2010

He said it: John Templeton on meaning and purpose

December 31, 2010

Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?

– Sir John Templeton, The Humble Approach: Scientists Discover God (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation, 1998)

Some of wouldn’t recognize that Templeton Foundation today. Curious to know what has changed.

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Speciation Reduced To Little More Than A ‘Gut Feeling’

December 31, 2010

Buried in the most recent scientific literature there is a story of love, sex, and intrigue that has all the makings of a hearty Mills & Boon novel. The central characters of this plot are not lovers wrapped in each others arms but fruit flies that choose their sexual partners according to the microbiota that line their guts (1,2). Lactobacillus planetarium is the ‘cupid gut bug’ that seems to have greatest influence on sexual preferences (1,2) And it appears to do so by influencing the release of a class of Drosophila pherormones known as cuticular hydrocarbons (1,2). For evolutionists this finding is cited as one possible avenue through which speciation might take place in Drosophila (1,2). For those of us who are critical of such work, however. there exists one small but important catch. That is that the sexual preferences observed are easily eradicated by simply treating fruit flies that had been raised on different diets, with antibiotics (1,2). In other words, no genetic changes that would ensure irreversible reproductive isolation, and hence speciation, have taken place.

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was convinced that for speciation to occur, so-called peripheral populations would simply have to become ‘locked up’- isolated from the gene flow of their larger ancestral stocks- in such a way that new adaptations would become stable and not watered down by interbreeding (3). Gould’s close colleague Niles Eldredge posited that new species could form, “by the mere accumulation of genetic differences in the two segments of a single ancestral species” on the basis of some sort of hypothetical, (however slight) change in the reproductive system (4, p.116). As he went on to add, “some modification of the reproductive system is required for speciation to occur” (4, p. 121).

Unfortunately for Gould and Eldredge such an exit glossed over key mechanistic questions. After all what mechanism could we come up with that ensured irreversible reproductive isolation from ancestral stocks? Attempts to correlate speciation events with some sort of unguided change in the genetic makeup of an isolated population have proved largely unfruitful. In their studies on fruit flies Laura Reed and Therese Markow suggest that reduced sperm motility as well as sperm storage, recovery from storage, or ability to penetrate the micropyle might play an important role in the hybrid incompatibility that results from interspecial crossings (5). But they readily admit that the lack of a known genetic causality for speciation, today represents, “a major challenge to evolutionary biology” (5). They further add that “no study has yet characterized levels of naturally occurring variation for factors causing postzygotic isolation in any animal taxon” (5). Such a challenge is of fundamental importance if, as Darwin did, evolutionary biologists are to confidently claim that speciation is merely an extension of population variation.

Today, some scientists have posited that a small number of genes in individual species might somehow maintain populations as reproductively isolated units. Biologist Daniel Barbash and his colleagues from Cornell University put forward a gene called ‘Hybrid Male Rescue’ (hmr) as a possible candidate speciation gene in fruit flies (6,7). They demonstrated that hmr was responsible for hybrid incompatibility between different species, seemingly acting in concert with an unknown autosomal factor (7). Yet they also recognized that the 13% interspecial amino acid divergence observed in the HMR DNA Binding protein was a tall order for ‘relaxed selective constraints’ to have achieved on their own (7). According to their statistical analysis of mutational frequencies and in line with the Dobzhansky-Muller (D-M) speciation model, they were adamant that some sort of positive selection must have been at work although they were unable to suggest what selective pressures might have acted to favor reproductive isolation (6,7).

Darwin himself recognized that, whatever factors might be involved in ensuring reproductive isolation, they could not have arisen through natural selection. He wrote in the Origin of Species that, “the sterility of species when first crossed, and that of their hybrid offspring, cannot have been acquired…by the preservation of successive profitable degrees of sterility” (8, p.361). As he subsequently noted “it could clearly have been of no advantage to such separated species to have been rendered mutually sterile, and consequently this could not have been effected through natural selection” (8, p.379). In other words whatever genetic factors had maintained reproductive isolation would have had to have been found purely through chance alone- a blind walk through genetic space in search of those mutations that would prevent reproduction between some individuals and allow reproduction between others (9).

Rather than supporting evolutionist dogma the picture of coordinated changes being effected in individuals numerous enough so as to ensure the creation of novel species resonates more closely with the tenets of intelligent design. It is the height of irony that evidence-lacking meanderings over evolution and speciation should become most apparent in the “gut feelings” of the humble fruit fly.

Further Reading

Jeff Akst (2010) Gut Bugs Affect Mating, The Scientist, 15^th December, See http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57793/
Gil Sharon, Daniel Segal, John M. Ringo, Abraham Hefetz, Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg, Eugene Rosenberg (2010) Commensal bacteria play a role in mating preference of Drosophila melanogaster Proc Natl Acad. Sci USA Vol 107, pp. 20051-6
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 800-802
Niles Eldredge (1985) Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian, Evolution and the Theory of Puctuated Equilibria, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York
Laura Reed, Therese Markow (2004) Early events in speciation: Polymorphism for hybrid male sterility in Drosophila, Proc Natl Acad. Sci USA Vol 101 pp. 9009-9012
A Gene Responsible for Hybrid Incompatibility in Drosophila, PLoS Biology Vol. 2, Issue 6, p. 709
Daniel A. Barbash, Philip Awadalla, Aaron M. Tarone (2004), Functional Divergence Caused by Ancient Positive Selection of a Drosophila Hybrid Incompatibility Locus, PLoS Biol. 2004 Jun;2(6):e142.
Charles Darwin (1859) The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York
Darwin stipulated that in order for speciation to have segregated populations into reproductive isolates, so-called ‘disturbances’ in the genetic makeup of offspring must have occurred whenever there were crossings between species. But natural selection could not have been the mechanism that led to hybrid incompatibility. Since natural selection favors those traits that are advantageous to an individual within a population, what advantage could be gained from one individual becoming reproductively isolated from the rest of its neighbors? Without the ability to reproduce no genes would be carried over to successive generations. Several individuals would have had to evolve their speciation genes in precisely the same way as to give a genetic constitution that was sexually compatible, this through chance alone.

Uncommon Descent

Neuro-politico-nonsense

December 31, 2010

Well, it seems that the silly season is upon us. A study conducted earlier this month by the University College of London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (directed by Professor Geraint Rees) reveals a startling correlation between between people’s political beliefs and the size of two specific regions of their brains: the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex. Among those who describe themselves as liberal, or left wing, the gray matter of the anterior cingulate cortex is significantly thicker; whereas for those who regard themselves as conservative, or right wing, the amygdala is relatively larger. The study has been widely reported in the press, but has yet to be published. Believe it or not, the study was commissioned by a British actor and comedian, Colin Firth, who wanted to know if it was possible to identify people’s political belief from the structure of their brains. For example, could scientists predict whether a person was left or right wing, just by looking at their brains?

The general standard of reporting in the media on Professor Rees’s study has been so poor that I thought readers would benefit from a more critical analysis. I’d like to declare up-front my own personal interest in studies such as these: as an Intelligent Design proponent, I take a very dim view of attempts to reduce uniquely human attributes – such as the distinctively human trait of being a political animal – to purely physical processes, which we share in common with a great many other animals. Let me hasten to add that I am not accusing Professor Rees of doing this, as I haven’t read his study, which has not yet been released to the public. Rather, what I am saying is that most educated people take for granted a materialist account of the mind, according to which mental processes are caused by events in the brain. Because the media reporting of this study has been largely uncritical of this materialist paradigm, people who read about Professor Rees’s study are likely to come away with the strong impression that our brains play a very influential role in determining our political affiliations. What I aim to show in this post is that this impression is totally unwarranted.

Why study conservatives?

When confronted with a study covering an important aspect of human behavior – such as the way we tend to vote – the first question one should ask is: what are the underlying assumptions made by the scientists who conducted the study, about the people who participated in it? Well, I did a little bit of digging, and came across an article (dated September 25, 2008) in Science Daily, which contained two interesting little quotes by Dan McAdams, professor of human development and psychology at Northwestern University. Professor McAdams was the co-author of another study conducted on 128 highly religious and socially active churchgoers, investigating the psychological differences between politically conservative Christian Americans and their liberal counterparts. You can find the relevant quotes here; the italics are mine:

“Social scientists long have assumed that liberals are more rational and less fearful than conservatives, but we find that both groups view the world as a dangerous place,” says Dan McAdams, study co-author and professor of human development and psychology at Northwestern University. “It’s just that their fears emerge differently.”

“Social scientists — who are generally liberals — have for decades done research to figure out what makes conservatives tick,” says McAdams.

So there you have it. In plain English, most social scientists regard conservatives as fearful, irrational animals who are holding the human race back from a bright and beautiful future. They want to find out what’s wrong with conservatives, in order to help qualified experts to “fix” whatever is the matter with them.

And if you think that’s too blunt an assessment, you might be interested to hear from the man who commissioned Professor Rees’s recent study of the relationship between people’s political beliefs and their brains: British actor and comedian Colin Firth. Here is what he had to say (italics mine):

Talking about the experiment, he said: “I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise: I just decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don’t agree with me and see what scientists had to say about it and they actually came up with something.”

And what are Firth’s own views? Firth is a former Labour Party supporter who switched to the Liberal Democrats in 2010, but broke with them earlier this month over their decision to raise student tuition fees. He is currently not affiliated with any major party, but his views are best represented by the film and political activism Website, Brightwide.com, which he helped launch in October 2009.

Some readers may argue that biased motivations do not necessarily invalidate a study, and that is true. However, a fair-minded person would admit that studies which are motivated by the assumption that a large proportion of the population has something wrong with them, are likely to yield flawed conclusions.

What’s a “conservative,” anyway? And what’s a “liberal”?

Once we’ve identified the background assumptions made by the authors of an academic study, the next thing we need to look at is their definitions. For Professor Rees’s latest study, we need to ask: how did the researchers define the terms “conservative” and “liberal,” and how did they measure those terms?

Professor Rees answered these questions when he was interviewed by BBC Radio 4′s “Today” programme (italics below are mine):

“The anterior cingulate is a part of the brain that is on the middle surface of the brain at the front and we found that the thickness of the grey matter, where the nerve cells of neurons are, was thicker the more people described themselves as liberal or left wing and thinner the more they described themselves as conservative or right wing,” he told the program.

“The amygdala is a part of the brain which is very old and very ancient and thought to be very primitive and to do with the detection of emotions. The right amygdala was larger in those people who described themselves as conservative.” (AAP report by Joe Churcher, December 29, 2010.)

Another widely cited study in the literature on political attitudes and their neural correlates, assessed people’s political views as follows:

Subjects reported their political attitudes confidentially on a –5 (extremely liberal) to +5 (extremely conservative) scale.

(Reference: “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism” by David M Amodio, John T Jost, Sarah L Master & Cindy M Yee. In Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 10, No. 10. (Oct 2007), pp. 1246-7. Published online 9 September 2007; doi:10.1038/nn1979.)

Both studies are flawed by the same underlying premise: that conservatives and liberals lie on a single spectrum. The authors really should know better than to make this simplistic assumption. Think about it for a moment. Where would you place a libertarian, on this spectrum? Or what about someone who believes the State has no place regulating people’s personal lives, but who believes the State should heavily regulate economic matters, for the good of the community? And how about someone who believes in the reverse: that the State should heavily regulate personal morality for the good of the community, but that it should leave markets alone? And why are Nazis and Communists viewed as polar opposites on this spectrum, when they’re both totalitarians? I won’t belabor the point here; instead, I shall simply refer the curious reader to the Wikipedia article, Political spectrum, which discusses two-axis and three-axis alternatives that have been developed as alternatives by various academics. One deserves special mention: the Nolan chart, a two-axis model developed by the libertarian David Nolan in 1969, which carefully distinguishes economic freedom from personal freedom. The Nolan chart is the centerpiece of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which you can take here.

Professor Rees’s study is marred by another fatal assumption: liberal = left-wing. Actually, the word “liberal” comes from the Latin “liber,” which means “free” (as in “liberty” or freedom). In popular parlance, “small-l” liberals are people who favor individual freedom – as opposed to “large-L” liberals, who belong to a political party that calls itself “Liberal.” The equation of “liberal” with “left-wing” is a particularly inaccurate assumption for the U.K., where Professor Rees’s study was conducted: in that country, the Conservative Party (more properly, the Conservative and Unionist Party) is centrist to right-wing; the Liberal Democrats are centrist to center-left; and the Labour Party is centrist to Left-wing. Thus in the U.K., Liberals are in the middle. In Australia (where I’m from), the Liberal Party is center-right, while in Canada, the Liberal Party is centrist to center-left. In Japan (where I currently reside), the Liberal Democratic Party is regarded as centrist to right-wing.

In short: Professor Rees’s criteria for assessing people’s political views are badly dated, harking back to the heady days of the French Revolution (1789-1796), when parliamentary supporters of the aristocracy and the Church sat on the right of the speaker (traditionally the place of honor), while the commoners sat on the left.

Confirmation bias: did the study’s authors expect to find the results that they observed?

The credibility of an academic study is severely weakened if the existence of confirmation bias can be established. The director of the latest study, Professor Geraint Rees, claims to have had absolutely no idea that the size of two specific regions of the brain – the anterior cingulate and the amygdala – might be correlated with people’s political attitudes, according to this BBC Radio 4 blog by Today programme correspondent Tom Feilden:

“It’s a remarkable finding” says professor Rees. “We were very surprised to find two areas of the brain from which we could predict political attitudes.”

All I can say is: where has Professor Rees been for the past few years? Surely he must be aware of this study, conducted in 2007: “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism” by David M Amodio, John T Jost, Sarah L Master & Cindy M Yee. In Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 10, No. 10. (Oct 2007), pp. 1246-7. Published online 9 September 2007; doi:10.1038/nn1979. I’d like to quote the abstract of the study (italics mine):

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

So neuroscientists have known for at least three years that a certain kind of activity in the anterior cingulate is associated with liberalism. All right. What about the amydala? Professor Rees should have been aware of this six-year-old report in The New York Times (April 20, 2004), suggesting that the amygdalas of Democrats and Republicans show different patterns of activity in response to images containing violence (italics below are mine):

Instead of asking the subject, John Graham, a Democratic voter, what he thought of the use of Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign commercial, the researchers noted which parts of Mr. Graham’s brain were active as he watched…

In the experiment with Mr. Graham, researchers exposed him to photographs of the presidential candidates, commercials for President Bush and John Kerry, and other video images, including the “Daisy” commercial from 1964. In that advertisement, promoting Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater, images of a girl picking petals from a daisy were replaced by images of a nuclear explosion…

The researchers had already zeroed in on those images and their effect among Democrats on the part of the brain that responds to threats and danger, the amygdala. Mr. Graham, like other Democrats tested so far, reacted to the Sept. 11 images with noticeably more activity in the amygdala than did the Republicans, said the lead researcher, Marco Iacoboni, an associate professor at the U.C.L.A. Neuropsychiatric Institute who directs a laboratory at the Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center there…

…[T]he researchers noted that same spike in amygdala activity when the Democrats watched the nuclear explosion in the “Daisy” spot, which promoted a Democrat.

That was six years ago. I find it interesting that the latest study by Professor Rees reports that conservatives have a relatively larger amygdala. How that ties in (if at all) with having an amygdala that’s less responsive to violent images is anybody’s guess.

Anyway, the point I wish to make here is that any clued-up researcher in the field would have been well aware that if there were any parts of the brain whose size correlated with people’s political attitudes, the amygdala and the anterior cingulate would have been two very promising places to look. At the very least, we can safely assume that Professor Rees was confirming a hunch – in which case, the issue of confirmation bias is certainly a relevant one.

What’s an amygdala for, anyway, and what’s wrong with having a big one?

Let’s get one thing clear immediately. Technically, the correct term is the amygdalae (plural), not the amygdala (singular), but I’ll conform to popular convention and use the singular throughout this article. What we call “the amygdala” is actually a collection of almond-shaped clusters of neurons, located deep within the temporal lobes of the brain. (Amygdale is the Greek word for almond.)

The amygdala doesn’t always get a good rap in the press, as British journalist Jeff Taylor observes in a very penetrating critique of Professor Rees’s study, in The Economic Voice (29 December 2010):

The amygdala is now being portrayed in a very negative light. It is, we are told, responsible for fear and other ‘primitive’ emotions. Whereas the anterior [cingulate] of course is responsible for courage, optimism, empathy and reasoning.

Ergo, Conservative primitive and bad, left wing reasoning, brave and good …. QED.

When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on animal minds, I had to do some research on the role of the amygdala, because some scientists were arguing that it played a pivotal role in animal consciousness. I can claim no expertise in neuroscience, as my specialty is philosophy. What I do know is that the amygdala does much more than simply process our fears. The amygdala is important both for perceiving in others and having in oneself emotional or affective behaviors and feelings, including fear and anger. The amygdala performs a primary role in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events, but it is also involved in positive conditioning. It is also involved in the modulation of long-term memory consolidation: apparently, emotional arousal following a learning event influences the strength of the subsequent memory for that event.

Readers who are accustomed to thinking of the amygdala as the brain’s “fear-processing center” will be surprised to know that the amygdala is not even necessary for the early stages of processing fear-related stimuli, since persons in whom it is damaged on both sides of the brain continue to show rapid reactions to fearful faces, even in the absence of a functional amygdala. Instead, it is thought to modulate recognition and social judgment. (Tsuchiya N, Moradi F, Felsen C, Yamazaki M, Adolphs R. (2009). Intact rapid detection of fearful faces in the absence of the amygdala. Nat Neurosci. 12:1224-12225. Click here for the abstract.)

And what about the size of the amygdala? Is having a big one a bad thing, as you might think if you regard the amygdala as a “primitive” part of the brain? Not at all. First of all, there is a time and a place for “primitive emotions”, as journalist Jeff Taylor points out in his critical review of Professor Rees’s study, which I cited above:

But as I have indicated above the worst thing to come out of this [study - VJT] is the presumption that ‘primitive’ emotions like fear are bad. Remember it is fear that drives a mother to keep her off-spring safe and also something that keeps most of us safely on the road.

It turns out that having a big amygdala can be an asset. Research indicates that the volume of the amygdala correlates with the size of social networks. (See Bickart, Kevin C., Wright, Christopher I., Dautoff, Rebecca J., Dickerson, Bradford C., Barrett, Lisa Feldman (Dec. 2010). Amygdala volume and social network size in humans. Nature Neuroscience. doi:doi:10.1038/nn.2724. See also Szalavitz, Maia (December 28, 2010), How to Win Friends: Have a Big Amygdala? in Time Healthland, at Time.com.)

Additionally, there is evidence that “amygdalar enlargement in the normal population might be related to creative mental activity.” (Asari T, Konishi S, Jimura K, Chikazoe J, Nakamura N, Miyashita Y. (2010). Amygdalar enlargement associated with unique perception. Cortex. 46:94–99. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2008.08.001. PMID 18922517.)

In short: people who identify themselves as conservatives have no reason to feel bad about the fact that their amygdalas tend to be larger than those of the rest of the population.

Which way is the direction of causation? Can your political views affect your brain?

The BBC report by Tom Feilden on Professor Rees’s study was careful to avoid falling into the trap of neural determinism:

Although the results do show that political belief is reflected in the physical structure of the brain it’s not clear which comes first. Whether the structure of the brain shapes political belief or political belief leads to the differential development of brain structure.

Other reports were not so careful – for example this AAP report by Joe Churcher strongly suggests in its opening paragraphs that your brain determines your political allegiance (italics below are mine):

Neuroscientists are examining whether political allegiances are hard-wired into people after finding evidence that the brains of conservatives are a different shape to those of left-wingers.

Scans of 90 students’ brains at University College London (UCL) uncovered a “strong correlation” between the thickness of two particular areas of grey matter and an individual’s views.

Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala – a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates.

To be fair, the AAP report later quoted Professor Rees as saying that his research “does suggest there is something about political attitudes that are either encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that our brain structure in some way determines or results in our political attitudes.”

Still, I would imagine that Joe and Jane Citizen, reading this article, would chalk it up as further evidence for neural determinism – the view that our brains determine how we think and feel and choose. Why? Because they remain prisoners of the dominant scientific paradigm for the relationship between mind and brain, which continues to be popularized in the media: the view that the mind is a product of the brain. According to this materialist account, mental processes (e.g. thoughts, feelings and choices) are caused by events in the brain. The bottom-level events in the brain are “more fundamental” than the mental states that “supervene” upon them. And even when we do see cases of top-down causation occurring (i.e. instances when our mental attitudes alter our brain states), the materialist account tries to explain it away, by claiming that it is always preceded (and determined) by something “bottom-up” occurring in my brain. On this account, even if my mental attitudes can alter the state of my brain, it is only because prior events occurring in my brain caused me to develop those attitudes in the first place.

Joe and Jane Citizen swallow this “scientific” materialist view, because they’re not familiar with the literature on neural plasticity, highlighted by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and co-author Denyse O’Leary, in The Spiritual Brain. There is a mountain of evidence showing that you can change your brain by changing the way you think. The direction of causality is not all bottom-up; it’s top-down as well. By contrast, there is not a shred of evidence for the sweeping assertion made by materialists, that all of our mental attitudes are determined by prior events occurring in our brain. In fact, I have yet to see evidence that even one of my attitudes to any issue is determined in this fashion.

Let’s get back to the amygdala. How many readers are aware that Buddhist monks who do compassion meditation have been shown to modulate their amygdala, along with their temporo-parietal junction and insula, during their practice? (See “Cultivating compassion: Neuroscientific and behavioral approaches,” an online talk given by Dr. Richard J. Davidson, at The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University, March 4, 2009.) Why doesn’t the media consider this “news”? But I’d be willing to bet that if there were research showing that we could induce states of deep meditation simply by stimulating the amygdala, it would be in every tabloid from Toronto to Timbuktu.

The same goes for the widely reported 2006 study which found that Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions about their preferred political candidates, without letting the facts get in the way. (Westen, D., Kilts, C., Blagov, P., Harenski, K., & Hamann, S. (2006). “The neural basis of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947-1958.) According to the Live Science report (January 24, 2006), “The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.” “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University, commenting on the research findings. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.” Again, the clear implication is that we are prisoners of our brains.

But what the study overlooked is that many people vote for candidates, simply because they espouse values that voters hold dear. Once a voter has identified the candidate whose values are closest to your own, it is hardly surprising that he/she would choose to disregard adverse media publicity about your preferred candidate, whom he/she views as a vehicle for getting his/her values expressed in the political process. What needs to be examined is the process whereby we choose our values. For instance, why does abortion matter a lot to some people, and not at all to others? Why are some people passionate about income redistribution, while others remain leery of it?

Another limitation of the 2006 study is that it looked at the neural responses of 30 committed partisans in the U.S. Presidential elections of 2004. Partisans are precisely the people we’d expect to be least rational when weighing up their options. What about middle-of-the-roaders? Where is the evidence that for these people, too, there is “a total lack of reason in political decision-making”? I suspect that there is an element of “man-bites-dog” in the media reporting of these issues. Telling people that they are free won’t sell newspapers – most people believe that already. But telling people that some scientific study demonstrates that they are not free is a pretty good way to sell a newspaper. As for academia, I suspect that the root cause of many scientists’ unwillingness to believe in free will is their discomfort with the idea of an immaterial soul that makes free choices, because they can’t put it under a microscope.

Happily, there are a few academics who dare to buck the prevailing trend. The atheist, anti-reductionist, British polymath and leading humanist Raymond Tallis, who is emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, highlights the role of what he calls “the self” in influencing brain states, in his recent article, How can I Possibly Be Free? (The New Atlantis, Summer 2010), when discussing the way in which we acquire new skills such as the ability to catch a baseball (italics below are mine):

If you really must be neuroscientific about it and talk about “neuroplasticity” (the research showing that there are changes in the brain when one acquires a skill), then you should be reminded that neuroplasticity is often self-driven, and that the self that does the driving cannot be understood without invoking the collective and individual transcendence that is the intentional world greatly expanded through language and culture. And we could extend the application of the term “plasticity” far beyond neuroplasticity: there is also bodily plasticity, plasticity of consciousness (including increased confidence in my abilities, which can be self-fulfilling), plasticity of the self, and plasticity of the world of selves (as when I decide to cooperate with others to ensure that one of us makes that so-important catch). It is a mistake to try to stuff all of that back into the brain and see it solely in terms of changes in synaptic connections at the microscopic level, or alterations in cortical maps at the comparatively macroscopic level. Stuffing it back in the brain, of course, is the first step to handing it all over to the no-person material world, and then tiptoeing back to determinism.

It is heartening to see that a professor (and renowned polymath) who is well-versed in the workings of the brain has little time for the view that our brains determine what we choose – a view he forcefully rejects in his article.

What we haven’t been told about the study

In his critical review of Professor Rees’s study, journalist Jeff Taylor remarks that although we have been told that the study was conducted on two British parliamentarians and 90 university students and post-docs, “there is no indication of the age and/or sex mix of the study’s guinea pigs.”

I should add that at this stage, the selection procedure for the students taking part in the study has not been made fully transparent to the public. All we know, from the BBC Radio 4 blog report by Tom Feilden, is that the subjects included “a pool of students and post-docs previously scanned at the Institute in other, unrelated, experiments.” This is all very vague. Were they self-selected or randomly selected? In case you think that’s an irrelevant question, ponder this: there may well be significant neural differences between people who are willing to volunteer for a study and those who are too shy to do so. If that’s the case, then the findings may only apply to extroverted conservatives and liberals.

In conclusion: I look forward to the forthcoming release of Professor Rees’s study in the New Year, but I would advise readers to take it with a very large grain of salt. It certainly proves nothing about free will, one way or the other.

Uncommon Descent

New Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenges Darwinian Evolution

December 30, 2010

Over recent months, papers challenging key elements of Darwinian theory — the kind of papers which are supposed not to exist — have increasingly been slipping through the net and finding their way into the peer-reviewed literature. One such paper, “Is gene duplication a viable explanation for the origination of biological information and complexity?,” authored by Joseph Esfandier Hannon Bozorgmeh and published online last week in the journal, Complexity, challenges the standard gene duplication/divergence model regarding the origin of evolutionary novelty. Read More>>>

Uncommon Descent

Peeking through the Forrest to look at the trees …

December 30, 2010

Christian Darwinists are fond of reassuring us all that Christianity and Darwinism are a natural fit. They don’t seem to have taught the chant to everyone yet. Old Earth creationist Stephen E. Jones has noted,

Barbara Forrest, has explored what she believes are the religious implications of neo-Darwinism and astronomy in her article, “The Possibility of Meaning in Human Evolution,” Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 35.4 (Dec 2000), 861-889. She writes (p. 862, notes omitted):

We have established scientifically some disquieting facts: (1) human beings have evolved from nonhuman life forms, meaning that (2) at one time we did not exist, and that (3) according to paleontological and astronomical evidence, at some time in the future we shall cease to exist. Furthermore, from a scientific standpoint, there is no discernible reason that we had to evolve in the first place, and there is no guarantee that we shall continue to evolve successfully; more hominid species have become extinct than have survived. The price of such knowledge has been the gnawing question of whether human existence has genuine meaning if it was constructed with cranes rather than supported by skyhooks, as Daniel Dennett says.

The problem of meaning is easily resolved for those who embrace a preconstructed system of meaning such as religion. However, religion cannot help us find meaning in any honest sense unless it can assimilate the truth about where human beings have come from, and the only real knowledge we have about where we came from we have acquired through science.

It’s convenient for Forrest – who has been accused of making her living by bashing design principles without understanding them – that no religion other than Darwinism would thrive by assimilating the “truth” that she imagines to be established “scientifically.” Actually, Dennett, whom she mentions, doesn’t seem sure that the human mind really exists, a position which ends the problem altogether, I guess.

Uncommon Descent

ID – Predicton or accommodation?

December 30, 2010

Alister McGrath makes some interesting comments on the need for prediction in science, noting that a natural theology may be possible on the basis of accommodation within an ‘inference to the best explanation.’ He writes;

‘…some theories concern entities or situations in which predictions may seem inappropriate or simply impossible. If natural theology rests primarily upon accommodation [and not prediction], it is in good scientific company.’ McGrath, (2009) A Fine Tuned Universe, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, p.60

McGrath is still a keen Darwinist and not really a friend of ID, but it does imply that ID can be justified on the basis of accommodation and need not necessarily seek justification on the basis of explanatory power.

Uncommon Descent

A better kind of beauty, or: Why some people mistakenly reject Intelligent Design as unaesthetic

December 30, 2010

This post is intended as a follow-up on the post, Children of a better god? by idnet.com.au.

I would like to suggest that the real reason why some people (including many Christians) dislike Intelligent Design is an aesthetic one. Their notion of beauty is overly influenced by mathematics: they define beauty as a delicate and interesting balance between variety (or plenitude) and simplicity (or economy). This kind of thinking goes back to Leibniz and beyond. Both qualities are needed: a very simple world containing just one object would be simple but intolerably boring, while a world lacking simple laws would appear messy and mathematically inelegant. It follows that according to this account of beauty, a beautiful world should contain many different kinds of things, governed by just a few underlying laws or principles. The variety of elements in the periodic table is a good example: it is aesthetically pleasing, because they can all be explained in terms of just a few underlying principles: the laws of physics and chemistry, whose underlying mathematical simplicity is evident in their regularity, symmetry and order. Many people would like to think that living things possess the same kind of beauty: an ideal balance between variety and underlying simplicity. Because the underlying laws are mathematically simple in this model of beauty, these people reason that the act of generating things that possess the attribute of beauty should be a simple one. Neo-Darwinism appeals to them as a scientific theory, because it purports to account for the variety of living things we see today, on the basis of a few simple underlying principles (natural selection acting on variation arising stochastically, without any foresight of long-term goals).

But living things aren’t like the periodic table. The phenomenon that characterizes them is not order but complexity – and complexity of a particular kind, at that. The beauty you see in a living cell is more like the beauty of a story than the beauty of crystals, which are highly ordered but still not very interesting, even when you contemplate them in all their variety. Stories have a much richer kind of beauty: they have parts (e.g. a beginning, a middle and an end; or the chapters in a novel), and these parts have to be ordered in a sequence specified by the author. The idea of writing a mathematical program that can generate a meaningful story from a “word bank” is comically absurd. Even a master programmer could not do that, unless he/she “cheated” and pre-specified the story (or a data bank of stories) in the program itself. But that wouldn’t save any effort, would it? And one cannot even imagine a simple procedure for writing a story. Stories are inherently complex; so the notion that they could be generated by a single, simple act makes no sense. The same goes for living things. They cannot be produced by a single, simple act. And just as one story cannot be changed step-by-step into another while still remaining a coherent story, so too, it is impossible for one type of living thing to change into another as a result of a step-by-step process, while remaining a viable organism.

Stories are not like mathematical formulas; and yet, undoubtedly they are still beautiful. They require a lot of work to produce. They are not simple, regular or symmetrical; they have to be specified in considerable detail. Who are we to deny God the privilege of producing life in this way, if He so wishes? The universe is governed by His conception of beauty, not ours, and if it contained nothing but mathematically elegant forms, it would be a boring, sterile place indeed. Crystals are pretty; but life is much richer and more interesting than any crystal. Life cannot be generated with the aid of a few simple rules. It needs to be planned and designed very carefully, in a very “hands-on” fashion. In order to facilitate this, God needs a universe which is ontologically “open” to manipulation by Him whenever He sees fit, rather than a closed, autonomous universe.

The beauty found in living things, then, cannot be defined as a balance between plenitude and economy, as Leibniz thought. It is a different kind of beauty, like that of a story. That is why life needs to be intelligently designed.

Uncommon Descent

Has the growth in interest in design helped to chase blatant philosophical materialism out of textbooks?

December 30, 2010

Wanted: Examples from recent textbooks that match these examples from the 1990s through 2001?:

From Joseph S. Levine and Kenneth R. Miller, Biology: Discovering Life (D.C. Heath and Co., 1st ed. 1992, p. 152:

Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit.Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.

(My source tells me that this language was not removed for the 2nd ed. in 1994.)

From Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5:

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…

From William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, H. Craig Keller, Life: The Science of Biology (2001, 6th Ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co.), p. 3:

Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any ‘goals.’ The idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.

Hat tip for excerpts: Stephen E. Jones, pictured above.

Uncommon Descent

Hello World! – An Introductory Post

December 30, 2010

Greetings all. Since I’m going to be contributing some posts here at Uncommon Descent, it’s been suggested I explain to everyone just where I’m coming from intellectually and in the context of the Intelligent Design discussion. Before I do that, I just want to express my thanks to the powers that be on this site for allowing me this opportunity – with luck it may lead to some interesting conversations on a topic I’ve enjoyed following over the years.

So if you’re at all curious of where I stand on the questions of ID, evolution, and so on… Well, just read on.

First, when it comes to questions of my intellectual background I’d like to be explicit: I’m very much an average person. My pseudonym doesn’t hide someone with important credentials, and I’m neither an academic nor a scientist. I’m simply someone who became very interested in Intelligent Design, along with the related questions of design, science, and so on years ago, and have taken part in many conversations both on here and at Telic Thoughts (another blog dedicated to teleological topics.)

Second, my views on ID are somewhat complicated. If you were to ask me if I think Intelligent Design can offer arguments, evidence and reasons to think that design exists in the natural world, I’d say yes. Now, if you’d ask me whether I think ID is “science”, I’d say no – but I’d also say that Darwinism as offered up by many (and Michael Ruse in particular) is not science either. The other side of that coin is that I’m pragmatic – if it’s “science” to argue, as many Darwinists do, that science CAN in fact detect the presence or absence of design in nature (and inevitably, they always insist that science has shown its lack), then my response is “Then detecting design in nature is science after all, therefore ID is science.” I strongly believe that the one thing many ID critics fear most is consistency: They want all positive inferences of design ruled out as non-scientific, but all negative inferences of design to be called not only scientific, but utterly true.

Third, you could classify me as a theistic evolutionist of sorts. I’m a Catholic who grew up with a Catholic family and schooling, and the result was that evolution never struck me as a problem for my faith – the impression I’ve always gotten is that it simply hasn’t been considered a major issue for quite some time, at least among many Catholics. That said, I have little patience for Darwinism – at least, I’ve had little patience for it after coming to realize that “Darwinism” was different from “evolution”, and this will be one of my focuses while I contribute at UD. Further, I simply don’t have the fiery indignation many TEs have when it comes to this topic. I got over my (largely ignorant, cultural) hostility to YECs years ago, I don’t find the suggestion of designer interventions in natural history as some kind of terrifying “science-stopper” much less obviously untrue, and I think both the natural world in general and evolution in particular bear signs of intention, design, purpose, mind, and teleology from top to bottom even if it’s granted for the sake of argument that no direct intervention took place. In other words, for me, design in the world is obvious – and questions of whether biological organisms evolved, were directly created, or otherwise strike me not as a question of whether or not design took place, but as an implied affirmation that it did take place with the “How?” being of central concern.

Fourth, my interest in ID is not purely or even largely religious. And by that I mean, if tomorrow it were demonstrated to me that Christianity was false, my interest in ID would remain. I think it’s to ID’s credit that its major proponents have repeatedly stressed that ID may allow one to infer, even strongly infer, a mind or teleology being responsible for what we see in the natural world – but that this mind is not necessarily the specific God of Christianity, or may not even be a ‘god’ at all (though the particularities of that question are dicey.) In fact, I think ID as a movement would benefit by stressing this point further – I feel that many otherwise agnostic people would find the broad inferences, questions, and ideas in the ID ‘big tent’ to at least be worthy of serious consideration. In some ways, I feel this is an eventuality regardless.

In the near future, I hope to post about a wide variety of ID-related topics – from giving my own take on why Thomists should support ID, why agnostics should support ID, the mistakes some prominent ID critics and/or TEs make, the ideas of some lesser-known ID-sympathetic people, and more.

I think that wraps things up for now. So a belated Merry Christmas to you all, and an early Happy New Year.

Uncommon Descent

Do you have to be an American liberal to believe in extraterrestrials?

December 29, 2010

Yes, folks, I thought this was Hoax News at work too.

But Michael Medved reports,

These clashing opinions on extraterrestrials amount to more than a trivial split on an arcane topic; they connect, in fact, both logically and emotionally to big conflicts over worldview, culture, politics and America’s role in history.In Colorado, these conflicts erupted in a recent battle over a proposed Denver commission to investigate visitations from alien life forms. Initiative 300 won enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November 2010 but lost in a landslide, with conservatives leading the derision of the “ET Initiative,” as a loony waste of taxpayer money. The chief support for “greater transparency” regarding sightings and encounters came from the city’s Bohemian left, with advocates proudly citing the interest in flying saucers from liberal icons like Jimmy Carter and John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff.

Polls show that Americans remain closely divided on attitudes toward extraterrestrials, with a 2008 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll reporting 56% who believe it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that intelligent life has developed in other worlds. Self-described Democrats (according to the same survey) are far more likely to say they have personally seen “visitors from another world” than are their Republican counterparts, who remain distinctly skeptical.

For more, go here.

A most interesting discussion follows.

Of course the Initiative is a waste of money! If the ETs really wanted to talk to us … well, like I always advise, in matters of the heart: If he’s there and if he cares, he’ll phone. He knows you want to hear from him. So, if you don’t …

By the way, I hope it’s not true that Jimmy Carter spent a lot of time thinking about … flying saucers?? … when he was president. Didn’t he have, like, “issues” to address? I recall something about the Ayatollah Khomeini holding American hostages back then … Ring a bell?

For more stories on extraterrestrials, go here.

Note: This sounds kind of preachy, but it is important to distinguish between “space aliens” as above, and the possibility of primitive life on other planets. The latter is a question on which information from science has a bearing; the former an article of faith, based on other beliefs.

Uncommon Descent