David Goldston (extensively edited) “Scientists tend to underestimate the public receptivity to science, and the battles ahead. Intelligent-design advocates try to sell their wares as science rather than religion partly as a legal gambit, but also because science and scientists are held in high esteem. Scientists do not face a public inherently hostile to science even among fundamentalists, and should address the public with respect rather than contempt. Although a remarkably high percentage of Americans do not believe that humans evolved from earlier life forms, it’s not clear whether this is just a casual way of saying they viscerally reject the notion of a random Universe. Evolution is largely a symbolic issue to the public, and may be a poor measure of how religious Read More ›

One of the grand engineering challenges issued by The National Academy of Engineering is to Reverse-engineer the brain.
If the NAE considers it possible to Reverse-engineer the brain, does not that imply that the brain may have been engineered in the first place? i.e., as in designed by an intelligent agent? As you read through these materials, compare the close parallels with engineering design methods and what researchers are discovering about the brain, (compared to chance processes.) (Hmm. Is that why brain neurons were used for The Design of Life cover!) Perhaps we can see productive reverse engineering research supported by grants from the National Academy of Engineering. with true scientific freedom to pursue where the data leads.

Reverse-engineer the brain
Why should you reverse-engineer the brain?

The intersection of engineering and neuroscience promises great advances in health care, manufacturing, and communication.
. . . the secrets about how living brains work may offer the best guide to engineering the artificial variety. Discovering those secrets by reverse-engineering the brain promises enormous opportunities for reproducing intelligence the way assembly lines spit out cars or computers. . . .

Read More ›

Now and then I am assailed by people who insist that “intelligent design is not falsifiable.”

Well, put that way, it isn’t, right?

Politics, economics, and religion are not falsifiable either. Anything can escape falsification if it is put in broad enough terms. That’s because we all have overlapping – but not identical – definitions of what these abstractions mean.

However, specific ID hypotheses such as Mike Behe’s irreducible complexity, Bill Dembski’s specified complexity, and Guillermo Gonzalez’s privileged planet hypothesis can all be falsified by showing that the condition that cannot exist according to the theorist’s postulates does in fact exist.

So a specific hypothesis is – of course – falsifiable. That’s a key part of what a hypothesis is: A statement so specific that its contrary would falsify it.

But now here is something I would really like to know: Do people who claim to have falsified various intelligent design hypotheses ever get angry with the people who claim that intelligent design hypotheses are not falsifiable? Read More ›

Following up on Grant Sewell’s interesting discussion of consciousness as a hard problem for Darwinism, and my response:

In “Brave Newark World”, law prof and columnist Mike S. Adams exposes an Orwellian world of reprogramming inside the dorms at the University of Delaware:

Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university’s official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for “oppressed social groups.” (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can’t stop asking “how do you feel?”).

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as “treatments.”

I wrote a letter to Adams because, while I greatly respect the work of groups like The Fire in fighting intellectual oppression, I also think that a critical dimension is missing – the role that materialism inevitably plays in producing the Orwellian conditions is too often ignored: Read More ›

Last Saturday afternoon, I was working quietly in my office, when the phone rang. I recognized the number of course (416 367-2000) – the Toronto Star has had that number about as long as I can remember. A reporter wanted to know what Christians were planning to do to celebrate October 23.

October 23? Well, in my tradition, that’s the feast of the saintly John Capistrano, but I don’t expect everyone to know. I didn’t myself, until I looked it up.

It turned out that the reporter had learned that a 17th century Irish archbishop Ussher had methodically dated the origin of the world to this date about six thousand years ago. And, given that I was a “fundamentalist author”, he was sure I could tell him about the big celebrations to be expected today …  Read More ›

In Kitzmiller et al vs Dover, the issue over whether or not Darwinian Evolution could be allowed critical evaluation by students, rather than be presented as established fact, was settled once and for all. Furthermore, any consideration of an alternate theory was off the table. All across the land, scientists cheered, since at least for now, science had been saved from an ‘assault by religion’. Just after the decision was handed down, Ohio’s State Board of Education in a 9 to 8 vote kept with their lesson plan, saying in effect, “go ahead and sue us” [Toledo Blade Op Ed 1/14/06]. Although many school districts had been considering broadening their standards to allow a more open discourse, many shelved their Read More ›

Needless to say, I loved this new review of The Spiritual Brain by Bryan Appleyard in the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he says of my lead author Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard: The great strength of his position is the folly of the materialists. Beauregard continually draws attention to the scientifically dubious basis of their leap of faith. They argue that it must be so and then set about proving it. Their triumphalism – driven by big publishing deals – is their greatest weakness. There are plenty of examples … The nicest thing about a review like Appleyard’s is that, agree or disagree, he sees what WE see – plenty of bumph marketed as the “assured results of modern science.” As applied Read More ›

Because so many people have asked me what The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul addresses, I thought I would post the Introduction. It doesn’t deal with everything the book addresses, but it gives you some idea. In this book, we intend to show you that your mind does exist, that it is not merely your brain. Your thoughts and feelings cannot be dismissed or explained away by firing synapses and physical phenomena alone. In a solely material world, “will power” or “mind over matter” are illusions, there is no such thing as purpose or meaning, there is no room for God. Yet many people have experience of these things. We intend to argue that Read More ›

You might wonder whether Prof. Robert Marks is the only faculty member at Baylor who has a “group” or a “lab” not blessed by the Baylor administration. The other day I mined a bunch of cases here at UD where the terms “group” and “lab” are used at Baylor, almost certainly without the Baylor administration’s blessing or knowledge. Here’s what I wrote: (1) Robert Marks has another research entity on the Baylor server: “The Baylor University Time Scales Group” (note the Baylor URL: web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/marks/Research/TimeScales). This research group (a collaboration between engineering and mathematics) has been allowed to proceed unimpeded by Baylor, using its name and absent any disclaimer. Is Baylor now, to maintain a foolish consistency, going to take down Read More ›

In her remarks to the Baptist Press, Lori Fogleman (well beloved Baylor sports personality who regularly comments on “Inside Baylor Sports” for the Lady Bears) offers the following argument against allowing Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab to continue at Baylor: Lori Fogleman, director of media communications at Baylor, told Baptist Press Sept. 5 that the school’s objection to the website involves standards by which something can or cannot attach its name to Baylor. “This isn’t about the content of the website. Really the issue is related to Baylor’s policies and procedures of approving centers, institutes, products using the university’s name,” Fogleman said. “Baylor reserves the exclusive right to the use of its own name, and we’re pretty jealous in the Read More ›

“Never shrinking from controversy, and sometimes deliberately provoking it, this book serves as a lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled.”—Publishers Weekly

The belief that the mind does not exist apart from the brain dominated the twentieth century. But can we really dismiss our thoughts and feelings, or furthermore, our religious and spiritual experiences, as simply outcomes of the firing synapses of our brain? In THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN, authors Dr. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary present the groundbreaking evidence that the mind cannot be simply reduced to physiological reactions in the brain. Read More ›

Reading reviews of a book one wrote is one of the best ways to study popular cultural assumptions about who you are and what you are trying to say:

From the Booklist review

Neuroscientist Beauregard is no flighty New-Ager or Creationist but, he says, one of a minority of neuroscientists who don’t adhere to strictly materialist interpretation of the human mind. … That is, it is too limiting to strictly confine the origin of all human thought to material or chemical interactions. In this complex tome, he …

I am glad that the Booklist reviewer explained the key point a non-materialist neuroscientist would want to make. But for the record, Mario Beauregard – no New-Ager or Creationist – is a perennialist. And The Spiritual Brain is not a complex tome. As psychiatrist Jeff Schwartz says,

It clearly explains non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader, while building on and extending work that Sharon Begley and I began in The Mind and The Brain, and work that Mario and I collaborated on in academic publications.

[other links to much Mindful Hack fun below] Read More ›

Over what now, you wonder, could the Pharyngula – usually as placid as a sea of glass – be freaking? Actually over something kind of stale. Years ago, at the Post-Darwinist, I blogged on the fact that one of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s friends (yes, he of Wonderful Life AND The Simpsons) said that Gould would never have signed the Darwin lobby’s Steves list (all the Steves in science that the Darwin lobby can find who agree with them). Pivar had his own take on evolution, which he thinks is much closer to what the original Steve really meant. And now his take is back for another run, too. Go here for the rest. Also, more fun today at the Mindful Hack, Read More ›

Responding to something I wrote at the Post-Darwinist about the popularity of evolutionary psychology among atheists, Moran (a textbook co-author you may well have suffered through in school), responds:

Just for the record, Denyse, I’m one of those evil atheists that you like to rant about but I’m totally opposed to evolutionary psychology.

But you already knew that many evolutionary biologist were against evolutionary psychology, didn’t you?

No, I didn’t, Larry, and if that’s true, it’s high time more of them voiced their objections. The only sustained critiques I have seen are Hilary and Steven Rose’s unjustly neglected Alas, Poor Darwin and David Buller’s also unjustly neglected Adapting Minds. Steven Rose is a neurobiologist, but Hilary Rose is a social scientist, and David J. Buller a philosopher. 

No doubt, there are many critiques out there that I haven’t seen, but I wonder what proportion comes from evolutionary biologists, as opposed to social scientists who know the difference between research and speculation. Read More ›

Stuff you might want to know if you are not just a bunch of chemicals running around in a bag: Evolutionary psychology: Why Clan of the Cave Bear makes more sense as a novel than as a science. Atheist gives millions to Catholic schools Quantum weirdness and consciousness New neuroscience blog questions pop science media’s neuro-this and neuro-that. Articles of interest on atheists, materialists, consciousness, and tenured authoritarian crackpots Re chemicals, bag = you – I think that expression was originally coined by Dean Hamer of “God Gene” fame.