of the irresponsible hit piece, unpacked”). Of course, I mean to discourage my students from investing time or energy in such enterprises.

This piece is especially useful for two reasons: As Beauregard’s co-author, I happen to know about non-materialist neuroscience already. So I need no research project to uncover the misrepresentations. Second, this piece is a very conventional example of the “hit” genre. That means I don’t need to keep stopping and saying, “But, students, please note that this particular feature is rare.”

Best of all, if I unpack this story now for interested Mindful Hack readers, I can save time in June by just dusting it off for Write! Canada. So, let’s have a look.

Sections
1 Scare their pants off before they even start reading: The art of the panic headline Read More ›

“Mind-Body Connections: How Does Consciousness Shape the Brain?”, the morning panel of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium (September 11, 2008), sponsored by the Nour Foundation, UN-DESA, and the Université de Montréal, featured some interesting exchanges featuring a number of non-materialist neuroscientists. Non-materialist neuroscientists think that your mind is real and that it helps shape your brain. It is not a mere illusion created by the workings of the brain.

(Both panels were televised and can be viewed here.)

Non-materialist neuroscience is practical

French philosopher Elie During led off the first panel ( Mario Beauregard, Esther Sternberg, Henry Stapp, and Jeffrey Schwartz, in order of speaking) by noting that the French mathematician Descartes – who believed that the mind was real – was, in a sense, the unlikely father of materialism because he tried to separate the mind entirely from the body: Read More ›

Things are changing.

Just recently, Richard Dawkins  conceded that a serious case can be made for a deistic God. (= A God Who Used To Be There)

Plus, Tom Wolfe has distanced himself from “Sorry, but your soul just died.” Apparently, it didn’t die, despite everything you did to kill it.

Now, Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker – well known for a materialist view of the mind – defends freedom of expression in Canada.

All I can say is, well, of all people!

Regular blog readers will know that I have rarely been kind to Pinker, either at The Mindful Hack or The Post-Darwinist (examples linked), or in The Spiritual Brain.

I find his hard core materialism juvenile – after all these years he still doesn’t know that his show left town a while back, as Thomas Wolfe has noted.

All that said, P. M. Jaworski notes at The Shotgun Blog (of the Western Standard) that Pinker recently said something in defense of intellectual freedom in Canada that makes a lot of sense to me:

I was aware of the Steyn/Maclean’s case.

It’s truly shocking that a supposedly democratic government has arrogated to itself the power to censor speech because some judge or bureaucrat thinks it may “expose a person to contempt.” This could outlaw any criticism of a practice that is statistically more common in some groups than others, such as slavery, polygamy, child abuse, ritual torture, gay-bashing, and so on.

It allows haters to decide who gets to say what — all they have to do is say, “So-and-so’s essay made me show contempt,” and So-and-so gets fined or jailed. And it opens the door to the government banning speech that upsets anyone, anywhere — as all-important speech is bound to do.

This is an atrocity against the ideal of free speech, and will make Canada a laughing stock among lovers of democracy and enlightenment. (October 24, 2008)

But Pinker is, alas, mistaken on two points:

1. The criticized practice does not need to be statistically common. Prosecution of the critic requires only that the “human rights” commissioner believes that the critic may “expose a person to contempt.” Statistically uncommon practices are more likely to do so.

2. Second, given that many countries have – or are contemplating – similar laws, we are kidding ourselves if we think that Canada – or American university campuses – are making themselves “a laughing stock” by enforcing censorship of opinion.

Many earnest, humourless people who know that they are “victims” or that they represent “victims” will only rest easy when they have permanently shut down all thought that gives them anxiety. As they are not likely to be free of anxiety any time soon, dislodging them will hardly be easy.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack (O’Leary’s blog on neuroscience and spirituality): Read More ›

One reason the artificial intelligence fantasy (“Soon computers will think and feel just like people!”) has enjoyed such a long shelf life is a fundamental misunderstanding: The computer is thinking.

Actually, the computer is not thinking. A programmer has developed a series of responses to our inputs. To the extent that the programmer can guess what we need, things will work. One way of seeing this is “thought, in the past tense.”

Just yesterday, for example, I was trying to order ten copies of a book from an automated book ordering site. But the programmer apparently forgot to build in the option of ordering ten copies at once. Needless to say, I was hardly going to order one copy ten times. But it’s no use trying to talk to the computer. I e-mailed the office and asked to have someone phone me.*

That’s what I mean by “thought, in the past tense.” If the programmer didn’t think of it, the computer won’t either.

Now, fast forward to the Turing test (can a machine fool you into believing it is a person?), which is once again being tested. David Smith, the Observer’s technology correspondent reports,

Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes. 

In the ‘Turing test” a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer’s responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be ‘thinking’. (“‘Intelligent’ computers put to the test. Programmers try to fool human interrogators,” October 5, 2008)

October 12, the designers of six computer programs are competing for the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence – an 18-carat gold medal and $100,000. Volunteers will sit at a computer, half of whose split screen is operated by another human and half by a program. After five minutes of text-based talk, they must guess. If 30% are unsure, then the computer is said to be “thinking.”

I’ve always felt there was something pretty fishy about this “Turing test”, and I agree with philosopher A.C. Grayling who points out,  Read More ›

Recently, commentator Dinesh D’Souza came up with an aid package for a most unlikely – though doubtless deserving – recipient. He considered it a scandal that George Obama, half-brother to the American Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, lives in Third World poverty in a shack in Kenya:

Read More ›

People who have been following the upcoming American election will know that last week featured a sustained media hit on Republican Veep nominee Sarah Palin’s family.

Some of the visceral hatred of Sarah Palin is, of course, completely understandable. As commentator Bill Whittle perceptively noted,

Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck.

That no one thought Palin could achieve this may be inferred from Ben Stein’s early pointed dismissal (which annoyed many fans of Expelled because Palin is not a Darwin hack). In fairness to Ben, he may have mistaken Palin for one of the cackling horde of entitlement/extortion babes who want to play with the boys – by girls’ rules.

No doubt the Dem campaign will regroup tomorrow, but meanwhile, I want to draw attention to the culture war over Trig Palin (the Palins’ youngest son, and what it tells us about the culture in which evidence for design in the universe is so very unwelcome.

Trig, as most know, has Down syndrome, a genetic disorder. It usually features retardation as well as physical problems, though the degree varies greatly from one individual to the next. Years ago I interviewed a young Canadian actor who had Down syndrome, read a book by a young British author who also had it – and have just learned today of the passing of a Canadian artist of some note who lived with the disorder for half a century. Most people with DS today can be educated, live as young adults in group homes, and undertake light responsibilities. Recent medical advances enable most to reach middle age.

However, 90% of American children who have the disorder are aborted, often late in pregnancy. Thus, I wasn’t surprised when intrepid Canadian blogger Wendy Sullivan (the Girl on the Right) alerted me to this Palin hate site, featuring ridicule of the infant Trig. Now, the site is a troll hole, to be sure, but it inadvertently draws attention to widespread American attitudes to children like Trig.

Recently, LA broadcaster Frank Pastore invited Jill Stanek, the Oak Lawn, Illinois nurse whose testimony about babies who survive abortions and are left to die triggered the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in Obama’s state. She recalls how she got involved:

… if they were aborted alive, they were allowed to die in the hospital’s soiled utility room without any medical intervention whatsoever.

This came home to me one night when a nursing coworker was taking a little baby boy (who had been aborted because he had Down syndrome) to our soiled utility room to die because his parents didn’t want to hold him and she didn’t have time to hold him that night. When she told me what she was doing I couldn’t bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone and so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. Needless to say, this was a life-changing event, …

A curious coupling of pictures that: Trig Palin, help up by his family before an adoring crowd … . The nameless, abandoned Oak Lawn child held by a lone, caring nurse in the soiled utility room …

It was Barack Obama who later prevented the Illinois “born alive” legislation from being passed. Although many clouds of smoke have billowed from his handlers’ offices, Obama quite clearly opposed protection for children such as the Oak Park boy, where the overwhelming majority of legislators supported it.

How strongly does Obama feel about his stand? When political reporter David Freddoso was asked by Bill Steigerwald “What the most damning thing you say about Obama’s ideology or belief system?”, he replied:

Sen. Obama promised to a gathering of Planned Parenthood last July that his first act as president – and that’s what he said, “my first act” — won’t be to bring home the troops from Iraq, or to set up a government health care system or any of the other things that Barack Obama has promised. The Number One thing, the top priority, his first act, is to sign a bill called the Freedom of Choice Act, which re-legalizes partial-birth abortion, among other things. Fine. People have all kinds of opinions about abortion. People are pretty much in agreement about partial-birth abortion – that they don’t want it. But that will be his first priority, and that he would go so far as to pander to Planned Parenthood and say that at their gathering last July, is really, really amazing to me.

No, David, it is not amazing. Not in a country where far more boys with Down syndrome will die alone in a soiled utility closet than live in a family.

Obama, I think, knows his country well.

Or does he? From the dawn of history, most human beings have known that there is – in any event – Another country, whose governor hates nothing and no one that he has made. And influences from that country sometimes make their way here.

As a traditional Christian, I believe that even now in that country, my childhood friend Johnny (1948-1957), who had Down syndrome, has placed his bet – and is smiling.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack Read More ›