Mindful Hack

Blog on hold until June 15, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:59:00 +0000

Because I am writing a book and working for a living, I have regretfully decided that the only time management solution now possible is to put this blog on hold until June 15, 2011.

I thank all regular readers and occasional donors.

Always glad to share a good read and thoughts thereon. The blog search box at the top left will give you access to all past stories.

I will still be blogging at Access Research Network (bottom row of headlines), Salvo, and Uncommon Descent.

Good luck to all in the happy hunting ground of materialist nonsense that so much pop science has become.

Us vs. Them is not in our genes (or brains), but in ourselves

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:00:00 +0000

In The Chronicle Review, On the perennial subject "us vs. them," while noting significant recent books, Carlin Romano offers us "Good News From the Ancients!" (January 23, 2011):

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, by Erich S. Gruen, out this month from Princeton University Press, like all excellent scholarship massages the mind in useful new directions. Gruen, a Berkeley professor emeritus of history and classics, wields his command of ancient sources to shake a widely shared historical belief—that ancient Greeks and Romans exuded condescension and hostility toward what European intellectuals call the "Other." For those Greeks and Romans, that largely meant peoples such as the Persians, Egyptians, and Jews. Even if Gruen doesn't wholly convince on every ground that Greeks and Romans operated like Obamas in togas, regularly reaching out to potential enemies, his careful readings of Aeschylus, Herodotus, Tacitus, and others introduce us to a kinder, gentler ancient world. His analysis confirms how even back then, tossing people into a category and then hating them en masse was a choice, not an evolutionary necessity.

Yes, it is a mental construct: Me better, you worse, as Carlin puts it - or in the version more familiar to me: Me Tarzan, you wrong.

Defensive claims of superiority pop up again and again through history, not because there is a "gene" or neural circuit for it but because the circumstances that excite the temptation keep reappearing, and all you need after that is a human brain, period.

Thus, when we hear that "they have found the brain area for prejudice," we would most wisely interpret as follows: "This is a brain area that prejudice may activate in some individuals."

Catholic philosopher saint can help neuroscience?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Aquinas in stained glass, Beao, Creative Commons

Here, Dominican Br. Christopher attempts to map 13th century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas onto modern neuroscience:

It turns out that at least one neuroscientist, Walter J Freeman of UC Berkeley, finds that Thomas’s philosophical foundation for explaining the mind-body problem is the most useful for grounding recent studies in nonlinear brain dynamics. Specifically, it is Thomas’s understanding of intentionality that fills the explanatory gap between the complementary observations of lower-level electrophysiological data and higher-level goal-directed behavior.

An interesting scheme is offered, with the following comment:

This is not, of course, a perfect one to one mapping of terms; however, this attempt at translating between the language of Thomas and neuroscience hopefully will generate dialogue between these two communities. Freeman notes that neuroscientists often don’t have a strong grasp of the philosophical questions and issues that relate to their topic of inquiry: how do we think? At the same time, philosophers generally do not have a firm understanding of the contributions modern neuroscience has made to our understanding of the workings of the brain, which certainly should influence any approach to the mind body problem.

Hey, wait a minute. The main reason, in my experience, that neuroscientists "often don't have a strong grasp" of mind-related questions is that they don't believe the mind exists. That is the starting point of their research.

While editing a book that addresses these issues recently, I was struck by the contempt for philosophers a famous neuroscientist exhibited. Had he expressed himself in such terms about any discipline whatever in science, he would certainly have been thought an ignoramus, regardless of his accomplishment in his own field, but no one questions his saying it about philosophers. Worse, even though neuroscience has a track record of zero to a zillion in explaining consciousness - the subject of his enquiry - his confidence was undiminished.

Unless that problem (proud, studied ignorance) is confronted, it is useless to ask whether Aquina's insights would be a help.

Hat tip: The Sheepcat

Neurosexism: Cordelia Fine's expose stays in the news

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Seems Carol Tavris at the Times Literary Supplement is also interested in CordeliaFine's takedown of the supposed neuroscience behind Fred and Wilma Flintstone:

Cordelia Fine has produced a witty and meticulously researched exposé of the sloppy studies that pass for scientific evidence in so many of today's bestselling books on sex differences

- "The new neurosexism" (January 26, 2011)

The whole field has the hallmarks of bad science: The researchers wanted to find genetic or evolutionary support for beliefs that were actually their own mental constructs. They were sure to find what they were looking for because it already existed, though not, as it happens, in nature.

The risk is that exposing the bad science will trigger another feminist "bashmen". In reality, "men" are not even, in isolation, responsible for this one. Many women promoted it too.

A hopeful sign is that people aren't just letting this one go, in an era where anyone with a scanner becmes an instant prophet, it seems.

See also:

Are men's and women's brains really different

and, especially,

this(on pink and blue).

Edge Question: Which science concept would make everyone think better?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:35:00 +0000

Here is the "Edge World Question Center", a leading materialist think tank, with 2011's Question:

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER

James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

The Edge Question 2011

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.

[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Daniel Kahneman for advice on its presentation.]

164 contributors, many whose names you will recognize, participated.

Any thoughts of your own? Go here to comment.

Note: Interesting, how many key words from medicine easily come to mind, yet medicine has slowly been moving away from a materialist paradigm, as Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Placebo effect: A non-material cause

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:19:00 +0000

In response to a recent post, Philosopher offers six signs of scientism, someone asked me to explain a non-material cause:

To a materialist, any materialist thesis about the placebo effect, no matter how inadequate, must be preferred to any non-materialist thesis.

The placebo effect is a good example of how a phenomenon can be studied from a scientific but non-materialist viewpoint.

Put simply, placebo is a relationship effect. Even if we can’t quantify the mind, we can study the relationships between mental and physical states.

Example: John has a flareup of a chronic condition, and his doctor announces that a promising new medication is available. John takes it, and begins to feel better.

The doctor forgot to inform him that the effects of the medication will only take hold about 12 hours later, at least if chemistry alone were the deciding factor.

In other words, John shouldn’t feel better now, but he does.

This is one of the best-attested facts in medicine. Indeed, one reason for double blind studies with control groups is precisely that much of the control group will feel better, as long as they believe they are the study group. Fortunately for themselves, members of control groups do tend to believe that.

We can make many assumptions, assessments, and predictions about the placebo effect and use it as needed, without knowing the exact constitution of the mind.

Ignoring the placebo effect set medicine back in certain ways, decades ago. Doctors, honestly believing that chemistry and surgery would do the trick, discounted the fact that a hospital looked and operated like a slaughterhouse.

For example, surgeons used to wear white scrubs, like butchers, but growing awareness of the placebo effect cause a switch to “surgical green".

Mario Beauregard and I discuss all this at some length in The Spiritual Brain.

Coffee!!: Atheism as a major cause of obesity?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:07:00 +0000

Man demonstrates the ease of proving the existence of French fries.
Photo by James Heilman, MD

Along the lines of religion and health, a friend absolutely insists that I write about this:

From a medical perspective, an obese person has accumulated enough body fat that it can have a negative effect on their health. If a person's weight is at least 20% higher than it should be, he/she is generally considered obese. If your Body Mass Index (BMI) is between 25 and 29.9 you are considered overweight. If your BMI is 30 or over you are considered obese.[6] The term obese can also used in a more general way to indicate someone who is overweight.[7]

Two of the major risk factors for becoming obese according to the Mayo Clinic are poor dietary choices and inactivity, thus given the above cited Gallup research, it appears as if non-religious are more prone to becoming obese than very religious individuals.[8] The Bible declares that gluttony is a sin.[9] Furthermore, the Bible declares the physical body of Christians to be temples of the Holy Spirit.[10] Therefore, it is not surprising that many very religious Christians would leave healthy lives.

Well, ... you heard it here first.

I hope the ID controversy won’t degenerate into a “Who’s a tub of lard?” war, a temptation to which my friend may have just possibly given way ...

Seriously, more on religion and health here.

Neuro-nonsense: A guide to spotting examples

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:54:00 +0000

At Oscillatory Thoughts, Bradley Voytek cautions against the pop science media’s simplifications of brain activity on subjects like curiosity :

How to be a neuroscientist

Written by Bradley Voytek at 12:54
In this post, I will teach you all how to be proper, skeptical neuroscientists. By the end of this post, not only will you be able to spot "neuro nonsense" statements, but you'll also be able to spot nonsense neuroscience questions.

I implore my journalist friends to take note of what I say in this post.

Much has already been said on the topic of modern neuroimaging masquerading as "new phrenology". A lot of these arguments and conversations are hidden from the lay public, however, so I'm going to expose the dirty neuroscientific underbelly here.

Curiosity?

Well, what is it? Is it even remotely likely that one small area of the brain will govern everything from “Why does she act like she knows something I don’t” over to “Why do geese fly in a V”, and as far down as “Why do people vote for Jane Schtickle, whom I can’t stand”?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Body and soul: Their relationship

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:25:00 +0000

Here, Benjamin Wiker provides a working definition of the relationship between the body and the soul, by the distressing route of ... vice:

We are, to repeat, a real unity of body and soul. Consequently, what we do with either our body or our soul affects both our body and our soul. We become what we do; we are what we have done. Repeated sinful actions literally reform our body and soul according to the sin, so that the actions come to define our very nature by becoming second nature.

The development of this second nature is called a habit, and since it is destructive, a bad habit, or more compactly, a vice. As the vice becomes more engrained, we increasingly lose our freedom, our power, to act well. The vice then defines our entire being, both body and soul.

To put it in St. Augustine's concise terms, sin is its own punishment.

Thus, a woman who gambles becomes a gambler, a human being entirely defined by a particular kind of self destructive activity that has become her second nature. A man who views internet porn becomes a creature who can do nothing else, who thinks about nothing else, who is entirely defined by this self- and other-destructive activity, body and soul, mind and heart, eyes, fingers, and brain. What they originally chose to do, and what earlier on they could have much more easily chosen not to do, now becomes the master who ruthlessly in-habits them, changing every aspect of their intimate soul-body union.

Hat tip: The Sheepcat

Mindfulness resources

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Here, a friend passes on:

I've pulled together some recent resources for mindfulness—most of them published within the last 3 years—in clinical contexts.

The resources below fall into 5 groups:

Meta-analyses
The Mindful Clinician: Training, Development, Self-Care
Articles on Mindfulness as an Intervention for Psychological and Medical Disorders
Books on Mindfulness in Therapy, Recovery, & Self-Help
Audio Resources for Mindfulness

Mindfulness means acting as if your mind exists.

You are what you eat? Yes but, in the same sense, you are also what you think.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Philosopher offers six signs of "scientism"

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:59:00 +0000

Non-materialist neuroscientists must often deal with the claim that their work is “unscientific,” despite the fact that, for example, the placebo effect, for example, is one of the best attested effects in medicine and the fact that there Is mounting evidence for researchable psi effects. The problem arises because, as Susan Hack puts it, "scientism" enables assessors to avoid evaluating evidence in favor of evaluating whether the evidence "counts as science". Here are her six signs:

1. Using the words “science,” “scientific,” “scientifically,” “scientist,” etc., honorifically, as generic terms of epistemic praise.

And, inevitably, the honorific use of “science” encourages uncritical credulity about whatever new scientific idea comes down the pike. But the fact is that all the explanatory hypotheses that scientists come up with are, at first, highly speculative, and most are eventually found to be untenable, and abandoned. To be sure, by now there is a vast body of well-warranted scientific theory, some of it so well-warranted that it would be astonishing if new evidence were to show it to be mistaken - though even this possibility should never absolutely be ruled out.

Always remember that Ptolemy’s model of the solar system was used successfully by astronomers for 1200 years, even though it had Earth in the wrong place.

2. Adopting the manners, the trappings, the technical terminology, etc., of the sciences, irrespective of their real usefulness. Here, Hack cites the "social sciences", quite justifiably, but evolutionary psychology surely leads the pack. Can anyone serious believe, for example, that our understanding of public affairs is improved by the claim that there is such a thing as hardwired religion or evolved religion? No new light, just competing, contradictory speculation.

3. A preoccupation with demarcation, i.e., with drawing a sharp line between genuine science, the real thing, and "pseudo-scientific" imposters. The key, of course, is the preoccupation. Everyone wants real science, but a preoccupation with showing that a line of inquiry is not science, good or bad - apart from the evidence - flies in the face of "The fact is that the term “science” simply has no very clear boundaries: the reference of the term is fuzzy, indeterminate and, not least, frequently contested."

4. A corresponding preoccupation with identifying the "scientific method," presumed to explain how the sciences have been so successful. " we have yet to see anything like agreement about what, exactly, this supposed method is." Of course, one method would work for astronomy, and another for forensics. But both disciplines must reckon with evidence, to be called "science".

5. Looking to the sciences for answers to questions beyond their scope. One thinks of Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker's recent claim that science can determine morality. Obviously, whatever comes out of such a project must be the morality of those who went into it.

6. Denying or denigrating the legitimacy or the worth of other kinds of inquiry besides the scientific, or the value of human activities other than inquiry, such as poetry or art. Or better yet, treating them as the equivalent of baboons howling for mates, or something. It discredits both arts and sciences.

Here's Hack's "Six Signs of Scientism" lecture: .

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Knockout gene study in mice prompts speculations on human behaviour #3348

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:32:00 +0000

Lab mice by Aaron Logan, Lightsource

In "Ma's gene does different things to pa's copy" Jessica Hamzelou (26 January 2011) reports for New Scientist on a knockout study of mice where researchers knocked out a gene called Grb10 in females and mated them with normal males.

(From the report: "Most of our genes are expressed in pairs – one copy inherited from each parent. But pairs of so-called imprinted genes have just one copy "switched on".)

What happened? The gene was expressed "only in the brain and spinal cord."* How did this influence behaviour?

Mice lacking the paternal gene groomed their mates so much that the latter lost their whiskers and fur.

So far so good. The gene helps regulate mouse behaviour. Now wait for the klunk:

Humans have the same gene, so there is a possibility that it might be influencing our own social behaviours, he adds.

"Possibility", "might" Their caution is well advised, but the question is, why bother? Humans differ from mice precisely in that we adjust our behaviour to real or perceived circumstances, and that difference greatly reduces the importance of any similarities.

If a human mother brushed her kid's hair until it fell out, she would soon be in a supervised parenting program (at least where I live).

A study author comments,

"The most interesting human parallel is Silver-Russell syndrome," says Gudrun Moore, a geneticist at University College London's Institute of Child Health. Ten per cent of people with this growth disorder have two copies of a maternal chromosome and no copies from the father. "These individuals have not been tested for overtly dominant behaviour, though they do have speech delay, learning difficulties and lower IQ," Moore says.

Ah, just the combination of traits needed by a dominant human: speech delay, learning difficulties and lower IQ ...

A real possibility, of course, is that an enterprising researcher will do a study of such persons, find "dominant behaviour" (acting out frustrations aggressively in this case), and we will soon be nearing about a new "violence gene". Book deal to follow? (Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09651)

(*A different experimental population with the sexes reversed showed that the gene expressed itself everywhere but the brain.)

See also:

It's in your genes theory fading in the wake of epigenetics?

Your friends: You pick them by the cut of their genes (you didn't know?)

Latest attempt to explain away religion: Religion gene leads to babies, not thoughts

Children: Do babies know the differences between right and wrong

Meaning of art and music not found in genes, says philosopher

Neuroscientist examines brains of his family members for killer gene

Identical twins: The differences explored

Another claim that genes explain religion

Flurry news revisited: It's one thing to dress baby girl chimps in pink, but ...

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0000

In the wake of the Marc Hauser "they talk to me" scandal around research into the inner lives of primates, a friend was asked to make agreeable noises about Frans de Waal's Our inner ape. Someone else commented,

This looks to be precisely the kind of thing Bolhuis and Wynne chided their colleagues for in an April 2009 issue of Nature. They point out that 20 years of research into purported chimp "empathy," "conflict resolution," "fairness" and sense of "equity," have lacked proper controls and amount to little more than "a flurry of anthropomorphic overinterpretation."

Here's British physicist David Tyler on the problem:

Bolhuis and Wynne provide a healthy check on these enthusiasms.

"For instance, capuchin monkeys were thought to have a sense of fairness because they reject a slice of cucumber if they see another monkey in an adjacent cage, performing the same task, rewarded with a more sought-after grape. Researchers interpreted a monkey's refusal to eat the cucumber as evidence of 'inequity aversion' prompted by seeing another monkey being more generously rewarded. Yet, closer analysis has revealed that a monkey will still refuse cucumber when a grape is placed in a nearby empty cage. This suggests that the monkeys simply reject lesser rewards when better ones are available."

Bolhuis and Wynne point out several behaviours and skills displayed by birds which have been interpreted in anthropomorphic ways when seen in apes and monkeys. They suggest that evolutionary convergence may be more important than ancestral relationships. They point out that many researchers have laboured hard at teaching apes some form of language, but "linguists generally agree that the resulting efforts made by chimps and bonobos don't qualify as language".

None of this is inconsistent with the idea that primates have some form of consciousness. The problem is the culture-driven project of mapping human aspirations attitudes, assumptions, and behaviour onto them. And theirs onto us. Think "Evolutionary Agony Aunt."

Mind: Questioning "may haves" and "might haves" officially labelled "science"TM

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In "A One Hundred Year-Old Challenge", Michael Flannery, author of a just-published biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, comments on Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's latest attempt to explain away the human mind, taking the non-materialist Wallace as a starting point:

Now, after more than a century, Pinker pledges to address once and for all the "profound puzzle" Wallace posed with "the cognitive niche." Let's see if Pinker's argument matches his bravado.

The cognitive niche is not new; it was first proposed by Tooby and DeVore in 1987. But Pinker believes it has special significance in explaining the evolvability of the human mind by means of natural selection, precisely what Wallace denied. The cognitive niche rests upon two hypotheses: 1) "a mode of survival characterized by manipulating the environment through causal reasoning and social cooperation"; and 2) "the psychological faculties that evolved to prosper in the cognitive niche can be coopted to abstract domains of processes of metaphorical abstraction and productive combination, both vividly manifested in human language."

It all sounds impressive until Pinker tries to actually make a case for any of this. The narrative quickly degenerates into a trivial recounting of what humans currently do and then into a collection of speculative scenarios about how certain primordial hominids "might have" done this or "perhaps" did that. Festooned with hedges like "may have been," "may serve as," "perhaps," "may connect" -- twenty-one in a seven-page paper! -- Pinker promises to "dissolve" the Wallace paradox. If it were all mere speculation it might simply be chalked up to the desperate wishful thinking so common among evolutionary psychologists. But Pinker goes on to try and explain "how cognitive mechanisms that were selected for physical and social reasoning could have enabled H. sapiens to engage in the highly abstract reasoning required in modern science, philosophy, government, commerce, and law." His answer: most humans don't do that! Only a few humans were able to do what "all are capable of learning." Examples? Instead of Newtonian mechanical physics most human "physics" has consisted of intuitions more akin to "the medieval theory of impetus," most have believed in an "intuitive biology" like "creationism," most have reasoned towards "vitalism" over "mechanistic physiology," and with regard to the mind most people have adhered to mind/body dualism over "neurobiological reductionism." Only "some humans," he insists, were "able to invent the different components of modern knowledge." The mechanism for how the apparent "few" were able to achieve this comes from what Pinker calls the "psycholinguistic phenomenon" called "metaphorical abstraction."

Now this most surely isn't science; it's rank presentism and wishful thinking. It privileges those things Pinker values as "progressive" and "modern" and relegates all the rest to a self-fulfilling ignorance.

Find out why Pinker is surely mistaken:

Animal ESP researcher gives University College science and technology lecture

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0000

I see where Rupert Sheldrake, who studies awareness at a distance in animals and has produced some interesting results, gave the Annual iBSc Lecture to the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London: "The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence."

"Awareness at a distance", sometimes called ESP, is trashed by Richard Dawkins as a threat to materialism. At one point, Sheldrake had to ask Dawkins and TV entourage to leave his lab, when they made their intentions clear.

Oddly enough, ESP isn't particularly a threat to materialism except insofar as it challenges the idea that resolutely denying the possibility of action at a distance (as in gravity, for example) is in itself some kind of a science. Anyway, here's the abstract:

We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But Dr. Sheldrake argues that there are good reasons for thinking that this view is much too limited. His recent experimental results suggest that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. Animals can be affected by human looks, and vice versa.

People's intentions can also seem to be detectable telepathically by animals from miles away. Hundreds of recent tests have also shown that some people can tell who is calling them before they pick up the phone. Our minds seem to extend out beyond our brains both through attention
and intention. Rupert Sheldrake will show how his hypothesis of morphic fields could help provide an explanation.

(Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and several books, including "A New Science of Life" and "Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home". He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, a visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut and lives in London. His web site is www.sheldrake.org)

Sheldrake's idea of a morphic field reminded me of something, and then I suddenly realized what it was: Moving around a three million-person city. The guy whose face is parked an inch from mine on the Toronto subway at rush hour is not invading my space. But if I were just walking down a typical street ... it would be a confrontation. One is constantly adjusting one's idea of one's own space based on social assessments. It is not a rigid thing at all.

In any event, the idea that the mind is not wholly inside the brain does not seem unreasonable. The mind apprehends mathematics, yet it cannot really be said that the laws that govern mathematics are "inside the brain."

Note: Some people get really upset by what they hear. Or (?) Sheldrake was stabbed at a 2008 lecture in New Mexico ...

The insanity defense and free will

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:00:00 +0000

In the wake of the Jared Loughner murders, here’s a debate on Who Qualifies for the Insanity Defense?” (New York Times, January 20, 2011). One ofthe panellists, Dr. Beatriz Luna, who uses neuroimaging methods to understand the development of voluntary control, comments,

The emergence of neuroscience methods that have the ability to characterize brain behavior have the promise of informing the justice system in issues like the insanity plea. However, these methods have not reached the level of identifying if an individual is a criminal and may never reach that level.

Neuroimaging methods can potentially inform the law as to whether someone has the capacity to make knowing and purposeful acts.

Even if neuroscience could provide some notion of the character of a person, the free will that the law protects may not be identifiable by neurobiological markers alone. Neuroscience can only inform the law about one of the many circumstances that underlie a criminal act. It cannot determine the ultimate culpability of a crime, which is an ethical issue.

Neuroimaging methods can potentially inform the law as to whether someone has the capacity to make knowing and purposeful acts. In cases where a person with a psychiatric disorder commits a crime, it may very well be knowingly and purposeful.

Good point. Just because a machinist, for example, believes he’s the President of the United States does not mean he isn’t guilty if he bludgeons the old lady next door to death because she “spitefully”refuses to acknowledge that fact. If the President had done it, he’d be guilty too.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Replacing Adam and Eve with Adam and heave is not the road to understanding human psychology

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0000

53 percent of Americans think the Universe is 6,000 years old and we have
no genetic precursors in the natural world apart from Adam and Eve.

- atheist neurocientist Sam Harris, in a 10/02/06 Talk of the Nation interview

So, Sam, their alternative is what, exactly?

Believe in the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution? The ridiculous hagiography around the old Brit toff Darwin? The Ida fossil carnival?

How about the rat droppings theory of human evolution? Didn't I, leaving, just bump into a woman coming in, proudly bearing her latest paper and samples about ... ugh! Please! No! I'll be sick!

Look, I don't believe the Universe is 6000 years old, but Adam and Eve remind me of people in a way that evolutionary psychology and its accompanying road show do not.

You can so believe in free will, atheist says

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:47:00 +0000

In New Atlantis, Raymond Tallis tackles free will:

This essay is an attempt to persuade you of something that in practice you cannot really doubt: your belief that you have free will. It will try to reassure you that it is not naïve to feel that you are responsible, and indeed morally responsible, for your actions. And it will provide you with arguments that will help you answer those increasing numbers of people who say that our free will is an illusion, or that belief in it is an adaptive delusion implanted by evolution.

The case presented will not be a knock-down proof — indeed, it outlines an understanding of free will that is rather elusive. It is of course much easier to construct simple theoretical proofs purporting to show that we are not free than it is to see how, in practice, we really are. For this reason, the argument here will take you on something of a journey.

That journey will provide reasons for resisting the claim that a deterministic view of the material universe is incompatible with free will. Much of the apparent power of deterministic arguments comes from their focusing on isolated actions, or even components of actions, that have been excised from their context in the world of the self, so that they are more easily caught in the net of material causation.

I don't know that his theory works exactly, but it's interesting that an atheist is trying it.

Peer review: If no one else reforms it, could Twitter do the job?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0000

In "Trial by Twitter",Apoorva Mandavilli for Nature (19 January 2011) tells us that "Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react."

"Scientists discover keys to long life," proclaimed The Wall Street Journal headline on 1 July last year. "Who will live to be 100? Genetic test might tell," said National Public Radio a day later.

These and hundreds of similarly enthusiastic headlines were touting a paper in Science1 in which researchers claimed to have identified a set of genes that could predict human longevity with 77% accuracy — a finding with potentially huge implications for medicine, health policy and the economy.

[ ... ]

This resulting critical onslaught was striking — but not exceptional. Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation.

Some, of course, are calling for "a new set of cultural norms."

Personally, I think the right lesson is this: The tweet beat means that researchers can't just float a trial balloon like "Evolution explains why men like dumb women"or "Religious people have embezzlement gene", and then run off to collect their tenure or whatever other reward, before anyone gets around to reading their stuff months later and shouting, "Rubbish! Compost! Anyone have a shovel handy?"

"It's in your genes" theory fading in the wake of epigenetics?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 23:00:00 +0000

In "Getting Over the Code Delusion" (The New Atlantis, Summer 2010), Steve Talbott
muses on the mystique around the genetic code in past decades, especially in the light of modern findings:

Meanwhile, the epigenetic revolution is slowly but surely making its way into the popular media — witness the recent Time magazine cover story, “Why DNA Isn’t Your Destiny.” The shame of it is that most of the significance of the current research is still being missed. Judging from much that is being written, one might think the main thing is simply that we’re gaining new, more complex insights into how to treat the living organism as a manipulable machine.

The one decisive lesson I think we can draw from the work in molecular genetics over the past couple of decades is that life does not progressively contract into a code or any kind of reduced “building block” as we probe its more minute dimensions. Trying to define the chromatin complex, according to geneticists Shiv Grewal and Sarah Elgin, “is like trying to define life itself.” Having plunged headlong toward the micro and molecular in their drive to reduce the living to the inanimate, biologists now find unapologetic life staring back at them from every chromatogram, every electron micrograph, every gene expression profile. Things do not become simpler, less organic, less animate. The explanatory task at the bottom is essentially the same as the one higher up. It’s rather our understanding that all too easily becomes constricted as we move downward, because the contextual scope and qualitative richness of our survey is so extremely narrowed.

The search for precise explanatory mechanisms and codes leads us along a path of least resistance toward the reduction of understanding. A capacity for imagination (not something many scientists are trained for today) is always required for grasping a context in meaningful terms, because at the contextual level the basic data are not things, but rather relations, movement, and transformation.

It could be pared down to a long inscription in marble, and worthy a monument too.

I, for one, believe that the pop gene revolution has been socially harmful. To the extent that people look for the "infidelity gene", the "violence gene", the "religion gene", the "altruism gene", they are refusing to explore the actual ways they made up their minds about things. Like all junk psychology, it's way too easy to be true.

I wonder what nonsense will grow from epigenetics.

Your friends? You pick them by the cut of their genes, not jeans. You didn't know?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In "Friends connect on a genetic level: Social scientists reveal genetic patterns in social networks," Amy Maxmen reports for Nature,

Groups of friends show patterns of genetic similarity, according to a study published today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings are based on patterns of variation in two out of six genes sampled among friends and strangers. But the claim is a hard sell for some geneticists, who say that the researchers have not analysed enough genes to rule out alternative explanations.

[ ... ]

"If this was a study looking for shared genes in patients with diabetes, it would not be up to the standards of the field," says David Altshuler, a geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge. "We set these standards after 10 years of seeing so many irreproducible results in gene-association studies."

Evolutionary psychologists have jumped on this "friends 'r genes" thesis because it shores up their slender database, but if it is true it probably means that humans have "jumping genes" and perhaps that there is a shared gene field, similar to Rupert Sheldrake's proposed morphic fields. But, to the extent that the proponents of evolutionary psychlogy would be strict Darwinian natural selectionists, they can't now break the rules and accept this without courting even greater disrepute.

Younger scientists more religious than older ones, study finds

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0000

At Canadian Christian thinkmag CARDUS, we
learn, via Point of view author Milton Friesen (January 21, 2011), "What scientists believe." Some interesting observations emerge from his review of Elaine Ecklund,'s, Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think:

Younger scientists are more religious than older scientists—the inverse of the general population, where older people tend to be more religious than younger people.

[ ... ]

There is indeed a very real clash of cultures born of different ideas, different ideologies, and different practices. While these variances are deep and persistent, Ecklund argues that the tone and nature of the exchange must change. Scientists need to understand far more about how people experience and practice religion and spirituality. They need to be much more skilled in translating what they do for public consumption. If religious scientists don't open up about their religious and spiritual experiences and convictions, colleagues will continue to assume (incorrectly) that these things are absent from their professional circles.

My own view is that no one came through the age of materialism unscathed and too many of the older scientists are simply avoiding contention by not counting the cost of the imploding materialist paradigm.

If one either practises or is familiar with any actual science, why pay any attention at all to the tidal wave of nonsense from "evolutionary psychology" purporting to explain religion, when the nonsense vendor is tone deaf to any experience that might actually explain it, and refuses from the very beginning to consider such experiences possible?

Meditation and health: Then again, there is always the package of 28 injections over 8 weeks ...

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 01:00:00 +0000

From Massachusetts General Hospital, we learn

Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in 8 weeks

Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time. (Eurekalert, January 21, 2011)

Changes were associated with awareness, empathy, and stress.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Women science bloggers: Some thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 21:39:00 +0000

Robin Lloyd explains in “Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure” (Jan 18, 2011),

Blogging and other Web activities have allowed members of many marginalized communities to open previously locked media doors. But women still rely more on back channels and ask for less help than men do in the digital realm. This tendency and other issues of concern for women bloggers were discussed Sunday at the ScienceOnline2011 conference in Durham, N.C., primarily in a session called "Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name."

Huh?

Experiences varied among attendees on whether blogging under a real name did indeed present perils. Miriam Goldstein (@oystersgarter), a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and blogger at Deep-Sea News says she has never had a negative experience. But stories surfaced regarding inappropriate comments by male readers. And one attendee voiced concerns about being emailed by a reader who said he was near her campus and about to stop by her office. Christie Wilcox (@NerdyChristie), a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who blogs at Observations of Nerd, said she only received nasty comments when she blogged on the science of make-up—and the anger came from women. Tribalism takes many forms.

Well, if you have dealt with minor Darwinists, as I have, and are not one of their companions, you get to how some of them talk about women. But God or nature or the guardian angel of marriages - or somebody or other anyway - invented a back browser button and a delete key.

I guess the big time Darwinists approve of all that stuff. I've never heard of them telling those dudes to smarten up, or slide their keesters to the low class boozehole down the road. I once had a problem with a guy who professed support for ID who behaved like that, but I heard vaguely that he had his can kicked six ways to Sunday over it. Nothing to do with me.

Actually, we had a problem with Darwinmouth here in Canada, but a smart blogger chick discovered and publicized the guy's true name. Worked wonders. (= One reason I don't like avatars is ... )

About real names: I blog under my real name.

Yes. Can we get past that? (After all, if I had to consult the police station down the street about a truly difficult person, what is the first thing they would ask me?) I kind of miss the days when writers insisted on their byline.

I can't relate to all the questions raised in the article because they involve concerns about tenure or promotion tracks that elude a career freelance hack like me. But this gets better:

The entire concept of a woman science blogger overturns various long-held assumptions about science and gender.

Shoot, the first blogging software hit the market in 1999. How long-held a prejudice can it be? I don't doubt the first woman on a tractor pulling a plough overturned lots of things ...

The tangled roots of spiritualism

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:06:00 +0000

John Gray, commenting on humanity's quest for immortality, reminds us

The séance that Charles Darwin attended in January 1874 at the house of his brother Erasmus brought the pioneering biologist together with Francis Galton, eugenicist and one of the founders of modern psychology, and the novelist George Eliot. All three were anxious that the rise of spiritualism would block the advance of scientific materialism. They were unimpressed with what they witnessed – Darwin found the experience "hot and tiring" and left before sparks were seen and rapping heard – but they would have been seriously concerned had they known the future career of a fourth participant in the séance, the classical scholar and psychologist FWH Myers. (Guardian, 08 January 2011)

It gets better:

Scientists who had passed to "the other side" were fashioning an exceptional human being, a posthumously designed messiah-child who would deliver humankind from chaos and bring peace to the world.

A child was in fact born – the offspring of Balfour's brother and the medium who transcribed the scripts, the wife of a much older man who took up automatic writing under the cover of a pseudonym after her daughter died in infancy – but seems to have known nothing of the role he had been assigned until late in life, and then probably less than the whole truth. Featuring a spell in MI6 (where for a time he worked alongside Kim Philby) followed by life in a monastery, the career of the supposed messiah was certainly unusual. But he had no impact on the world at large, which continued its normal course of conflict and drift.

And still better. H. G. Wells - whose friends rated him a truly dreadful man, and they were no angels - gets involved. Ah, the stories we don’t hear from Book HypeCentral.

Better we stick with spirituality.