Dr. Steven Novela believes that the brain (matter) entirely explains the mind. I challenge him to answer the question raised by this thought problem:

Imagine a tutor who specializes in teaching children about color. He’s a materialist, named…Steve. He knows all that is known about color. He knows the physics, the optics, the chemistry, the neurobiology, everything. A family retains him to teach their child, a prodigy, all that can be known about color.

Tudor Steve goes to work. He teaches the little genius about quantum mechanics with relevant application of string theory to flesh out the more subtle issues, then goes on to teach the precocious child chemistry, optics, neurobiology, all of the material and physical facts about color. The child excels in color class in school, acing all of the exams on the physics and the chemistry and the neurobiology.

Then, one day, the boy confides in tutor Steve: the child is color-blind. He has learned all of the physical facts about color, but he has no idea what color looks like. He knows that tutor Steve is a materialist, so he assumes that all there is to know about color can be explained from a materialistic standpoint, including what color looks like. That’s why the child’s parents hired Steve the materialistic color tutor.

So the boy asks tutor Steve:

"Please explain to me what color looks like."

Materialist color tutor Steve has a dilemma. Material facts about color can, of course, be taught. But can ‘what it is like to see color,’ the subjective experience of color, be taught? If it can’t, then there is knowledge of color that is not material knowledge. Therefore materialism cannot completely explain the subjective experience (the qualia) of color. Therefore subjective experience is something in addition to matter. And therefore dualism is necessary to explain the mind.

How would materialist tutor Steve explain what color looks like to a person who is color blind?

Posted by Michael Egnor at 1:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Editor's Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes' book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America's Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, "Monkey Girl.]

For someone who boasts a Pulitzer Prize (for a work other than Monkey Girl) and claims to be objective and neutral journalist, Edward Humes’ book Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul is an incredibly partisan and inaccurate portrayal of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. At many points it simply parrots Darwinist talking points and retells many of their patently false urban legends about the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, leaving out crucial facts which contradict common Darwinist claims. Humes says in his book, “if the evolution wars are to continue, let the combatants be armed with facts, not fiction.” (pg. viii.) That sounds good to me. But Humes' book comes off more like advocacy than an objective evaluation of the facts. Humes' intent to write Monkey Girl as a polemic against intelligent design (ID) and ID proponents is especially seen in...

Humes' One-Sided Attacks and Double-Standard Used against ID proponents Regarding Name-Calling:
Humes tries to paint the Darwinists as if they are the only ones who are victims of personal attacks in the debate over ID and evolution. Anyone who even remotely follows this issue on the internet realizes that namecalling can be a problem on both sides, but that Darwinists are the ones who overwhelmingly participate in personal attacks against ID proponents.

Humes quotes a couple ID proponents who apparently said nasty things about Darwinists, such as one legislator who apparently “offered a chilling comment likening anyone who thought differently to the murderous terrorists of 9/11.” (pg. 207) While it is terrible, to be sure, when anyone engages in such personal attacks, Humes fails to observe the fact that ID proponents are subjected to personal attacks that vastly outweigh those received by Darwinists. In fact, ID proponents are also regularly compared to terrorists, or the "Taliban," by Darwinists who make such comparisons with a straight face. Such comparisons come not just from hyperbolic politicians with an agenda (like the example Humes gives) but from serious academics and journalists. Even a front page New York Times article in 2005 acknowledged that Discovery Institute “is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to... the Taliban.” The article had good reason for making that claim, because many ID critics compare ID proponents to terrorists or the Taliban:

Steven Novella has a recent post on SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Like many of us, Dr. Novella is fascinated by the prospect of finding evidence for intelligent alien life in outer space. Dr. Novella:

I am a strong supporter of SETI - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. To me this is a fascinating scientific endeavor with a potentially huge payoff...

Dr. Novella defends SETI against the claims by some that it is not real science:

And yet, I find that even within skeptical circles I hear grumblings that SETI is not real science…The primary complaint stems from the misapplication of an important scientific principle - that a necessary criterion for any scientific hypothesis is that it needs to be falsifiable. If you cannot make an observation or conduct an experiment to prove an idea wrong, then that idea is not useful to science…SETI critics argue that the notion of extraterrestrial intelligence is inherently unfalsifiable. No matter how much you look with negative results, one could always argue that it is not enough, we have to look deeper into space, for fainter signals, in more EM frequencies…But this, however, does not render SETI unfalsifiable in the that is meant by philosophers of science, because it runs up against another scientific principle - the notion that you cannot prove a negative. It is logically impossible to prove completely that a phenomenon does not exist (unless it can be demonstrated that it violates know laws - but even then the proof is only as good as the degree to which the violated laws are established). Evidence for the lack of a phenomenon is always only as good as the thoroughness and efficacy of the search methods.

Dr. Novella rambles a bit. He hypothesizes about Dyson spheres and alien SETI projects looking for us:

In a recent Nature commentary, Philip Ball also feels the need to defend SETI. He discusses another method (other than listening for radio signals) for looking for ET, writing:..Dyson suggested that a sufficiently advanced civilization would baulk at the prospect of its star’s energy radiating uselessly into space. They could capture it, he said, by breaking up other planets in their solar system into rubble that would form a spherical shell — known as a Dyson sphere — around the star, creating a surface on which the solar energy could be harvested…He is talking about the work of Richard Carrigan, who asked a specific question: are there any detectable Dyson spheres within about 1000 light years. That is not the same thing as asking if there are any ET’s, rather its a proxy question. It’s a method of looking where the light is good. What behaviors might ET be engaged in that we can detect. Well, they may be broadcasting at us in the radio frequency. Or they may have buit something like a Dyson sphere around their star - perhaps we can detect that…Of course, these methods require speculation about what an ET civilization might do. This is problematic because really we have no idea. All we really can do is assume that humanity is somewhat representative of technological intelligence and then speculate about what a more advanced version of our own civilization might do. It’s a pretty thin line of reasoning, although it is legitimate as far as it goes. We just know we are speculating from too little information…Another recent SETI “innovation” was to assume that ET might be interested in looking for life elsewhere in the galaxy. They might start by looking for planets around other systems, and planets like earth would be easiest to detect from a direction in the plane of our system. Therefore, to those observers the earth would eclipse the sun and that is one way they could detect it. It might be more likely, therefore, that such civilizations are broadcasting at us, because they know we are here, or at least life might be here. Perhaps, then, SETI should focus its efforts by looking at stars in the plane of our system…That is another long chain of speculation - but very interesting, and legitimate as far as it goes. This is an effective investigational logic to use - imagine what might be the case, then take a look…It still strikes me as odd when people use this feature of SETI to argue that it is pseudoscience. No -it would only be pseudoscience if SETI proponents concluded that ET exists based on such reasoning, or to explain away negative results. But this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis upon which to design a program for searching for data…SETI programs also use a very reasonable protocol for dealing with signals when they encounter them. They consider such signals an anomaly, then they systematically rule out possible known causes. So far, every candidate signal has turned out to be something known - no enduring anomalies. This behavior is very different from pseudoscientists, who might call such signals “ET signals” and then proceed to only rule out a couple of obvious known causes, or then dismiss non-ET explanations for the signals.

One is struck by SETI supporters' speculative extravagance. The most cogent critique of SETI, in my view, is that it is akin to an article of faith. There is absolutely no evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life. SETI is surely a shot in the dark, perhaps literally, but I do believe that it is a worthwhile scientific venture. Methodologically it is certainly science, even good science. The reception of signals with specified complexity or the discovery of artifacts apparently crafted by intelligent non-human agency would be clear evidence for extraterrestrial intelligent agency. Carl Sagan’s example in “Contact” is entirely valid. The reception of a signal repeating prime numbers would be very unlikely to have a non-intelligent natural source, and the most reasonable scientific inference would be that it was generated by extraterrestrial intelligent life.

There is another kind of research that has been going on for the past century that implicitly (if not explicitly) investigates intelligent agency in nature. Molecular biology is the study of molecular DNA codes and intricate cellular nanotechnology. It investigates structure and function on a microscopic scale, not an astronomical scale. It is, in a real sense, the intracellular analogue of SETI; we might even call it (only half-facetiously) a search for intra-cellular intelligence (SICI).

Unlike SETI, which, however well intentioned and well designed, has floundered, SICI has been remarkably successful. In the past century, we have discovered intracellular structure and artifacts that, had the analogues of this computer code and intricate nanotechnology been discovered in space rather than in the cell, would have led to the obvious inference to intelligent design and would have been considered mankind’s seminal scientific discovery. The series of discoveries that began in Cambridge in 1953 — the discovery that the basis for heredity was a molecular code written in letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs — with punctuation! — was astonishing evidence for non-human intelligent agency of a very high order in nature.

Molecular biology has revealed machines and rotors and motors and dynamos inside cells. In important ways, the most useful way of studying these nanomachines is reverse-engineering, which is the study of designed artifacts. Methodologically, researchers routinely use the implicit inference to design to understand intracellular molecular machines. To understand the bacterial flagellum, it is necessary to understand how motors work. Enzymes have intricate working parts that are most cogently explained as elegantly designed nanotechnology. Had these artifacts been discovered by SETI researchers in extraterrestrial space instead of intracellular space, the inference to design would have been widely accepted and hailed as a turning point is science and in human history.

Of course, if signals or artifacts that appeared intelligently designed were discovered in space, the scientific vetting of this data would include testing the inference that the artifacts arose by natural unintelligent means. That is, the design inference would be tested against the inference to natural unintelligent causation. This of course has been done in SETI; there have been instances (e.g. pulsars) in which signals that raised the question of design were investigated and found to have a natural unintelligent cause.

Yet, in SICI, the inference to design has not been vetted, and in fact, investigation of the obvious evidence for design has been ruled out in many established scientific circles. Why the widespread scientific resistance to SICI, which has produced abundant scientific evidence for design, but not to SETI, which has produced nothing of scientific value?

The answer, I believe, is that the implications of SICI are unacceptable ideologically to many scientists, who are philosophically materialistic and hence unwilling to examine the evidence for design in biology from an unbiased perspective. The maxim “Follow the Evidence” stops at design for many biologists. The argument that ‘evolution’ explains these obvious design manifestations has no traction. Evolution by Darwinian mechanisms has explained very little of specified functional complexity in molecular biology in any rigorous way. And evolutionary hypotheses can only be evaluated by comparing evolutionary explanations with design explanations, so that meaningful inferences could be drawn. If we cannot methodologically draw design inferences, then there are no hypotheses to which to compare evolutionary inferences, and evolutionary ‘explanations’ are merely dogma, unchallenged and unchallengeable.

Dogmatic materialists continue looking through their (figurative or literal) SETI telescopes, searching for evidence of intelligent agency in all the wrong places. The search for intelligent agency in the living cell, using the same entirely valid inferences for the detection of intelligent agency as are used in SETI, is producing a mountain of evidence for intracellular intelligent design, whereas SETI, looking for intelligently designed signals from outer space, has come up dry.

The past century of biological science can be summed up succinctly: biology is replete with evidence for intelligent design.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 7:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In Part 1, I showed how Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Behe's arguments about the irreducibility of the blood-clotting cascade to Judge Jones during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, such that Judge Jones wrongly ruled that "scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe's predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade." To briefly recap, Miller told Judge Jones that Behe's discussion of the blood-clotting cascade in Darwin's Black Box was "essentially identical" to the discussion of the blood-clotting cascade in Of Pandas and People, implying that any critiques of Pandas also applied to Behe. But unlike Pandas, Behe explicitly did not argue that all of the components of the blood-clotting cascade were required for it to function properly. In fact, the evidence that Miller presented at trial used comparative biochemistry to show that the blood-clotting cascade still worked in the absence of certain blood clotting factors, but these missing factors were ones that Behe explicitly did not argue were part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood-clotting cascade. Miller in no way refuted Behe, and as I will show in this second installment, Miller probably didn't even refute Pandas.

Pandas May Still Be Correct
As I discussed in Part 1, Pandas contended that the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates requires all of its parts--including the intrinsic pathway, the extrinsic pathway, and all of the components that the pathways share in common after they converge (i.e. from factor X onward). The blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates, with the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways labeled, is seen in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1: The figure below shows the full blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates. Jawed fish lack the intrinsic pathway found in humans and all other land-dwelling vertebrates. Miller's logical mistake was assuming that this fact therefore implies that the intrinsic pathway is therefore dispensable to the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates. Perhaps it is dispensable, but Miller's evidence did not show that (click on graphic to see the full diagram):

Miller argued that because dolphins and jawed fish lack some components of the intrinsic pathway, that this shows that the entire land-dwelling vertebrate blood-clotting cascade is not irreducibly complex. But this is not a valid argument: Miller's logical mistake was to forget that the fact that two systems are different, or the fact that System A does not have certain parts found in System B, does NOT necessarily mean that System A could evolve into B along a stepwise evolutionary path, or that system B is not irreducibly complex.

For example, consider again the bicycle. Bicycles have two wheels. Unicycles, having only one wheel, are missing an obvious component found on bicycles. Does this imply that you can remove one wheel from a bicycle and it will still function? Of course not. Try removing a wheel from a bike and you'll quickly see that it requires two wheels to function. The fact that a unicycle lacks certain components of a bicycle does not mean that the bicycle is therefore not irreducibly complex.

Miller assumed that since jawed-fish / dolphins lack certain components found in the intrinsic blood clotting pathway of land-dwelling vertebrates, that therefore the land-dwelling vertebrate blood-clotting cascade is NOT irreducibly complex. But Miller didn't cite an experiment that demonstrated that the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates doesn't require the intrinsic pathway. In other words, he never tried removing a wheel from the bike, which is the proper experiment to show that a bike is reducibly complex. Instead, Miller effectively said unicycles only have one wheel, so bikes don't need both wheels. It's an experimentally deficient and logically flawed argument.

Arguments about the irreducibly complex core aside (see Part 1), the entire land-dwelling vertebrate system might still be irreducibly complex, for the fact that some vertebrates lack factor XII (called Hageman Factor) in their blood-clotting cascade, or even lack the entire intrinsic pathway, in no way implies that humans (and other land-dwelling vertebrates) don't require all of these components for their blood to clot. Miller didn't cite the proper experimental data to show that the land-dwelling vertebrate blood-clotting cascade is reducibly complex. He just cited a unicycle, which as we've seen, isn't sufficient to demonstrate the point he's trying to make. Miller could only make this argument if he presented actual knockout experiments on the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates that removed certain components from the blood-clotting cascade, and found that the blood still clotted properly. But Miller didn't do anything like that.

In fact, no one has demonstrated an evolutionary pathway from the blood-clotting cascade of jawed fish to the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates. In contrast, as Behe observes in Darwin's Black Box, the blood-clotting cascade is irreducibly complex with respect to the extrinsic pathway and everything after the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways converge, i.e. from factor X onward (see the red box in the diagram below). As usual, Darwinists have used bogus comparisons to other living organisms to find other systems which COULD represent islands along an evolutionary pathway, but they need MUCH more evidence to demonstrate that the pathway exists.

Figure 2: This diagram shows the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates. The red box shows the components that Michael Behe argues form the irreducibly complex core of the blood-clotting cascade. The green box shows the components which Ken Miller claims are dispensable to the blood-clotting cascade. Since the boxes don't overlap, it can be seen that Miller didn't even address Behe's arguments. Nonetheless, Judge Jones had the gusto to rule that "scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe's predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade."

Revealing Differences Between the Blood-Clotting Cascade of Land-Dwelling Vertebrates and Dolphins / Jawed Fish?
During the Kitzmiller trial, Ken Miller discussed the fact that dolphins (like jawed fish) lack factor XII (Hageman factor) in their blood-clotting cascade. This is interesting: Dolphins are supposedly descended from land-dwelling vertebrates (which have factor XII) but their condition is like jawed fish, which lack factor XII. This implies that there may be functional constraints on water-dwelling vertebrates to have a different activation pathway than land-dwelling vertebrates.

Darwinists like Ken Miller view the dolphin's lack of factor XII as a case of convergent evolution, but we might also see it as evidence of a functional constraint or a case of common design. The fact that jawed fish lack factor XII is not necessarily evidence that their blood-clotting cascade was a "primitive evolutionary precursor" to the land-dwelling vertebrate blood-clotting cascade, but evidence of a functional constraint for water-dwelling vertebrates--a constraint which is confirmed in that dolphins also lack factor XII.

This is an interesting issue that will require further research to sort out. In the mean time, any claims that Miller refuted Behe--or even Pandas--appear to be premature.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Dr. Steven Novella is a Yale neurologist with whom I have been having a blog debate about the mind-brain question. Dr. Novella asserts that neuroscience has proven the strict materialistic understanding of the mind — that the mind is caused entirely by the brain, and reducible entirely to it — is true. I disagree. Although the mind and brain correlate to a high degree, the mind is ontologically irreducible to the brain. I believe that some form of dualism is necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.

I have written several posts about qualia, which is the subjective nature of sensory experiences, such the experience of the color red, or the smell of coffee, or the ‘hurt’ of pain. The neurophysiological correlates of these phenomena, such as the physiology of retinal mediation of color vision, or the olfactory nerves in the nose that mediate the smell of coffee, or the neurochemistry of C-fibers that mediate pain, can be explained materialistically, but the experience of color, smell, and pain — qualia — elides material explanation.

Here is my description of the problem that qualia poses, from a previous post:

Qualia is subjective experience, which is first person ontogeny. You can describe pain, using science or literature or whatever. But the experience of pain is something qualitatively different. There is nothing in science which infers subjectivity — no “Newton’s Fourth Law” by which objective matter produces subjective experience. No material law or principle invokes subjectivity, yet subjectivity is the hallmark of the mind.

Here is Dr. Novella’s reply:

This is just a non-sequitur. There is very little in science that reduces down to a specific law. His argument, in fact, is a good example of using hyperreductionism as a straw man. There is higher-order complexity in the natural world - emergent phenomena that are more than the sum of their parts, that cannot be reduced to fundamental laws. Consciousness is one of those things…He also incorrectly uses the term “infer” here. It is true that we cannot measure subjective experience. But we can infer its existence by the behaviors it produces (and from our own subjective experience). We can also say that there is no evidence of subjective experience existing without corresponding brain activity…What Egnor is actually saying is that anything we cannot directly measure (even if we can infer it) does not exist, and therefore we should attribute any of its effects to non-material magic. By this logic quarks cannot exist, so atoms must be made of pixie dust.

Dr. Novella invokes “higher order complexity…emergent phenomena” to elide the deep problem that subjective experience such as qualia pose for materialism. There are two reasons that attribution of subjective mental states to “higher order complexity…emergent phenomena” fails to rescue materialism from the problem of subjectivity:

1) Traditional emergent and higher-order phenomena, such as the ‘wetness’ of water that emerges when individual water molecules aggregate or the characteristics of statistical mechanics that emerge from individual atoms of a gas, always relate third-person objective phenomena to to other third person objective phenomena, and never invoke different ontologies. Emergence theory proposes, for example, that molecules aggregate in ways that yield movement not readily predicted by the properties of individual molecules, but emergence theory doesn’t propose that molecules themselves begin to see colors, smell coffee, or form opinions about philosophical issues. But this is exactly what materialism proposes. The problem with the application of 'emergence' to the mind is that a mental state is not a "higher order state of complexity" of matter. It’s a different ontology, a different kind of existence, for which the concept of emergence seems to merely be an evasion of the ontological questions, not a resolution of them.

2) Emergence and higher order complexity are fundamentally observer-dependent subjective phenomena. That is, water atoms don’t do miraculous things when they aggregate in order to produce ‘wetness’; we invoke ‘wetness’ to describe what aggregated water molecules feel like. Gas molecules don’t magically change their physical properties when they aggregate. But in the aggregate, they seem to us to do things that we have difficulty gleaning from more basic physical properties of the molecules themselves, and we invoke mathematical methods such as statistical mechanics and gas laws (e.g. Boyles' and Charles' laws) to describe the dynamics of gas molecules in the aggregate. They’re still gas molecules, doing what gas molecules do. 'Emergence' doesn’t really exist without a mind to apprehend it. Emergence is, in a sense, a psychological phenomenon. We infer emergent properties because we wouldn't have predicted large scale properties from small scale properties, yet all of the properties of the system are merely that — the properties of the system. Material systems just do what they do. Emergence is observer-dependent. Thus, invocation of ‘emergence’ to explain the mind ironically invokes mind to explain mind. Materialists who invoke emergence in order to explain the subjective properties of the mind merely invoke that which they feign to explain.

Materialism can’t explain subjective first-person experience, because materialism posits the existence of only third-person objective things. ‘Emergence’ gets the materialist nowhere, because emergence offers no explanation for the difference in ontology between first-person subjective experience and third-person objective existence. Furthermore, emergence depends on apprehension of the phenomenon by a mind, which is that which is to be explained.

‘Emergence’ is applicable to the mind-body problem in only this way: the invocation of “higher order complexity...emergent phenomena” to explain the mind is an evasion that emerges when materialists are asked to explain the subjective nature of the mind.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 5:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Editor's Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes' book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America's Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, "Monkey Girl.]

Any book with an icon of evolution on its cover — in this case, the fanciful diagram of ape-like skeletons transitioning into a human skeleton — is bound to be unfriendly towards intelligent design (ID). When I received my copy of Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul, Edward Humes’ book about the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, I expected no less. Humes’ FAQ on evolution and ID on his website made the incredibly bold claim, “There is more scientific evidence ... to support evolutionary theory than ... gravitational theory.” What I did not expect to find in Humes’ book were dozens of inaccurate claims about the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial and extensive name-calling and ad hominem attacks against Discovery Institute, where he says we are “combativ[e], “running scared,” “angry,” “cocky,” “co[y],” “masters of anti-evolution spin,” “would-be giant killer[s],” and “sore loser[s].” This isn't upsetting--just surprising given that it comes from a book that is being touted as a true and correct historical treatment of this trial. This second installment will discuss Humes'...

Attacks upon Discovery Institute:

Here is another hilarious example of a just-so story from Science Daily. (In fact, this one is more just so-so.) Substitute the words "made up" whenever you read characterized. Were they in court, a judge would surely say: "Show me the evidence."

Posted by Robert Crowther at 3:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m in the midst of an online debate with neurologist Dr. Steven Novella about this question: can the mind be explained entirely by the brain, or is there an immaterial aspect of mental states that defies materialist reduction? Dr. Novella and I are both well-acquainted with neuroscience (I’m a neurosurgeon), and we have quite different views on the mind-brain problem. Dr. Novella is a materialist, and he believes that neuroscience has demonstrated beyond question that the mind is entirely caused by material processes in the brain. I believe that there are properties of mental states that don’t admit material explanations, and I favor dualism. Dr Novella asserts:

[Egnor] fails to recognize that this battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena…[a]s our knowledge of brain function increases, it is squeezing out any role for a non-material ghost in the machine. A non-material cause of mind is…unnecessary…

Of course, the battle over the mind-brain question hasn’t “already been fought and lost,” and it certainly hasn't been resolved in favor of materialism. Dualism is, if anything, gaining traction in the philosophical community as necessary for an adequate description of the mind, and there are and have been many prominent neuroscientists who adhere to dualism. Charles Sherrington (Nobel laureate and the father of neurophysiology), Wilder Penfield (the father of epilepsy surgery), Sir John Eccles (Nobel laureate and pioneer in the study of neuronal synapses) were dualists, and many modern neuroscientists such as Jeffery Schwartz and Mario Beauregard reject strict materialist understandings of the mind. Dr. Novella’s dogmatic assertion that the “battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena” is mere rhetorical bluster.

In the philosophical arena, strict materialism is faring even worse. Over the past few decades, many philosophers of the mind have pointed out the glaring logical problems with materialism as an adequate solution to the mind-body problem. Central to the evidence against materialism is the concept of qualia. Qualia (singular quale) is a philosophical term that refers to the subjective aspect of sensory experience. Qualia is often described as ‘that which it is like to…’. It is the entirely first-person subjective aspect of sensation — the smell of coffee, the experience of the color red, the hurt of pain, as distinguished from third-person objective facts about sensations, such as the chemical formula for coffee, or the wavelength of red light, or the neurotransmitters that mediate pain. Daniel Dennett has described several properties of qualia that are generally agreed upon:

1) Qualia are private experiences, which are accessible directly only to the person experiencing them.
2) Qualia are incorrigible, in the sense that the experience of qualia is all that needs to be known and can be known about them. Qualia are pure subjective experience.
3) Qualia are ineffable, in the sense that they cannot be apprehended by someone who has never experienced them. (i.e. if someone had never had a sense of smell, one could not describe what it is like to smell coffee).

Philosopher Frank Jackson posed a thought question in 1982 that clarifies the problem that qualia poses for the strict materialist approach to the mind-brain question. It is framed as an epistemological problem. Materialism claims that the physical facts about mental states are all the facts there are. We may not understand all the material facts now (we certainly don’t ), but there are no facts about mental states that are not, in the final analysis, reducible to material facts, such as neurotransmitters, neurons, axonal electrochemical gradients, etc. Can materialism really provide all that can be known about color?

Jackson called his thought question "Mary’s Room" (1), and it has since come to be known more generally as the ‘Knowledge Argument’:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

Jackson believed that Mary did learn something new: she learned what it was like to experience color.

It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism [materialism] is false.[my brackets]

Many philosophers have ventured materialistic hypotheses to explain qualia in an effort to salvage the materialist paradigm, and Jackson himself later in life came to accommodate materialism (grist for future posts). But in the view of most philosophers of the mind, the Knowledge Argument represents a profound problem for any strict materialist solution to the mind-body problem. When we experience qualia, we know something that is not material knowledge. Therefore, the mind cannot be explained completely by materialism. The fact that we experience qualia is difficult to elide, and there is nothing in materialistic explanations, and nothing in neuroscience, that invokes subjective experience.

Dr. Novella, again:

this battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena…A non-material cause of mind is…unnecessary…

Dr. Novella misunderstands the profound problem that first-person subjective mental states pose for strict materialism. In his blithe assurance that science has solved the mind-brain problem, he commits a category error. Science has made great progress in describing some of the material (brain state) correlates of mental states. However, neuroscience by its nature deals with law-like correlations between third-person material processes, and there are fundamental first person subjective aspects of mental states, such as qualia, that do not admit material explanations.

Is the mind entirely caused by material processes in the brain? If Dr. Novella has a materialistic explanation for qualia, he should provide it.

(1) (1982) "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly 32, 127, pp. 127-136.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Editor's Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes' book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America's Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, "Monkey Girl.]

In early 2007, I wrote a three-part series of blog posts where I discussed how Darwinist author Edward Humes misrepresented himself when trying to convince me to do an interview with him for his book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul (Harper Collins, 2007). (That series of prequels can be found at the following links: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) When Humes first contacted me in 2006, he declared his commitment to non-partisan and objective journalism (he later refused to give me permission to quote directly from his original emails). Humes' defensive posture immediately alerted me that something was awry, so I declined to do an interview. It turned out my instincts were correct: Edward Humes was not interested in non-partisan journalism regarding the evolution debate. He created a website about Monkey Girl, which had many inaccurate and highly partisan claims, like, “There is more scientific evidence, laboratory testing and direct observation to support evolutionary theory than virtually any other scientific theory, including gravitational theory,” calling intelligent design (ID) a “form of creationism,” and saying ID “posits a supernatural process.” It would be hard to imagine a less-partisan treatment of evolution. At the end of that series of blog posts, before I received Humes' book, I wrote the following:

At this point, I’ve recounted Humes’ glowing praise from only hardline Darwinists, his partisan and inaccurate FAQ, and the fact that he changed his FAQ in response to my emails and then did not disclose key changes while accusing me of misstating the FAQ. Yet Humes originally came to me soliciting an interview claiming to be fair and neutral.

Some readers may choose to believe that Humes developed his views while he wrote the book and was forthright towards me. Unsurprisingly, that is what Humes claims, and Humes' Darwinist reviewers will certainly take that line in his defense. And if that’s the case, Humes could simply make his book proposal public, because that should reveal whether he really was non-partisan when he researched his book. That would certainly lay my suspicions to rest. But Humes continues to refuse to make his book proposal public. Other readers may wonder what Humes is hiding in the book proposal.

Regardless, there is no doubt that Humes is now a complete partisan (who believes evolution is better supported than gravity) and that he is promoting much false information about ID.

Because Discovery Institute was unable to obtain a review copy of Humes’ book, I had to order it off Amazon, and I have not yet received the book (somehow many Darwinist bloggers already have copies, as they've reviewed [it] for Humes on his blog). Perhaps after the book arrives, further commentary can be made about it. Meanwhile, I'm sure Edward Humes won't complain too much about the free publicity we're giving him. After all, you know what they say...

(Is Edward Humes, Monkey Girl Author, a Partisan? (Part III): Glowing Endorsements from Darwinists)

In response to some of these e-mails about Monkey Girl, I decided to dig up my prior review of Humes’ book, shorten it, and highlight some of the main points of my review. Because most of Humes’ inaccurate claims about ID have been answered in various other writings, my review of Monkey Girl will consist primarily of short descriptions of his false claims combined with links to articles that address his false statements. I will publish my review of Monkey Girl in a series of six posts dealing with various problems with the book. This first installment will discuss some of Humes'...

Problems Related to Intelligent Design:

While the Christmas season brings out the best in most people, it seems to have the opposite effect on many Darwinists, who become even more sour and dismal than usual. Even Eugenie Scott, who perennially tries to be the happy face of Darwinists everywhere, can’t resist sounding like a Scrooge. In an article co-authored with Glenn Branch in this month’s Scientific American, Scott sounds the alarms against the “dangerous lie” that Darwinism is a theory in crisis, and implies that civilization itself will collapse if we allow teachers and students the freedom to discuss criticisms of Darwinian theory--because as every thinking person knows, all of our knowledge of everything depends on Darwin. Seriously. Anyone tempted to believe such predictions of the end of the world should read this essay by National Academy of Science member Philip Skell, or consult biologist Jonathan Wells’ delightful book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (especially chapter 7, “You’d Think Darwin Created the Internet”). Corrections to Scott’s distortions on other issues like the Louisiana Science Education Act and the film Expelled can be found here and here and here.

Pity the poor Darwinists during this season of hope and good cheer. For people who insist they have overwhelming evidence for their views, they seem awfully unhappy and insecure. Those of us who celebrate Christmas might want to remember to say a prayer for them, or maybe even send local Darwinists a copy of It’s A Wonderful Life. They certainly seem to need some cheering up.

Posted by John West at 12:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

At the beginning of 2008, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated in its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism, that "Evolutionary biology has been and continues to be a cornerstone of modern science." It seems that their assertion did not pan out very well for the rest of 2008. Two groups recently released lists of top science news stories and breakthroughs for 2008: The Access Research Network and the leading journal, Science. None of their top breakthroughs came as a result of evolutionary biology.

Science's top breakthrough was a method where scientists discovered how to harvest stem cells from living patients, a find which has huge potential for treating diseases. This is an extremely important scientific breakthrough, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with evolutionary biology. In fact, their press release states that “if scientists can master cellular reprogramming so that it's more finely controlled, efficient and safe, patients may someday be treated with healthy versions of their own cells.“ Keep in mind that in their view, researchers are simply “reprogramming” an entity that arose via blind and unguided processes. In fact, the main article in Science was titled “Reprogramming cells,” but the mere fact that cells can be “programmed” and “reprogrammed” does not point to an unguided, unintelligent origin. The article even admits that researchers do not fully understand how the reprogramming takes place: “Although dozens of labs have used the technique, what is happening inside the reprogrammed cell remains a mystery.” Though Science would never admit it, their top story of 2008 shows that scientists are studying cells by treating them as if they run on software programs which can control the physical form, and input/ouput of the cellular hardware. They’re trying to “master” a programming system they don’t even fully understand, yet they believe that it all arose via unguided and blind natural processes. It seems that any progress that is being made in this field results from scientists treating cells as if they were designed.

It’s also worth noting that none of Science’s 10 “runner up” scientific breakthroughs for 2008 were from evolutionary biology. Their other top scientific breakthroughs dealt with fascinating scientific topics, ranging from detecting extrasolar planets to understanding why some cells turn cancerous to finding methods to new ways to generate electricity using water, but none dealt with evolutionary biology.

Access Research Network’s Top 10 Science News Stories for 2008 also show — though in a more explicit fashion — that it is becoming harder to do good science without intelligent design (ID) and that old notions of evolution are failing. ARN’s top news story was the summer meeting of the Altenberg 16, a conference of scientists “who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence.“ ARN’s other runner-up top science news stories for 2008 included atheists and agnostics who are increasingly defending ID, the release of Stylus by the Biologic Institute as an improved method of using computers to simulate evolution, the molecular clutch discovered in flagella, and leading biologists marveling at the irreducible complexity of the ribosome. ARN also recognized the increasing reliance that engineers are making upon biomimetics — where engineers mimic nature to improve technology. According to ARN, "Design-based methodologies in biomimetics are yielding tangible results."

(ARN also released a list of Top 10 Darwin and Design Resources for 2008, which includes Expelled, the video game Spore, David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion, Salvo Magazine’s issue on ID, Intelligent Design 101 and its rebuttal to Francis Collins by me and Logan Gage, and William Dembski and Sean McDowell’s new book Understanding Intelligent Design.)

With 2009 being the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin’s birth, undoubtedly Darwinists will seek to make a big push next year to promote the glories of Darwinian evolution. But if 2008 was any indication, it seems quite possible to do good science without neo-Darwinian evolution. As National Academy of Sciences member Phil Skell wrote in The Scientist in 2005:

Darwinian evolution — whatever its other virtues — does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

During the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial three years ago, biologist Kenneth Miller claimed that biochemist Michael Behe's arguments in Darwin's Black Box regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade were false. Miller's testimony led federal district court judge John Jones to assert in his decision that "scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe's predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade."

But an analysis of Miller's arguments demonstrates that he refuted Behe in no way whatsoever, and that in fact it was Behe who refuted Miller at trial, although Judge Jones ignored Behe's testimony. Miller continues (I am told) to go around lecturing on this topic, claiming that the blood-clotting cascade of lower vertebrates demonstrate that Behe was wrong and that the blood-clotting cascade is amenable to explanation by Darwinian evolution. Like many Darwinist claims of refutation of Behe, this one is based on smoke and mirrors.

First, A Mirror
During his Kitzmiller testimony, Miller's first misrepresentation was to equate Michael Behe's arguments in Darwin's Black Box regarding the blood-clotting cascade with those in the textbook Of Pandas and People (Pandas). Miller stated, "[W]hen I read through the pages of Darwin's Black Box, I was struck by how many of the arguments used against evolution that are found in Of Pandas and People are also used in Darwin's Black Box. And the one that really stuck in my mind was the discussion of the blood-clotting cascade in both Dr. Behe's book and in Of Pandas and People. It struck me as essentially--the two discussions struck me as essentially identical." (Miller, September 26 AM testimony, pg. 108, emphasis added.) So according to Miller, the treatment of the blood-clotting cascade in Pandas is "essentially identical" to the treatment of the blood-clotting cascade in Darwin's Black Box.

The problem is that Miller's claim is false. Behe's treatment of the blood-clotting cascade in Darwin's Black Box is much more precise than the treatment in Pandas, and in fact Behe made it very clear that he was limiting his argument for irreducible complexity to a particular segment of the blood-clotting cascade that had been well-studied and was well-understood.

Then A Puff of Smoke
By equating Behe's treatment of blood clotting with that of Pandas (see above), and by quoting Pandas' statement that "Only when all the components of the [blood clotting] system are present and in good working order does the system function properly," Miller implied to Judge Jones that according to Darwin's Black Box the entire blood-clotting cascade is irreducibly complex. Wrong. While Pandas made the claim of irreducible complexity with respect to the entire blood-clotting cascade, Behe in Darwin's Black Box did not.

To understand the difference between Behe's views and the account in Pandas, one needs to understand some basics about blood-clotting cascades. Roughly speaking, in land-dwelling vertebrates, there are two different pathways by which the blood-clotting cascade can be initiated — the "intrinsic" pathway, and the "extrinsic" pathway. (There can be some crossover between the two pathways.) The final stages of the blood-clotting cascade take place after either pathway reaches factor X, also called the Stuart factor. These final stages of the cascade are what Behe calls "beyond the fork" or "after the fork." Figure 1 below contains a very rough description of how the blood-clotting cascade can be initiated by either the extrinsic or intrinsic pathway before it forms a final clot, and Figure 2 contains a full description of the land-dwelling vertebrate blood-clotting cascade.

Figure 1: Rough sketch of the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways of the blood-clotting cascade:

Figure 2: The blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates with both intrinsic and extrinsic pathways labeled (click on graphic to see the full diagram):

In Darwin's Black Box, Behe specifically stated that his argument for irreducible complexity only pertained to irreducible complexity "beyond the fork" where the intrinsic and extrinsic blood-clotting cascades converge. As Behe writes:

Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where some details are less well known, the blood-clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity. … The components of the system (beyond the fork in the pathway) are fibrinogen, prothrombin, Stuart factor, and proaccelerin. … in the absence of any one of the components, blood does not clot, and the system fails. (Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, pg. 86 (Free Press, 1996), emphasis added.)

The relative importance of the two pathways in living organisms is still rather murky. Many experiments on blood clotting are hard to do. And I go on to explain why they must be murky. And then I continue on the next slide. Because of that uncertainty, I said, let's, leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where some details are less well-known, the blood clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity. And I noted that the components of the system beyond the fork in the pathway are fibrinogen, prothrombin, Stuart factor, and proaccelerin. So I was focusing on a particular part of the pathway, as I tried to make clear in Darwin's Black Box. If we could go to the next slide. Those components that I was focusing on are down here at the lower parts of the pathway. And I also circled here, for illustration, the extrinsic pathway. It turns out that the pathway can be activated by either one of two directions. And so I concentrated on the parts that were close to the common point after the fork. So if you could, I think, advance one slide. If you concentrate on those components, a number of those components are ones which have been experimentally knocked out such as fibrinogen, prothrombin, and tissue factor. And if we go to the next slide, I have red arrows pointing to those components. And you see that they all fall in the area of the blood clotting cascade that I was specifically restricting my arguments to. And if you knock out those components, in fact, the blood clotting cascade is broken. So my discussion of irreducible complexity was, I tried to be precise, and my argument, my argument is experimentally supported.

(Michael Behe, Oct. 18 testimony, pg. 25-28, emphasis added)

Figure 3: Components that Michael Behe argued comprised the irreducibly complex core of the blood-clotting cascade:

Behe provided Judge Jones with an experimentally verified case for irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade with respect to particular proteins within the cascade: fibrinogen, prothrombin, and tissue factor. He discussed the cascade "after the fork" where the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways converge. Behe didn't want to extend his argument too far, because adequate experimental tests had not yet been performed to demonstrate irreducible complexity with respect to some of the other factors, particularly those involved in the intrinsic pathway.

And Then Another Mirror
In his effort to refute Behe, Miller also discussed the fact that blood-clotting cascades in whales and dolphins lack factor XII (also called the Hageman factor), and the blood-clotting cascade in puffer fish lacks factors XI, XII, and XIIa. As Miller testified: "Whales and dolphins, in 1969, well before Pandas was published, were shown to lack factor 12. … The proposal is that we take away the three parts which are known as the contact phase system. Now, that includes factor 12, which we talked about a second ago, but also factor 11 and also the factor that catalyzes the conversion of 12 to the active form. It turns out these three parts are missing in a vertebrate known as the puffer fish. " (Miller, September 26 AM testimony, pgs. 126-128).

Miller concluded that since these cascades "are missing three parts of the system and their blood clots perfectly well," that therefore the irreducible complexity of the entire land-dwelling vertebrate blood-clotting cascade is "refuted by the scientific evidence." (pg. 129) The implication was that Behe's argument for irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade had been refuted as well as the more expansive argument in Pandas. But Miller did not refute Behe's argument, because Miller only gave evidence that some vertebrates (like dolphins or jawed fish) lack certain components involved in the intrinsic pathway (factors XI, XII, and XIIA) found in land-dwelling vertebrates. What Miller failed to acknowledge is that land-dwelling vertebrates, jawed-fish, and water-dwelling mammals like dolphins and whales still have the extrinsic pathway intact, as well as everything after the point where the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways combine in land-dwelling vertebrates. In other words, dolphins and jawed fish still have the factors in the blood-clotting cascade that Behe considers irreducibly complex (i.e. those “after the fork”). They even have the factors on the blood-clotting cascade's extrinsic pathway. The only factors they appear to be missing are the portions on the intrinsic pathway. Since Behe's argument did not include any of those factors on the intrinsic pathway, and only dealt with factors shared by jawed fish (like the puffer fish), water-dwelling mammals, and land-dwelling vertebrates, Miller's argument did not refute Behe's argument at all.

But there is more.

The Blood-Clotting Cascade's Irreducible Core
The blood-clotting cascade pathway of jawed fish has an important difference from that of land-dwelling vertebrates because fish don't have an intrinsic pathway found in land-dwelling vertebrates. That doesn't mean that the rest of the cascade isn't irreducibly complex, for both may have a core system of parts that is irreducibly complex. And how do we know there's an irreducible core comprised of parts Miller didn't address in his testimony? Because experimental evidence, cited by Michael Behe during the Kitzmiller trial and in Darwin's Black Box, shows that some components of this system are absolutely necessary to have a functional blood-clotting system.

The "irreducible core" is a long-standing concept within ID thinking that William Dembski and Jonathan Wells define as follows:

A functional system is irreducibly complex if it contains a multipart subsystem (i.e. a set of two or more interrelated parts) that cannot be simplified without destroying the system's basic function. We call this multipart subsystem the system's irreducible core. ... We therefore define the core of a functionally integrated system as those parts that are indispensible to the system's basic function: remove parts of the core, and you can't recover the system's basic function from the other remaining parts.

(Jonathan Wells and William Dembski, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems, pgs. 146-147 (Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008).)

I like to explain the "irreducible core" using the analogy of a bicycle: A bicycle has an irreducible core that requires a frame, two wheels, a motor mechanism (like legs on pedals), and a steering mechanism (like handle-bars attached to the front wheel). A bicycle also has a seat, but obviously you can ride a bike without a seat (though it wouldn't be very fun). So, while the seat sure helps a lot, it is not part of the irreducible core of a bike. Same could be said for light deflectors, etc. So the fact that a bike has a couple dispensable parts doesn't mean that there isn't an irreducible core to a bike.

In this regard, under Miller's style of argument, at the very least, the blood-clotting cascade of jawed fish and land-dwelling vertebrates might all share the parts seen in the diagram below, meaning that their blood-clotting cascade might have an irreducible core which looks like this (the diagram below basically shows the blood-clotting cascade of jawed-fish):

Figure 4: The blood-clotting cascade of jawed fish, which also represents the components of the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates that Michael Behe argued formed an irreducibly complex core:

By finding that both jawed vertebrates and land-dwelling vertebrates contain all of the above components — the extrinsic pathway and everything "after the fork" — Miller's arguments, at most, show that there is an irreducible core comprised of the components in the above diagram. Perhaps the intrinsic pathway of land-dwelling vertebrates (missing from this diagram) is not part of this irreducible core. If that's the case, this does not refute irreducible complexity for the rest of the system; it just shows that those components in the intrinsic pathway aren't indispensable to the system. The fact that land-dwelling vertebrates have an intrinsic pathway does NOT negate the existence of an irreducible core. Incidentally, this diagram contains all of the components which Behe said are part of the irreducible core. So Miller in no way refuted Behe.

Figure 5: This diagram shows the blood-clotting cascade of land-dwelling vertebrates. The red box shows the components that Michael Behe argues form the irreducibly complex core of the blood-clotting cascade. The green box shows the components which Ken Miller claims are dispensable to the blood-clotting cascade. Since the boxes don't overlap, it can be seen that Miller didn't even address Behe's arguments. In other words, none of Miller's comparative biochemistry examples of blood-clotting cascades in various species lacked any of the factors that Behe claimed were part of the irreducibly complex core. Nonetheless, Judge Jones had the temerity to rule that "scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe's predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade."

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

There is an internet cottage industry of physicians and scientists who regularly excoriate alternative medicine and other non-traditional or even fringe approaches to health or to scientific understanding. Steven Novella, Orac, and a host of other faux "defenders of science" decry the danger to the public from vaccine "denial," homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, among others. Now, I agree with my medical colleagues that the scientific basis for most of these practices or viewpoints is missing or minimal. I don’t believe that the scientific evidence supports the view that vaccines cause autism. I am not a supporter of "alternative medicine," and I objected when an effort was made some years ago to expand alternative medicine here at Stony Brook. Alternative medicine, like traditional medicine, must be subjected to strict standards of evidence for safety and efficacy. Most types of alternative medicine fail to meet those standards, and therefore should not be endorsed by the medical profession.

Yet there is an irony in the efforts of "defenders of science" to protect the public from treatments and theories that are outside of the mainstream of medical practice. The greatest iatrogenic danger to patients isn’t chiropractors or homeopaths or vaccine "deniers." It’s the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel working in the traditional medical paradigm.

The data is uncontestable. Each year in the United States, errors of traditional science-based medical practice kill at least a hundred thousand people, probably substantially more. These errors include medication errors, surgical errors and unnecessary surgery, preventable bedsores, infections caused by poor technique and the failure of medical personnel to practice good hygiene such as hand washing, and many others. Note that none of these deaths are caused by homeopaths, vaccine "deniers," etc.

The harm done by traditional practitioners of medicine is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Where is the introspection by "skeptics" and "science defenders" like Drs. Novella and Orac about the enormous harm done to patients by themselves — traditional medical practitioners? What hypocrites.

Simple measures such as hand washing, site-marking prior to surgery to affirm that the patient and the surgery are correct, and computerized pharmacy and prescriptions to avoid errors can make (and are making) big differences in mortality and morbidity associated with medical care. In my own hospital, we have prevented several hundred deaths (based on mortality rates from past years) by such expedients as mandating and facilitating hand washing by doctors and nurses as they move between patient rooms and by a focused effort to reduce hospital acquired pneumonia and blood infections.

Arrogance of scientists and physicians is an old scourge. Alfred Russel Wallace, who helped develop the theory of evolution in the 19th century and who confronted the scientific arrogance of his own day, famously commented on medical arrogance in a different context (i.e. eugenics), calling it

… an arrogant scientific priestcraft. (1)

Despite all of the enormous benefit to mankind conferred by mainstream science and medicine, considerable harm is done as well. Nothing in non-traditional medicine comes any where near the harm done to patients by mainstream medical errors and even malfeasance (e.g. unnecessary surgery). We are beset by an arrogant medical and scientific priestcraft, eager to call ordinary people "idiots" or "anti-science" or "deniers" because they hold viewpoints with which these particular scientists and physicians disagree. I believe that much of the motivation for the "pro-science" priesthood isn’t patient safety or a genuine respect for scientific method but ideological hegemony. What bothers materialist ideologues like Novella and Orac is that there are people who challenge their materialist scientific worldview. There is a deep arrogance to the commentary and tactics of these defenders of science.

Far more damage is done to patients by doctors and other mainstream health care providers than is done by vaccine "deniers," acupuncturists, homeopaths, etc. Fatal disease is much more likely to be spread by a doctor’s unwashed hands than by some (mostly misguided) parents who fear that a vaccine may harm their child. I’ve never known a patient to be harmed by a chiropractor. Tens of thousands of patients each year are harmed in preventable ways by their (usually well-intentioned) surgeons.

My advice to Dr. Novella, Orac, and other arrogant medical clergy: go easy on the parents concerned about autism from vaccines, even though the evidence suggests that their fears are unfounded. They’re not idiots, and they shouldn’t be treated with scorn. A little humility on the part of doctors, and some respect for the right of people to hold other views (even if those views are wrong), and to act on those views, would be a good thing. Respectful discourse with patients who disagree with our advice, not scornful excoriation, is much needed.

Doctors should be less arrogant with our advice and we should denounce faux "skeptics" like Dr. Novella and Orac who exhibit no skepticism about their own dogma and behavior and are coarsening this discourse because of their own ideological commitments rather than for any rational commitment to public health.

We doctors need to wash our own hands.

(1) James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1916), p 476.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 2:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Science journalist Suzan Mazur has been reporting extensively about scientists' doubts about Darwinian evolution and a forthcoming paradigm shift — a shift that we are assured by the likes of Eugenie Scott is not coming, does not exist, and is simply a ploy by "creationists." Scott, and dogmatists like her, continue to insist there is no controversy or disagreement amongst scientists about the mechanisms that Darwin championed, namely natural selection acting on random mutation. Mazur's interviews underscore what we've been saying all along. There is a controversy, and it deserves to be heard.

Mazur and those she interviews and covers are not friendly to the idea of intelligent design. In an interesting twist,

these folks find themselves under attack from the Darwinian orthodoxy, but at the same time seem unable to see that they themselves treat pro-ID scientists in a similar manner. Or maybe they see it, but they don't know how to handle it without seeming to be open to dangerous new ideas.

Mazur was recently interviewed by progressive radio talker Jeff Farias and had some very interesting thoughts about all this. She recounts how her stories about the Altenberg 16 have been received and how some scientists recognize the problems with modern evolutionary theory but insist that it would be better to attack creationists than deal with those issues, and how scientists stick together politically when it comes to funding and publishing.

Suzan Mazur: But part of the problem is "the cycle of submission", as Lima-de-Faria puts it. Where you've got a peer review process to go through. If you've got a rather unorthodox theory, but something you see as a solid idea, you may not have much success when you submit it to a journal for approval. Because scientists hang together, they want to secure funding. If they get the endorsement of their peers, then it makes it easier to get funding, etc. Rather than going out on a limb with a new idea, scientists tend to stick with the pack. And science doesn't advance as much as it could.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

Over at alivingdog.com, blogger Gord Wilson has just posted a lengthy interview with the lead writer of Expelled, Kevin Miller. The interview is enlightening on several levels, and covers a wide range of topics from media suppression, to the lawsuits against the film, to Richard Dawkins appearance. Well worth reading.

G: I would say what his argument doesn’t explain is Richard Dawkins. It doesn’t explain why he’s so passionate, why he’s so smart, why he writes so well. And if he’s right, the game’s over.

K: Why does it matter to him? I came to that question over and over. Why does he want to become an evangelist for an idea that doesn’t matter? That’s why I find C.S. Lewis’ book, Miracles, so fascinating, because he wrote that in the 1940s or something, completely prescient about people like Richard Dawkins coming in the future. In the first five chapters, Lewis destroys any argument before it ever gets voiced. Someone else featured in the film whom I thought was a real decent individual is Will Provine. He doesn’t believe in free will. He doesn’t believe in anything, and yet he is so passionate about essentially nothing. Those are some of the things I find so intriguing.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 9:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Steven Novella has post entitled “More Neuroscience Denial,” and of course it’s about me.

Dr. Michael Egnor has written two more posts reiterating his neuroscience denial over at the Discovery institute. This reinforces the impression that neuroscience denial is the “new creationism” - the new battleground against materialism as a basis for modern science.

First of all, I’m not a creationist, in the sense that I don’t interpret Genesis literally. I adhere to neither "old creationism" nor "new creationism." It is my opinion that design is empirically evident in biology, so I support intelligent design theory. I’m a Christian, but my faith doesn’t depend on any particular scientific theory. There are many Christians who accept the basic scientific tenets of evolutionary biology — e.g., the inference to random mutation and natural selection as the origin of most biological complexity. I don’t agree with that view, but my reasons are scientific, not doctrinal.

I am deeply perplexed by Dr. Novella’s obsession with "denial" as an epithet. The term is obviously meant to evoke Holocaust denial, and thus to place the denier beyond the moral pale. But I don’t deny the Holocaust. I just deny materialism, which certainly doesn’t put me in the same moral camp as David Irving. Most people deny materialism, in the sense that they deny that matter is all that exists. Most people deny the materialistic theory of the mind. I deny materialism; Dr. Novella denies dualism. One can’t hold an opinion without denying other opinions. Dr. Novella calls himself a “skeptic.” He denies a lot of things, probably more things than I do. He denies the mainstream religious beliefs of most of humanity. Is he a "denialist," too, like I am?

I don’t deny neuroscience. I believe in neurotransmitters, neuroanatomy, synapses, axons, and so on. I’m well trained and well versed in neuroscience. I got honors in neuroscience in medical school. Dr. Eric Kandel, subsequently a Nobel Laureate, was my neuroscience professor at Columbia. I trained in neurosurgery for seven years, and spent quite a bit of time doing basic neuroscience research during my training (my mentor was Richard Bunge, who was a leader in the study of myelin sheaths that surround axons). Following my residency training, I've been practicing neurosurgery and conducting basic research in neuroscience at a medical school for the past seventeen years. No doubt Dr. Novella has good training and experience as well. We’re both professionals, respected in our fields, probably with comparable knowledge in our related specialties.

So in what way am I a "neuroscience denier"? By calling me a "denier," Dr. Novella seems to mean that I deny the truth of something that has already been proven beyond reasonable doubt and has the assent of all informed people. He means that I deny that materialism can explain the mind entirely, and he means that that particular view is held by nearly all informed neuroscientists. But that’s not true at all. Most neuroscientists spend their time concerned with getting probes to work and publishing papers on highly technical science. They’re not philosophers, and they really aren’t informed about the central problems in the mind-brain problem. They probably couldn’t discuss intentionality or qualia or token identity theory with anything close to adroitness. Perhaps most couldn’t even define the terms. Yet these are the central concepts in the mind-brain problem, and one can’t say anything meaningful about the relationship between the mind and the brain without invoking them.

Within the community of philosophers who do understand and explore these concepts, materialism has not only failed to be "proven beyond reasonable doubt," but has actually been on the decline over the past decade or two. These philosophers are quite aware of the advances in neuroscience, but the main issues in the mind-brain problem aren’t experimental issues. They are much deeper issues, about ontology and epistemology and causation. Strict materialism hasn’t fared well in this light. The enthusiasm a half-century ago with computational models of the mind-brain relationship has waned as the deep problems of materialist theories have become better understood, and dualism of various sorts, such as property dualism, predicate dualism, hylomorphism, and even substance dualism, is in ascendance. In the view of very many philosophers of the mind, materialism hasn’t so far even met minimal criteria of logical coherence, let alone empirical proof. Philosopher Joseph Levine hasobserved: "We lack an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical."

I’ll get back to Dr. Novella’s specific arguments in my ensuing posts, but Dr. Novella’s invocation of "neuroscience denialism" leaves me dumbfounded. Just why Dr. Novella would confuse disagreement with his materialist ideology with denial of neuroscience is hard to see. The epithet "denialism" has a disturbing Orwellian ring to it, and it’s not clear to me why anyone would invoke such a term in a discussion about the philosophy of the mind. Perhaps it’s meant to intimidate. Perhaps Dr. Novella isn’t used to having his opinions questioned, and it’s just a slur, a substitute for a reasoned argument.

That seems closest to the truth.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this month, the peer-reviewed science journal PloS Genetics published its latest earth-shaking contribution to the field of genetics: a personal interview with none other than Judge John Jones of Kitzmiller v. Dover fame. The interview was conducted by Jane Gitschier of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California San Francisco, who gushes over the Judge like a school-girl with a crush on her teacher. The non-scientist might be forgiven for thinking that a journal bearing a name like PLoS Genetics would restrict its articles to, well, genetics… or at least, to biology… or at the very least, to science. Not to worry! If the article extols Judge Jones, a lack of scientific content apparently is no detriment. Indeed, a lack of any substantive content apparently is no detriment.

Dr. Gitschier is positively giddy when she meets the Judge, telling him:

I am very excited to meet you.

Her questions include such deep and probing queries as:

I'd like to deal with some of the legal stuff I don't understand. Kitzmiller was a suit. What does that mean?

Then there is the not-to-be-missed repartee between interviewer and interviewee:

Jones: …If you poll in the US today, you'll find that approximately half of our fellow citizens believe in creationism and think that creationism ought to [sic] taught.

Gitschier: I had no idea!

Jones: Believe me.

Believe me, most people probably “had no idea” that this is the sort of stuff that appears in peer-reviewed biology journals these days. As I’ve said many times before, it really is hard to lampoon the Darwinists. They do it so magnificently themselves.

Posted by John West at 1:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today marks the third anniversary of Judge John Jones' attempt to ban science classroom discussions of intelligent design in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. In the three years since Jones' decision was announced, it has not worn well. Judge Jones' supposedly devastating critique of intelligent design turned out to be cut and pasted (factual errors and all) from a document written by lawyers working with the ACLU. Law professors (including some who oppose intelligent design) have skewered Jones' embarrassing judicial opinion as poorly argued and unpersuasive. And many of the alleged factual claims on which Judge Jones based his opinion have been refuted. In the meantime, public interest in intelligent design has continued to grow, as has support for academic freedom to question Darwinism (no doubt encouraged by this year’s theatrical documentary Expelled). Darwinists, alas, have yet to learn the futility of trying to win scientific debates by court orders and intimidation. No matter—although Darwinists may not believe in free speech and debate, the vast majority of Americans do.

Posted by John West at 1:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Mike Dunford and I have disagreed several times over the past couple of years about issues in the ID-Darwinism debate. Mr. Dunford was very upset recently that I had made a minor error in quoting him in a recent blog post. Of course, he offered no answer to my scientific critique of his earlier post, and one has the suspicion that his pique may be related to his difficulty in formulating a credible scientific answer.

He fired off an e-mail to the Discovery Institute. Here’s his closing paragraph:

…I would not dream of taking a position on whether or not you should continue to provide a platform for someone who is apparently incapable of meeting the basic standards of academic discourse, but I would like to see a public retraction and apology appear on your site. [emphasis mine]

I'm the "someone" he's referring to. I have of course corrected the error, and have set out to review Mr. Dunford’s “basic standards of academic discourse.”

Here are examples of Mr. Dunford’s own “standards of academic discourse,” culled from his blog posts from the last couple of years. Keep in mind that Mr. Dunford is a trained scientist:

From Mr. Dunford’s post on 12/9/08:

Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit…based on the level of intellectual integrity that he just demonstrated, he's not someone I would trust to train a dog, much less a doctor. ….I'm simply going to highlight the most egregious case of flat-out, nose-growing, pants-on-fire lying…I don't know if Dr. Egnor's dishonesty is substantial enough that I would have gotten him expelled from school, but I do know that any student I caught pulling a stunt like that would flunk.

From Mr. Dunford’s post on 11/29/08:

There he goes again. Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's... Egnor's characteristic lack of intellectual integrity…Egnor has, yet again, decided to ignore the examples that were presented to him... Declining to face reality in favor of tilting with your own personally invented reality may not necessarily be the mark of a psychiatric pathology, but it's definitely not the mark of intellectual honesty, either…But we can ignore the lack of integrity, too. After all, the fact that Egnor is apparently incapable of facing reality...

From Mr. Dunford’s 3/22/07 post:

An ever-deepening Egnorance…His last attempt, before today, came less than a week ago, with this spectacular piece of inane argumentation… Egnor has, apparently, been sucked dry of any remaining vestiges of intellectual honesty that he might have had before he joined the DI flack crew. If there's a difference between Egnor's latest "argument" and a five-year-old jumping up and down, fingers in ears, chanting, "na na na na I can't here you na na na na," it's only in Egnor's ability to form complete sentences.

From Mr. Dunford’s 4/23 07 post:

Would the Real "Michael Egnor" Please Stand Up."Egnor" manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the "Michael Egnor" articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes.

From Mr. Dunford's 3/12/08 post:

Two Things that Don't Go Together: Michael Egnor and Intellectual Integrity…Someone once pointed out that when a dog pisses on a fire hydrant, it's not committing an act of vandalism. It's just being a dog....the same casual disregard for public decency as a male dog telling his neighbors that he's still around, but, unlike dogs, the creationists are presumably capable of self-control...

From Mr. Dunford’s 3/29/07 post

The Revenge of the Egnorant: Everyone's least favorite Creationist Brain Surgeon, Michael Egnor, is at it again, jumping up and down chanting "I can't heeeeaaaaarrrrrr yoooouuuuu!!!"

Mr. Dunford will no doubt scrutinize his quotes for skipped ellipses, but one gets the sense that his “academic discourses” emerge primarily when his scientific arguments aren’t going all that well. His screeds are characteristic of his Darwinist colleagues, mostly professional scientists, mostly atheists promulgating their creation myth, mostly living off of government grants (i.e. you).

Meanwhile, I’ll look elsewhere for standards of academic discourse.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When I was a resident in neurosurgery I had a professor who had the annoying habit of claiming credit for quite a few advances in neurosurgery to which, by the record, he had made no contribution. He would frequently confide to me, in the operating room, "Mike, ya know that operation that we just did. I really developed it, back in the 50’s." Invariably, the actual record of the development of the operation had nothing to do with my narcissistic professor.

Claiming credit for advances that to the uninitiated seems credible is common in medicine and science. Darwinists have an annoying habit of attributing all sorts of advances in medicine and biology to Darwin’s theory. Darwinists have asserted that genetics, molecular genetics, taxonomy, microbiology, population genetics, and many other fields of medicine and biology would have been impossible had it not been for Darwin’s insight (‘survivors survive’). Even a cursory look at many of these fields (e.g. molecular genetics) reveals that Darwinism obviously had nothing to do them; the elucidation of the structure and function of DNA didn’t have a damn thing to do with ‘natural selection’ (except that Watson and Crick practiced ‘survival of the fittest’ in their competition with Linus Pauling and their treatment of Rosalind Franklin). The discovery of the genetic code had everything to do with biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology. Nineteenth century fairy tales about the origin of species may have provided some comic relief. It had nothing to do with the science.

In a recent post I observed that Darwinism, while essential to eugenics, contributes nothing of value to medicine.

Darwinist blogger Elf M. Sternberg took the bait. Elf started with the usual sneers, calling me a "creationist," accusing me of of "rejecting the germ theory of disease" and of attributing disease to "demonic influences," and then he points out my "absolutely insane 'graf'"from my essay:

I had written:

Fairy tales about the origin of illnesses and adaptations are worthless to medicine. The materialistic philosophical basis for Darwinism and the inference that humans evolved by natural selection have been catastrophic to medicine. Any genuine insight claimed by Darwinists, such as the dynamics of antibiotic resistance or of heterozygote advantage in such diseases as sickle cell anemia and malaria, is really gained by the relevant basic sciences.

Elf sees my fatal stumble. He replies:

The basic consequence of Egnor's dismissal of human evolution by natural selection is this: we have no reason to believe animal studies are worth anything. If common descent with modification by natural selection is not valid, then any commonalities we have with any other species is pure coincidence. Animal models work because...[emphasis in original]

Actually, the similarity of body designs and functions of living things was described in considerable detail by Aristotle 2,200 years B.D. (before Darwin). He described the interrelation of organisms as the "great chain of being," and he classified apes as intermediate between humans and other quadripeds. He described 500 different species in Historia Animalium, and his understanding of genetics was closer to our modern understanding than was Darwin's. Aristotle rejected the theory of pangenesis, which posited that "gemmules" migrate from all parts of the body to the sperm. Darwin supported the theory.

Galen, the father of classical anatomy and medicine, extrapolated his dissections of Barbary apes and other animals to human anatomy, as he probably never dissected a human (1700 years B.D.). William Harvey worked out the circulation of human blood using inferences from cats and dogs 300 years B.D. Carl Linnaeus, working 100 years B.D., worked out the species classification system for all living things that we still use today.

Comparative biology — the study of the 'commonality between species' — was the basis for all biology for 2500 years before Darwin. Similarities between organisms were inferred on the basis of common design, and of course it is still the similarity of design, real or imagined, that forms the basis for modern animal studies and their application to human biology. Comparative biology has always been based on comparisons between the structure and function of organisms — that is, on the design inference, explicit or implicit. Darwinian stories about lineage depend on inferences from similarities in molecular and macroscopic structure, not the other way around. Darwinian stories didn't give rise to comparative data; they were inferences from the comparative data. And it is the comparative data, not the Darwinian stories, that is the basis for comparative medicine and biology.

Elf is an atheist (who woulda guessed?), and he describes himself as a writer of “Quality science fiction and fantasy erotica since 1989.” Elf needs to put away the Darwin centerfold. If he wants to understand Darwin’s seminal contributions to medical science, may I suggest he read John West’s Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science and Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.

Darwin’s indispensability to eugenics is a matter of historical record, and his irrelevance to taxonomy and comparative biology is a matter of logic. Darwin can’t be credited with science that took place before he lived, and he can't be credited with data from which Darwinian stories are spun.

Here’s some advice, Elf: you’ve read too much Darwinian "fantasy erotica." Take a cold shower, and then introduce yourself to science and history.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There's a special podcast at ID the Future today:

Click here to listen.

This episode of ID the Future tells the story of Jesse Kilgore, a college student whose loss of faith and subsequent suicide has been linked to his biology class and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. After his professor challenged him to read the anti-theistic book and rule out the possibility of God’s existence in light of the evidence for evolution, Jesse experienced a crisis of faith. Now his father is arguing for academic freedom for intelligent design and critiques of Darwin’s theory. Listen in as he and others explain how Jesse was affected by reading this book.

The tragedy of Jesse Kilgore's death affects all of us. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who knew and loved him.

I only know it is.

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Steven Novella recently replied to my post in which I pointed out six properties of the mind that were not properties of matter. Strict materialistic theories of the mind restrict themselves to purely materialistic explanations. The difficulty is that the salient properties of the mind — intentionality, qualia, continuity of self through time, restricted access of thoughts, incorrigibility of mental states, and free will — are not known to be properties of matter, including brain matter. The important things that characterize the mind are not material. How then can the mind be explained completely by materialism?

I’ll review the first property (intentionality) here, and the other five in subsequent posts. I’ll first give my original observation about it, then Dr. Novella’s reply, then my reply to Dr. Novella.

My original observation:
Intentionality is the “aboutness” or meaning of a mental state, the ability of a mental state to refer to something outside of itself. Ink on paper has no meaning unless it is conferred by a mind, which wrote it or read it. Matter may have intentionality only secondarily (”derived intentionality”). The problem of intentionality is believed by many philosophers of the mind to be the most serious challenge to materialism. “Meaning” is imparted to matter by a mind; matter isn’t the source of meaning. Therefore matter (brain tissue) can’t be the entire cause of the mind.

Dr. Novella’s reply:

Yeah. It’s that bad - and it gets worse. If that’s the greatest challenge to materialism, then materialism is doing just fine. His argument is entirely based upon a false analogy. Ink on a page is matter, and it has no meaning without a mind to interpret it. Therefore, he concludes, the material brain can have no intention without a non-material mind. But the brain is not static matter, like ink. The brain is a dynamic organ. It is alive. It can use energy to do stuff, like process information, communicate with itself, receive outside stimulation, and even activate itself. Egnor, however, would have you believe that claiming these functions of the brain, when taken together, constitute the mind is the same thing as believing that a rock has inherent intention within its inert matter. Yep - that’s all he’s got.

My reply to Dr. Novella:

Dr. Novella doesn’t seem to understand intentionality and the central role it plays in philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of the mind. Intentionality was of fundamental importance to classical (Greek) philosophers as well as scholastic philosophers and theologians, and continues to be central to modern analytic philosophy. It’s fair to say that much if not most of the debate about the philosophy of the mind in the 20th century has been about intentionality.

The seminal modern description of intentionality was given by philosopher Franz Brentano in his work, “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” published in two volumes in the late 19th century. Brentano’s classic description of intentionality is:

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on.

Inexistence is an important word for Brentano. It does not mean ‘lack of existence,’ but rather ‘existence within.’ Intentional inexistence means that mental states (which are intentional) always have objects to which they refer, whether real or imaginary. Intentional states, unlike matter, are about something.

Brentano described intentionality as “the mark of the mental,” the essential characteristic of the mind, and a property not inherent to matter.

Another way of understanding intentionality is to use a linguistic analogy. Intentionality is semantics; it’s the meaning of something, as distinct from the syntax. In this sense, in the world as we experience it, intentionality is semantics, and matter and its structure are syntax.

Philosophers have described three types of intentionality:

Intrinsic intentionality: that characteristic of a mental state that is of or about something. It is always a property of mental states, and never a property of matter.

Derived intentionality: a property of matter derived from a mind. An example would be a sentence on a piece of paper, in the sense that the meaning of the writing is derived, not from the ink or paper, but from the mind that wrote it.

“As-if” intentionality: some philosophers (e.g. John Searle) invoke as-if intentionality to describe the faux intentionality imputed (figuratively) to physical objects :‘the river ran to the sea as if it wanted to go home.’

Intentionality is the ‘mark of the mental.’ Thoughtful materialists admit that intentionality is the most serious problem for a strict materialist understanding of the mind, and many philosophers, even non-theistic philosophers who are quite sympathetic to a naturalistic understanding of reality, believe that intentionality is a fatal problem for philosophical materialism. Much of the literature from the materialist point of view from the past half century has been an effort to come to terms with the problem of intentionality. For example, the core of Daniel Dennett’s work is his effort to explain intentionality materialistically. He invokes the “intentional stance,” and proposes that intentionality is not real, but is simply an inference that material things (like us) make about other material things (i.e., other people) in order to predict their behavior. Dennett’s concept has not been widely accepted, and I’ll discuss it in more detail in future posts.

Other materialists have proposed that intentionality can be explained materialistically by context; that is, the meaning of a material event (a photon hitting your retina) is derived from its relationship in time and space to other photons hitting your retina, in a purely materialistic fashion. This view has been challenged by a number of philosophers, most notably Karl Popper, who have pointed out that the concept of ‘context’ of material events necessarily involves a selection of the context — there are innumerable ways in which an assembly of material events could be organized to provide context. The selection of context presupposes intentionality, so context cannot be the source of intentionality.

The intentionality problem is so profound for materialists that an entire school of philosophy of the mind has been created specifically to deal with the challenge posed by intentionality. It’s called Eliminative Materialism, and it’s most prominent advocates are "neurophilosophers" Paul and Patricia Churchland. Eliminative materialists believe that the mind does not exist. We are merely brains, and our beliefs, hopes, and experiences (which comprise our intentionality) don’t really exist at all. Our intentional states are entirely material brain events; our ‘belief’ that we love our children is merely a certain chemical gradient in our cingulate gyrus (or whatever). They call the view that beliefs and intentional states are real “folk psychology,” which they assert is the mistaken belief-system of uninformed people who don’t understand that they are nothing more than material beings. Eliminative materialist Paul Churchland writes (1):

The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process...there seems no need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances of properties into our theoretical accounting of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact.

Critics of eliminative materialism (and there are very many critics) point out that eliminative materialism, besides being… well… crazy, is essentially self-refuting. How can one believe that there are no beliefs? If eliminative materialism is true, then a discussion about eliminative materialism is merely changing chemical gradients in interlocutors’ brains, without meaning (intentional) content. The radical (some would say bizarre) nature of eliminative materialism is evidence of the depth of the problem that intentionality poses for materialists. Some materialists are willing to eliminate the mind in order to deal with intentionality.

So what to make of Dr. Novella’s casual dismissal of intentionality,

Yeah. It’s that bad - and it gets worse. If that’s the greatest challenge to materialism, then materialism is doing just fine. …Yep - that’s all he’s got.

and his invocation of a living brain:

…But the brain is not static matter, like ink. The brain is a dynamic organ. It is alive. It can use energy to do stuff, like process information, communicate with itself, receive outside stimulation, and even activate itself…

Of course all sorts of things are living and "use energy to do stuff" — my kidney for example, but are not imputed to have intentionality. Living matter is still matter (unless one is a proponent of vitalism), and "using energy to do stuff" gets us nowhere with the problem of intentionality. My car uses energy to do stuff.

Dr. Novella’s other assertion — that intentionality can arise from computation — is an argument developed most notably by philosopher Jerry Fodor several decades ago (it’s called the “computational/representational theory of thought” — CRTT), and it has been, in the view of many philosophers, thoroughly demolished, in two ways.

The first is what has been called ‘the problem mental causation.' Consider a simple electronic calculator. It computes, in the sense that I can enter 2…+…3…= and I get …5. It’s amazingly accurate, fast, and reliable. The reason for its accuracy is that it employs a causal string of electronic events such that pushing the '2…+…3…=' buttons causes the event '5' on the little screen. Integrated circuits, all that stuff. Of course, the calculator doesn’t think (really quick) “hmmm…two plus three is….hmmm…five!” There’s no thinking at all. There isn't even any 'arithmetic' going on in the little calculator. There’s just causal events, electrons bumping electrons and going through gates on a circuit, structured by the program to cause 5 on the little screen when 2…+…3…= is pushed. What's going on in the calculator is a mechanism, a series of causally effective material events.

Note that the actual meaning of the numbers and arithmetic operations doesn’t really matter. My toddler can push 2…+…3…=, and still get 5, without any meaning to the computation at all. 5 comes up just because it is caused materially by the physical events. My cat could push 2…+…3…=, and still get 5. Furthermore, the causal relations need not even have anything to do with arithmetic. I could create my own language, in which 2 is “I,” + is “feel,” 3 is “happy,” = is “when,” and 5 is “it’s sunny,” and the computation would be identical (same electrons bumping same electrons), and just as true. I do feel happy when it’s sunny. So the computation is completely independent of meaning.

In other words, computation by itself has syntax, not semantics (intentionality). Material causation — even complex causation that (in Dr. Novella's words) “…can use energy to do stuff, like process information, communicate with itself, receive outside stimulation, and even activate itself…” utterly lacks intrinsic intentionality. Computation can be given meaning from something else (a separate mind), but computation-by-itself — a series of material events, no matter how elegant — has no intrinsic intentionality. Intentionality is given to computation by a mind, and therefore cannot itself be the cause of a mind. Computation, whether on a silicon matrix in a calculator or on a carbon matrix in the cerebral cortex, does not give rise to meaning or semantics. Computation does not give rise to intentionality.

The second refutation, which is related to the first, was given in a famous thought problem proposed by Berkeley philosopher John Searle a couple of decades ago called the “Chinese Room.”

Imagine that you go to China, and get a job there. You speak only English, and don’t know a word of Chinese. You work in an information booth, in which Chinese people can write questions on a piece of paper and pass the question through a slot to you inside the booth. You of course have no idea what the question is, because you can’t read Chinese. However, the Chinese guys that hired you have given you a book that has written, all in Chinese, any question that could be asked, and along with it, the answer corresponding to each question. You take the question written on the paper and search through the book, until you match the Chinese characters exactly. Then you copy the Chinese answer, and return to through the slot.

The Chinese person who asked you the question believes, quite understandably, that you understand Chinese, understood the question, and were smart enough to figure out the answer. And of course, that is true of the Chinese guys who wrote the book. But it most certainly is not true of you. You don’t know Chinese, you don’t know what question was asked, and you don’t know what the answer was.

A Chinese person outside the booth would have believed that he was interacting with a person who understood his questions and provided good answers. But what you have done is, precisely, a computation. You have mechanically matched input to output, just as a computer program does, but you have added no meaning. You understand nothing. Only the minds of the guys who wrote the Chinese book have intrinsic intentionality. Computation-by-itself does not give rise to intentionality.

Meaning is not inherent to computation, no matter how complex the computation. Material causation — silicon-based computation in an electronic calculator, or tedious illiterate computation in a booth in Beijing, or carbon-based computation in a living brain — does not give rise to intentionality. Matter, no matter how instantiated or casually linked, does not give rise to intentionality. Intentionality — meaning — is the mark of the mind.

Dr. Novella again:

"...If [intentionality] is the greatest challenge to materialism, then materialism is doing just fine..."

Dr. Novella is wrong. Intentionality is fatal to materialism.

(1) Paul Churchland. Matter and Consciousness, 1988 p. 21.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A news article at ScienceCentric.com reports that single-celled protists have left tracks and grooves in the ocean-bottom that resemble fossil grooves or "trail" fossils that are found in some pre-Cambrian strata. Darwinists have asserted that such pre-Cambrian track or trail fossils must have been produced by complex, multicellular, worm-like animals, thus implying that the Cambrian explosion was not really as explosive as the fossil record makes it appear. Actual fossils of the alleged pre-Cambrian worms that supposedly made the trails are yet to be found, but Darwinists have claimed that the track fossils are smoking gun evidence that they existed. The Darwinists' story is challenged by this new find: if tracks can be produced by single-celled protists, then pre-Cambrian track fossils do not necessarily indicate the presence of multicellular animals. Since these protists are far less complex than the animals with multicellular body plans that explosively appear in the Cambrian period, Darwinists remain stuck — whether they like it or not — with a very explosive Cambrian explosion that isn't the mere artifact of an imperfect fossil record. As the article states:

The finding is significant, because similar fossil grooves and furrows found from the Precambrian era, as early as 1.8 billion years ago, have always been attributed to early evolving multi-cellular animals. 'If our giant protists were alive 600 million years ago and the track was fossilised, a palaeontologist unearthing it today would without a shade of doubt attribute it to a kind of large, multi-cellular, bilaterally symmetrical animal,' said Matz, an assistant professor of integrative biology. 'We now have to rethink the fossil record.'

[...]

'We used to think that it takes bilateral symmetry to move in one direction across the seafloor and thereby leave a track,' said Matz. 'You have to have a belly and a backside and a front and back end. Now, we show that protists can leave traces of comparable complexity and with a very similar profile.'

With their find, Matz, Frank and their colleagues argue that fossil traces cannot be used alone as evidence that multi-cellular animals were evolving during the Precambrian, slowly setting the stage for the Cambrian explosion. 'I personally think now that the whole Precambrian may have been exclusively the reign of protists,' said Matz. 'Our observations open up this possible way of interpreting the Precambrian fossil record.'

Matz says the appearance of all the animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion might not just be an artefact of the fossil record....

An experience-based analysis of the causal powers of various explanatory hypotheses suggests purposive or intelligent design as a causally adequate — and perhaps the most causally adequate — explanation for the origin of the complex specified information required to build the Cambrian animals and the novel forms they represent. For this reason, recent scientific interest in the design hypothesis is unlikely to abate as biologists continue to wrestle with the problem of the origination of biological form and the higher taxa.

(Stephen C. Meyer, The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In his recent post on Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers comments on the "breakthrough" in our understanding of human evolution that has emerged from an analysis of the genes in humans and apes that code for salivary amylase, an enzyme in spit that helps digest carbohydrates. For unfathomable reasons, this research, led by Nathaniel Dominy and George Perry, has captured quite a bit of attention in the scientific community and even in the press.

Concurrent with publication of their paper in Nature Genetics last year, Dominy and colleagues put out a press release entitled: “Extra gene copies were enough to make early humans' mouths water.” Dominy bizarrely credits mutations in salivary amylase with the evolution of the human brain:

To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks. That's one interpretation of a discovery, published online September 9 in Nature Genetics, which indicates that humans carry extra copies of the salivary amylase gene…Humans have many more copies of this gene than any of their ape relatives, the study found, and they use the copies to flood their mouths with amylase, an enzyme that digests starch. The finding bolsters the idea that starch was a crucial addition to the diet of early humans, and that natural selection favored individuals who could make more starch-digesting protein…A new ability to supplement the diet with calorie-rich starches could have fed our large brains and opened up new food supplies that fueled our unrivaled colonization of the planet, Dominy said…For Dominy and his coauthors, the finding goes beyond the mouth…anthropologists have long been stumped by the sudden, nearly simultaneous increases in our brain size, body size, and geographic range, while other apes changed little. …"That's the big mystery of paleoanthropology," Dominy said. "What changed" Why did our earliest human ancestors deviate from the pattern we see in living apes to evolve this incredibly large brain…For years, the answer was thought to be the growing importance of meat in the diet...Some anthropologists have begun to suspect the new source of food consisted of starches, stored by plants in the form of underground tubers and bulbs-- "It's kind of a goldmine," Dominy said. "All you have to do is dig it up."…Tubers may have been especially critical for the first widely successful humans, known as Homo erectus, who may have learned to cook with fire.

Dominy and colleagues based this speculation on analysis of copy number and variation in human and ape salivary amylase, and they attribute the spit-based evolution of man to...you guessed it...natural selection! Survivors with better spit...survived, ecce homo.

I wrote a post on this Spit Brain Research, in which I pointed out that the inference from variations in an enzyme in spit to the emergence of man and the evolution of the human brain wasn’t science but marketing:

The spit-brain paper no doubt contributes to the literature on salivary amylase. A study of the comparative biology of salivary enzymes — genuine science but with limited (to say the least) popular appeal — would have languished on dusty shelves were it not for the authors’ utterly unwarranted inference that their research is relevant to the origin of the human brain. It seems to be a contemporary maxim in evolutionary biology — ‘attach preposterous speculation about the origin of the human brain to your arcane research, and you’re famous,’ at least for a day or two.

Nature Genetics editor Alan Packer took issue with my dismissal of the authors’ linkage between salivary enzymes and the origin of man, and we exchanged posts on ENV. Dr. Packer defended the authors’ evolutionary inferences.

I replied:

So are these evolutionary inferences, as distinct from the actual data on comparative genetics of salivary amylases, good science?

What if humans had low salivary amylase gene copy number, and apes had high copy number? How could the authors invoke evolutionary theory to explain these observations? The authors could assert that human vulnerability (our relative inability to digest tubers) led to a need for interdependence and socialization to ensure survival, and gave rise to human cooperation, altruism, language, and civilization. This is of course explained by natural selection.

What if humans had low intraspecies salivary amylase copy variation, and apes had high intraspecies variation? No problem. The evolutionary theory: low human intraspecies copy variation is evidence for strong evolutionary conservation — providing further evidence that human ability to digest tubers provided enhanced energy for evolutionary adaptation or that human vulnerability (inability to digest tubers) generated a need for interdependence, gave rise to cooperation, brain growth, altruism, language, and civilization. Natural selection is consistent with either of the evolutionary hypotheses!

What if humans and apes both had high salivary amylase gene copy numbers? The evolutionary explanation: abundant salivary amylase was essential for human and ape evolution, because it allowed digestion of energy-rich tubers, thereby facilitating human and ape brain growth and giving rise to intraspecies cooperation and altruism. More evidence for natural selection!

What if humans and apes both had low salivary amylase copy numbers? The evolutionary explanation: paucity of salivary amylase is essential for human and ape evolution — lack of ability to digest energy-rich tubers caused need for interdependence gave rise to ape cooperation, and to human brain evolution, altruism, language, civilization. Clear evidence for natural selection!

Perry et al.’s inference to natural selection is irrelevant to the specific data in their paper. ‘Natural selection’ could be invoked for any permutation of their data. Yet in science, inferences must depend on data, and must be subject to falsification by data. Inferences that are independent of data, such as the inference that amylase gene copy number and variation are explained by natural selection, aren’t scientific inferences at all, because the inference to selection could be drawn from any data on the comparative genetics of salivary enzymes.

At the core of Darwin’s theory of evolution are two hypotheses: heritable variation arose randomly, without teleology, and individuals that were rendered more reproductively successful by heritable variation were more reproductively successful. When applied to several-million-year-old genes for salivary enzymes, the first hypothesis — that heritable variation arose without teleology — is untested, and the second inference — that reproductively successful individuals are reproductively successful — is a tautology. The inference to ‘evolution’ in the authors’ paper is an inference to the untested and to the tautological. The authors would have us believe that their inference to evolution is cutting-edge science. Yet the synthesis of ‘untested’ and ‘tautological’ isn’t science at all

In his post on Pharyngula about a recent paper on this topic by Perry, P.Z. Myers, normally a dupe for any evolutionary fairy tale, seems a bit reticent to sign on completely to the spit-brain-ecce-homo breakthrough:

It implies that there may have been some selection for greater copy numbers in cultures with diets high in starchy plants… We can't entirely rule out drift as a possible cause of the difference; while we can see differences in the enzyme levels in saliva, low levels of the enzyme haven't been shown to be directly deleterious to anyone. It is again implied: oral digestion of starches may be an important pathway for taking in energy during episodes of diarrhea, so it could be critical when individuals are experiencing disease-related stress… It is very suggestive. The fact that it represents a distinct difference between other apes, such as chimpanzees, and ourselves also suggests that it may have had significant evolutionary consequences. Maybe we aren't primarily the biggest-brained apes; we are the Apes Who Eat Roots As Well As Bananas. A core nutritional difference could have played a more significant factor in our early evolution than small differences in brain size, and may have been an enabler of brain expansion.

"It implies...may have been… [w]e can't entirely rule out..[i]t is again implied...may be...could be…[i]t is very suggestive...also suggests...may have had...[m]aybe...could have...may have been an enabler of brain expansion..." Solid science, that. Here’s Myers’ money quote, again:

“…low levels of the enzyme haven't been shown to be directly deleterious to anyone.”

!!!

Evolutionary biologists spin out this bizarre tale that natural selection acting on differences in spit played a fundamental role in the origin of man and in the evolution of the human brain, and yet, as P.Z. Myers admits, “…low levels of the enzyme haven't been shown to be directly deleterious to anyone.” In other words, there isn't even real evidence that good spit confers 'selective advantage' over bad spit (carbohydrate digestion also occurs via other enzymes further along the digestive tract), let alone that it is responsible for the origin of man. This leaves a huge gap in evolutionary theory. Perhaps we are human because of better nasal mucous — press release: "Perhaps World Domination Began in the Nostrils".

This isn’t science. It’s witless speculation, in service to a materialistic worldview (and grants and tenure) without a shred of relevance to our understanding of man.

And there’s a deeper irony that relates to the intelligent design-Darwinism debate. Notice that the glaringly obvious I.D. inference that there is evidence for design in biology — such as the genetic code, which has letters, words, sentences, punctuation and even syntax that are eerily similar to computer code, and the nanotechnology inside cells that is obviously a manifestation of the purposeful arrangement of parts — is completely ruled out by Darwinists, who will go to federal court to censor even the mention of these obvious design inferences in public schools. Darwinists use legal coercion to compel teachers to remain silent about the lavish evidence for design in human biology and about the implications of that evidence for our understanding of what it means to be human. Yet schoolchildren can be taught confidently that scientists have shown that major insights into human origins has been gained by the comparative biology of spit.

Random mutations in salivary enzymes and the survival of survivors isn’t the source, or even a source, of our humanity. Evolutionary biology and sociobiology entail a reduction of the salient characteristics of biology and human culture to the most rudimentary materialist speculation. It’s a materialist speculative pastime, not insight of any sort. The publication in prominent scientific journals of these crudely materialistic inferences about human origins based on the comparative genetics of salivary amylase is so bizarre that it deserves nothing but scorn. It demeans science.

Here’s what’s important in the process by which we became human: religion, law, philosophy, literature, history, art, medicine, mathematics, natural science, psychology, just to start with. All the stuff except spit.

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, a harsh critic of sociobiology, has observed (*):

“…a theory ought to be judged as much by the ignorance it demands as by the knowledge it purports to afford.”

Evolutionary biology is deep ignorance.

* Quoted in McKinnon, Susan; Neo-Liberal Genetics: the Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago. p 149

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Steven Novella has taken exception to my recent post suggesting that the materialist theory of the mind has characteristics of a superstition. In the recent past, the Yale neurologist has been so confident of the truth of his materialistic ideology on the mind-brain problem that he has asserted that

“The materialist hypothesis- that the brain causes consciousness- has made a number of predictions, and every single prediction has been validated.”

Leaving aside the hubris (has any reputable scientist ever claimed that ‘every single prediction’ of his pet theory has been validated?), one of Dr. Novella’s implicit predictions seems to have frustratingly failed to materialize. In his latest post, Dr Novella seems to have been certain that, following his pronouncement on the resolution of the mind-brain problem, everyone would defer to his decision:

[Egnor] fails to recognize that this battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena…[a]s our knowledge of brain function increases, it is squeezing out any role for a non-material ghost in the machine. A non-material cause of mind is…unnecessary…

"This battle has already been fought and lost"? Consider this. There are six properties generally agreed to constitute the essence of mental states: intentionality, qualia, persistence of self-identity, restricted access, incorrigibility, and free will. Each of these properties of the mind shares a common characteristic — subjectivity, what philosopher David Chalmers has called the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. The 'easy problems' of consciousness are the kinds of problems that neuroscientists routinely deal with; for example, the determination as to which neurotransmitters in the brainstem are associated with behavioral arousal. These are 'easy' because they're tractable, although they can obviously involve some very challenging science. The Hard Problem is something entirely different; it is the problem of subjective experience, of why we are subjects, and not just objects. Why do we experience things?

Philosopher Joseph Levine has termed this epistemological gap between our subjective experience and our inability to explain it using a materialistic understanding of nature the "Explanatory Gap." Levine succinctly observes:

...[W]e lack an explanation of the mental in terms of the physical

How can subjectivity be explained by objective matter? Subjective experience is the central dilemma in the mind-brain problem. Matter, even brain matter, has third-person existence; it’s a ‘thing.’ We have first-person existence; each of us is an ‘I,’ not just a thing. How can objective matter fully account for subjective experience? If matter is the complete cause of the mind, how is it that none of the six salient properties of the mind is a property of matter? How exactly does a clump of protein, carbohydrates, and lipids (a neuron) give rise to meaning or to first person experience — using the example of pain, not merely the behavior associated with pain and the reflexes and neural correlates of pain, but the experience of it?

For materialism to offer a plausible scientific explanation for subjective experience, we would need more than materialists’ reassurance that "this battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena." An assertion of dogma isn't a scientific law. It is, turning the materialist slur back around where it so commonly belongs, "anti-science." A scientific explanation requires a quantifiable law-like dependence of subjective experience on matter and a satisfactory account of the Explanatory Gap.

First-person ontology and third-person ontology share no properties at all. There is no scientific law-like dependence of free will, intentionality, qualia, etc. on matter. How would we even measure intentionality (meaning) to establish a law-like dependence? In what units can ‘meaning’ be expressed? The materialist assertion — ‘this must be true, so stop resisting’ — is merely arrogant dogma.

No one doubts that there are quantifiable law-like correlates between behavioral states and brain states, and between some brain states and other brain states. But behavior and brain states are objective third person phenomena, the sort science deals with routinely. And behavior is not the same thing as the mind. The mind's salient properties are all first-person, not third-person. Not a single first-person property of the mind — not intentionality, qualia, persistence of self-identity, restricted access, incorrigibility, nor free will — is a known property of matter. No one has ever demonstrated a law-like dependence of any subjective property of the mind on any objective property of matter. How could we establish such a scientific relationship? A differential equation quantitatively relating intentionality to intracellular calcium?

Contra Dr. Novella's assertion that advances in neuroscience are "squeezing out" any need for immaterial causation, after a century and a half of remarkable advances in neuroscience it’s still not even conceivable what a quantifiable law-like dependence of mind on matter could look like. The Explanatory Gap remains unaddressed by neuroscience. It's hard to see how it could be addressed. Are materialists asking for another 150 years to provide one plausible materialistic theory to close the Explanatory Gap or one example of a scientific law-like dependence to buttress their dogma? The advances in methodologically materialistic neuroscience and the failure to provide even a single example of quantifiable law-like dependence counts against materialism, not in support of it. Materialist neuroscience offers no explanation whatsoever for the central problem of the mind-brain relationship: the gap between subjectivity and objectivity. In a century and a half, neuroscience has explained nothing about the Hard Problem of consciousness, nothing about the Explanatory Gap, and has not provided a single example of a law-like dependence of subjective ontology on objective ontology.

If neuroscience is a victory for materialism, what would defeat look like?

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

We are teaming up with the IDEA Center (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness) to help students in starting IDEA chapters on their campuses. Such campus clubs are a fun and educational way for students to examine all sides of the debate over evolution.

Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Clubs are student-initiated clubs that foster academic freedom as students learn about scientific evidence that supports intelligent design and also learn about modern evolutionary theory. IDEA Clubs are a growing network of student-led clubs on university and high school campuses around the United States with thirty new chapters formed to date.

Visit www.ideacenter.org or e-mail Brian Westad at brianw@ideacenter.org for information on how you can start an IDEA club in your area.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You decide.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Multiple choice quiz. Where did the following words first appear?

"We need to move forward in our human evolution and not regress to the flawed passions of the crusades, the suppression of science by religion, or the intolerance of theocracy over freedom of the human spirit."

A. The latest blog post from PZ Myers?
B. The bumper sticker on some 1968 VW Bus owned by a hippie commune?
C. The manifesto of the Allied Atheist Alliance?
D. The latest Dean's newsletter from Philip A. Pizzo, Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine?

If you guessed...

...D, you’re correct.

As I reported recently, Dean Pizzo's latest December 1, 2008 newsletter extols those who would make scientific research "free" by keeping it "protected from non-scientific influences such as … 'Intelligent Design.'"

Dean Pizzo’s tragically common Darwinist blindness of his own intolerance piqued my interest, so I decided to search his newsletters for other statements. What I found is that Dean Pizzo has all kinds of fantastical fears about intelligent design (ID) and theocracy.

In his November 14, 2005 newsletter, Dean Pizzo expresses his fear that interest in teaching intelligent design is a sign that some communities "increasingly see[m] to be promoting theocracy over democracy." He plays heavily on the theocracy theme, charging that "Evangelical Christian groups" allegedly "ignore or dismiss other religious or faith based beliefs or traditions," and then reminding, "When potential religious oppression becomes politically based, the fine line is crossed between democracy and theocracy." Pizzo closes his newsletter with the fascinating quote at the beginning of this post, which is worth repeating here: "We need to move forward in our human evolution and not regress to the flawed passions of the crusades, the suppression of science by religion, or the intolerance of theocracy over freedom of the human spirit.'

Thus, we can see that the same Dean Pizzo who three years ago lamented the "suppression of science by religion" and "intolerance" is now, in his latest newsletter, expressing the view the scientific community should suppress the science of intelligent design.

Rhetorician Thomas Woodward has developed his own terms for these kinds of common hypocritical Darwinist arguments--"projection themes" and "fantasy themes":

Far more hot and dramatic was the rhetoric of ID critics. A series of nightmares was painted, in which ID threatened the educational and scientific future of modern societies. Rhetoricians have a name for these imaginative constructions, mixtures of fact and faith: fantasy-themes. Normally fantasy-themes function as collages of images and concepts; at the center are interwoven plot elements, usually including heroes and villains. In my earlier work, I proposed projection themes as a more congenial and accurate term, since such projections aren't complete fantasies.

(Thomas Woodward, Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, pg. 25 (Baker, 2007).)

In the meantime, if you're a pro-ID medical student at Stanford, you might want to lay low, because Dean Pizzo fears he must "protect" science from the "influence" of your pro-ID views, because he mistakenly thinks you'll bring theocracy, intolerance, and of course, the "suppression of science by religion." What tragic irony.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I used the analogy of a genetic disease (spinal bifida) that kept afflicted men out of the army in WWI to point out the vacuousness of "evolutionary" explanations for disease. The "evolutionary adaptation" provided by the handicap may have led to a transient increased prevalence of men with spina bifida in England, but from the standpoint of medicine, the evolutionary vignette was of no tangible value. Medicine needs more than stories about differential survival, which is the only unique thing that evolutionary biology offers to medicine. The genuine accomplishments of medical science and practice, for which Darwinists persistently claim credit, such as the understanding of bacterial antibiotic resistance or heterozygote advantage in the protection from disease (such as the protection from malaria conferred on people with sickle cell trait), have come about because of superb work by medical scientists in molecular biology, microbiology, genetics, and epidemiology. They didn’t place phone calls to their colleagues in evolutionary biology to do their work. Darwinian fairy tales, such as "X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage," added nothing to the important research already going on in medicine.

Darwinists were not pleased with my observations, and Mike Dunford seems to have drawn the "respond to Egnor" short straw. He responded first with the requisite personal sneers:

We could also start things off by focusing on Egnor's characteristic lack of intellectual integrity…Declining to face reality in favor of tilting with your own personally invented reality may not necessarily be the mark of a psychiatric pathology, but it's definitely not the mark of intellectual honesty, either.

He rambles, quotes me several times, then, near the end of his post, gets down to business. He argues that my military history analogy indeed demonstrates the importance of evolutionary biology to the understanding of diseases like spina bifida:

…we …need to know that spina bifida patients are typically unsuitable for military service, that there are hereditary factors involved in causing spina bifida in the first place, and that differential survival among individuals carrying an allele will affect the proportion of that allele in the next generation...the third is the central principle of evolutionary biology

So it looks like we can't really understand spina bifida without the "central principle of evolutionary biology." Alright then, let’s take a look, claim by claim, at Mike’s assertion that my example demonstrates the importance of evolutionary biology to the medical understanding of spina bifida.

First:

…we would need to know that spina bifida patients are typically unsuitable for military service...

No evolutionary biology here. Our knowledge of the suitability of people with spina bifida for military service is gained from two things:

1) our knowledge of the disabilities caused by spina bifida
2) our knowledge of the requirements for military service

Second:

...that there are hereditary factors involved in causing spina bifida in the first place...

No evolutionary biology here. Our knowledge of the heredity of spina bifida is provided by genetics and epidemiology, both of which are full scientific disciplines in their own right. Data from genetics and epidemiology are the prerequisite for evolutionary stories. Darwinian stories about the "evolutionary origin" of spina bifida depend on, but do not substantially contribute to, our knowledge of the hereditary factors involved in causing spinal bifida.

Third:

… differential survival among individuals carrying an allele will affect the proportion of that allele in the next generation...

This, asserts Mr. Dunford, is

…nothing more nor less than the central principle of evolutionary biology.

Lots of evolutionary biology here. This is the heart of the issue. Let's understand what Mr. Dunford said. The observation that the "… differential survival among individuals carrying an allele will affect the proportion of that allele in the next generation...[this] is the central principle of evolutionary biology." [emphasis mine]

A moment of clarity. Mr. Dunford finally gets to the heart of Darwinist science. The observation that differential survival among individuals carrying an allele will affect the proportion of that allele in the next generation is little more than a restatement of the definition of an allele. An allele is one particular gene, and differential survival of individuals carrying an allele will result in a differential transmission of that particular gene to the next generation.

In other words, alleles that survive, survive, and alleles that don’t survive, don’t survive.

!

This old Darwinian tautology is at the root of all Darwinian insights. It is indeed, as Mr. Dunford emphatically asserts, "…the central principle of evolutionary biology." Alleles that survive, survive.

Medicine needs anatomy, biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, population genetics, and epidemiology, among many other fields of science. Although stories in evolutionary biology draw heavily from several of these fields, none of these scientific fields depends in any tangible way on evolutionary stories. Evolutionary biology needs other fields of science. Other fields of science don’t need evolutionary biology, because molecular biology, population genetics, and epidemiology don’t depend on evolutionary fairy tales.

Medical science depends on data, testable hypotheses, and inferences that aren't tautologies.

This irrelevance of evolutionary stories to real scientific work was pointed out by biologist Adam S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, in 2000:

…most [biologists] can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas…Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.

So my thanks to Mr. Dunford for providing yet another permutation of the Darwinian tautology — "… differential survival among individuals carrying an allele will affect the proportion of that allele in the next generation" (trans. "alleles that survive, survive").

Medicine depends on real science. Darwinism is mostly a collection of vacuous stories based on the tautological central principle of evolutionary biology — "survivors survive" — and it’s worthless to medicine.

My gratitude to Mr. Dunford for making my point so clear.

Addendum: Mr. Dunford has pointed out an error in my reproduction of one of his quotes. I had used, without ellipsis, the word "this", instead of Mr. Dunford's original words "the third", in the following quote:

…we …need to know that spina bifida patients are typically unsuitable for military service, that there are hereditary factors involved in causing spina bifida in the first place, and that differential survival among individuals carrying an allele will affect the proportion of that allele in the next generation...this is the central principle of evolutionary biology [emphasis added at this time to point out the error]

Mr. Dunford is concerned that my error might lead a reader to infer that Mr. Dunford believes that our knowledge of the suitability of people with spina bifida for military service and the fact that there are hereditary factors involved in causing spina bifida are central principles of evolutionary biology. I want to assure readers that Mr. Dunford does not believe that suitability of people with spina bifida for military service nor the hereditary factors involved in causing spina bifida are central principles of evolutionary biology.

I have corrected the error in the text, and I offer my apologies. I assure Mr. Dunford that my intention is, and has always been, to represent his arguments accurately.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 2:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The recent Dean’s Newsletter from Philip A. Pizzo, Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, announces a statement from the "Scientific Advisory Board" of the Koch Foundation that recommends creating a brave new world of censorship. According to Dean Pizzo’s newsletter, when giving an award recently to a biology researcher, the Koch Foundation’s "Scientific Advisory Board" stated: "Research must remain free and therefore has to be protected from non-scientific influences such as 'Creationism,' 'Fundamentalism,' 'Intelligent Design,' or other non-scientific ideas or religious convictions."

Ignoring their inappropriate lumping of intelligent design with "creationism," "fundamentalism," "non-scientific ideas" and "religious convictions," it seems that in the Koch Foundation’s vision of the future, being “free” means that ID cannot have any influence upon research. "Free" must be their newspeak word for censorship of ideas they don’t like.

I suppose if you don’t like the conclusion that life was designed, it’s much easier to just ban such ideas and "influences" from the scientific research community. Such censorship and suppression has been done before, and if the Koch Foundation has its way — cheered on by the Dean of Stanford’s Medical School — it will be done again.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently pointed out that Darwinian stories about the evolution of diseases were of no tangible use to medical science. Few physicians and medical scientists and educators with genuine experience with medical education, research, and practice, and who are not ideologically committed to the materialist-atheist metaphysics for which Darwinism is the creation myth, honestly believe that evolutionary biology is important to medicine. There are many important disciplines in medicine today, such as microbiology, epidemiology, molecular and population genetics, and mathematical biology, that deal with the real science for which evolutionary biologists routinely claim credit, and these genuine medical disciplines, unlike evolutionary biology, are very important to medicine. We've done very well for more than half a century without Darwinian medicine. The recent drive to introduce Darwinian Medicine 2.0 into medical education was initiated by Darwinists. They weren't invited.

Years ago, medicine turned away from Darwinian "science" after eugenics was widely exposed and denounced in the aftermath of WWII. Of course, like Darwinian medicine 2.0, eugenics (Darwinian Medicine 1.0) was based entirely on Darwinian stories — on the theory that man was merely an evolved animal. Darwinists concocted stories about the evolutionary origin of all sorts of maladies, real and imaginary. If you can, get an copy of Charles Davenport's Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1910. It's loaded with Darwinian stories — the Darwinian and eugenic science of eye color, Meniere’s disease, Chorea, Hysteria, Myopia, Deafness, "Catarrhal affections," Splenic anemia, and Hypospadius, to name just a few of the disorders on which Darwinian medicine could shed light.

Eugenics was based on the explicit Darwinian postulate that man is an animal evolved by the process of natural selection. We are human because our ancestors struggled, often to the death. The Darwinian concern was that human civilization was corrupting natural selection by foolish solicitude for the unfit. The solution was to "take evolution into our own hands," which was to breed human beings. Eugenics was a major part of American medicine for the first half of the 20th century, until growing public and professional awareness of the banality and the venality of eugenics, capped by the Nazi atrocities that were motivated in significant part by the same Darwinian science and Darwinian metaphysics, got evolutionary biology, as an explicit discipline, kicked out of American medicine.

We haven’t missed it. For more than half a century, "evolution-free" medicine has done very nicely. Heart, kidney, and lung transplants, cardiopulmonary bypass (the heart lung machine), extraordinary advances in brain surgery, joint replacements, major advances in the treatment of heart attacks, congenital heart disease, stroke, and infectious diseases, and remarkable improvements in the survival of patients with cancer and the survival of premature babies, to name just a few, have come about very nicely without evolutionary biology in the medical school curriculum. We haven’t missed the mass sterilizations, the pseudo-diagnoses of "feeble-mindedness" and the carefully planned quarantine and even exterminations of the handicapped (merely planned in the U.S. — at the Eugenic Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor — but actually carried out in Germany). In American medicine in the past half-century, evolutionary biology wasn’t missed at all.

Now, there is a push among Darwinists to bring evolutionary science back to medicine. Of course, no one talks anymore about mass sterilizations and exterminations. That was Darwinian Medicine 1.0. Darwinian Medicine 2.0 is gentler, interested in finding "evolutionary causes and remedies for diseases." Of course, eugenics was the search for "evolutionary causes and remedies for diseases," in the sense that it attempted to explain human maladies in terms of natural selection and the impediment to the beneficial influence of natural selection on man that was caused by human benevolence toward the disabled, and to correct those perversions of natural selection by scientifically directed social policy.

Darwinian Medicine 2.0 retains the silly stories at the heart of eugenics, but leaves out, at least explicitly, the genocide. The problem is that the inference that care for the ill and disabled "sins" against natural selection is the logical denouement of Darwinian metaphysics. "Survival of the fittest" is the origin of the human animal. Natural selection is our creator. Human benevolence often sins against its creator. Darwin himself pointed out the problem: lamenting the life-saving effectiveness of the recently developed smallpox vaccine, he asked whether it was wise to risk the degradation of mankind by “allowing our worst animals to breed.”

Can we reintroduce Darwinian Medicine 2.0, despite its obvious banality, into modern medicine without opening the door again to its lethal doppelganger?

Do we really want to find out?

Posted by Michael Egnor at 6:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin discovered and advanced the theory of evolution, was, unlike Darwin, a deeply spiritual man who was convinced that materialistic natural selection did not fully explain the origin of man. Unlike so many of his philosophically materialistic scientific colleagues, Wallace was a fierce critic of eugenics and the arrogant scientism of his day. Wallace wrote:

Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have had enough of this kind of tyranny already…the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight…Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft. (1)

Commenting on our modern scientific priestcraft, Steven Lenzer has a superb essay and book review on the Weekly Standard Online entitled, “Biomorality: The uses and abuses of science in political life.” Lenzer opens:

Among the many authorities we adhere to today, only science rivals that of equality. This is not thought to be a problem because, as everyone knows, science is morally and politically neutral. Or so we are informed by luminaries ranging from Albert Einstein to George W. Bush. As such, science cannot come into conflict with our democracy. But is science as innocent as scientists claim?

Lenzer notes that scientists and others who exalt the capacity of science to understand and alter the natural world often assert that science is independent of and above politics. He notes:

Henceforth, all who read Yuval Levin's “Imagining the Future” will refrain from availing themselves of this plausible, but deeply misleading, piece of conventional wisdom.

Lenzer quotes Levin:

”From the very beginning, the modern worldview has given rise to peculiar utopianisms of various stripes, all grounded in the dream of overcoming nature and living, free of necessity and fear, able to meet every one of our needs and our whims, and able, most especially, to live indefinitely in good health. This brand of utopianism generally begins in a benign libertarianism, though at times it has ended in political extremism, if not the guillotine.”

Levin suggests that part of the problem with the negative influence of scientism (my term, not his) on our culture is that science is corrosive of our traditional reference to moral standards that transcend the philosophical materialism that is the foundation of scientism:

In our time, we are perhaps less inclined to recognize science as a set of ideas with aspirations to universality precisely because the scientific enterprise has been so successful. But the authority we cede to science, both as the servant of health and as the master of knowledge, weakens our allegiance to those other sources of wisdom so crucial to our self-understanding and self-government. Those other sources serve to ground our moral judgment, while science avoids or flattens moral questions, since it cannot answer them and rarely needs to ask them... For all its power, science risks leaving us morally impotent.

In my view, Daniel Dennett’s "universal acid" — the materialistic Darwinian understanding of man that is at the core of scientism — corrodes the moral framework of our civilization, not by introducing a coherent new morality, but by rendering our traditional morality impotent and replacing it by relations governed by the assertion of power.

For example, there is a disturbing trend in bioethics to invoke ‘autonomy’ at almost all costs, and to cast aside the concept of ‘human dignity’ as a relic of sectarian traditionally religious morality. But autonomy is the ethics of the autonomous — the powerful, who are likely to prevail with or without a system of coherent and moral bioethics. Respect for dignity protects those who are weak — those who lack autonomy, and who genuinely need bioethics. Yet the preference for autonomy is consistent with the creation myth of philosophical materialism — the Darwinian understanding of the origin of man as a struggle for survival. Scientism cripples ethics based on religious tradition, and replaces human exceptionalism with the unexamined inference that man arose through struggle and assertion of autonomy. Scientism seduces bioethics with the naturalistic fallacy — the substitution of 'is' for 'ought.' The result — the exaltation of autonomy and and the denigration of dignity in bioethics — is the denial of ethics.

Scientism has led to a degeneration of public discourse, as even a casual visit to the atheist-materialistic science blogs will attest. Lenzner comments on what is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this enfeeblement of genuine moral debate: the debate over human embryonic stem cell research.

[Levin] shines a light, for example, on the impoverished character of the debate about the use of embryonic stem cells for medical research. Neither prominent academics, who seek to obscure the moral questions raised by such research, nor legislators, who believe that individual tales of woe are sufficient to dispense with moral argument, escape Levin's incisive skewering….Regardless of where one ends up on the matter, only the incurably callous would shrug at the creation and casual destruction of potential human life.

One could point out many other examples of situations in which scientific imperative or a misplaced deference to ‘modern science’ and an evasion of traditional moral scruples coaxed us into practices (or even atrocities) that should have raised profound moral questions: American eugenics, which culminated in the involuntary mass-sterilization of 60,000 "feeble-minded" Americans in the 20th century; the German T-4 euthanasia program that murdered 250, 000 handicapped people who were deemed by doctors and scientists to be "life unworthy of life"; the Tuskegee Study in which federal health officials and doctors in Alabama allowed hundreds of black men to die of syphilis (when treatment was readily available) in order to "advance science"; the growing acceptance of physician assisted suicide in the United States and the growing practice of active euthanasia in Europe, including the killing of handicapped infants in Holland; and the widespread acceptance of "clean eugenics" in the United States that is eliminating people with birth defects such as Down’s syndrome and spinal bifida from our society.

Lenzner and Levin’s observations suggest that what may be most troubling about this idolatry of science is that we are losing our vocabulary for moral reflection, and substituting it with vague (or not so vague) totalitarian slogans, attaching epithets such as "denialist" and "antiscience" to people who don’t accept orthodox scientific explanations or who question the moral implications of public policy influenced by science. Recently there have been calls to outlaw climate change "denial" and prosecute deniers via "Nuremburg-style trials."

How are we to protect freedom of speech and respect for human exceptionalism in the emerging biological revolution? We need to reassert, against “the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft,” the traditional moral vocabulary of several millennia of Judeo-Christian moral reflection and understanding. We need to resist the abuses of science in our public life.

In doing so, we should have no illusions about the fury we will reap.

(1) From James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1916), p 476.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On Charles Darwin's 200th birthday (February 12, 2009), students everywhere can speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution. Let's turn Darwin Day into Academic Freedom Day.

Announcing the Academic Freedom Video & Essay Contest
Darwin once wrote,

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

We need your help in promoting the contest to ensure that as many students as possible hear about it and are able to participate.

Here are five things that you can do to help us promote the Academic Freedom Day Video & Essay Contest:

1) If you have a blog or podcast, consider making an announcement there as well. And please include a link to the AFD page: www.academicfreedomday.com. For web ads, graphics, screenshots, flyers and logos, go here.

2) If you have a Myspace or Facebook page, please post a brief announcement about the contest and a link to the Academic Freedom Day (AFD) page: www.academicfreedomday.com. If you’d like to post a video, you can e-mail us (academicfreedom@discovery.org) and we can get you the code for embedding the Ben Stein Special Message on Academic Freedom video. It’s short, about 2 minutes long, and asks people to sign the academic freedom petition. You'll also want to include a link to the AFD website along with that.

3) If you belong to any listservs, online forums, or discussion groups, please consider sending an announcement to them as well. We can provide you with text if you’d like, as well as a press release that you can share. E-mail academicfreedom@discovery.org for more information.

4) Please alert any students you come into contact with. If you teach, maybe you can make an announcement in class, or put up a poster at your school somewhere. See if your school has a student newsletter or website that allows people submit general announcements. Or if you attend church, maybe you could alert the youth groups there about the contest. And posting flyers in libraries and other public meeting areas is a great way to get the word out. We have posters, flyers, bulletin inserts, bookmarks, email text, and power point slides available for download here.

5) Finally, the easiest thing would be to e-mail your friends and family and suggest they help to spread the word. You can send these suggestions to them as well.

With your assistance we can help educate students about academic freedom and free scientific inquiry. Help us turn Darwin Day into Academic Freedom Day!

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

David Chalmers has a thoughtful blog post about the growing importance of the problem of consciousness in the debate over intelligent design. Chalmers, a leading philosopher of the mind, is a particularly clear and honest thinker, and his elaboration of "the hard problem of consciousness" alone warrants much gratitude from those of us who are trying to formulate a vocabulary for the thoughtful discussion of the problem of consciousness.

Chalmers is not a theist, but he believes that consciousness is a fundamental property in the universe, in the same way that matter and natural laws are properties in the universe. In that sense, he is a dualist. He does not, however, believe that the necessity for an immaterial explanation for the mind poses a problem for Darwinism:

The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism. In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length… [b]ut it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.

Chalmers explains:

The simplest way to see this is to note that the "hard problem" does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn't lawfully depend on physical processes, at least in the sense that certain physical states are reliably associated with certain states of consciousness in our world. Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness. But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness. If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects. And if epiphenomenalism (on which consciousness has no causal role) is true, consciousness can still arise by evolution as a byproduct. Perhaps the thought that consciousness is a byproduct is unattractive, but if so the problem lies with epiphenomenalism, not with evolution.

I think that it's reasonable to infer that Darwinism can be consistent with an immaterial understanding of the mind, if the mind lawfully depends on physical processes. Yet there are deep problems with the concept of lawful dependence of the mind on matter.

"Lawful dependence" in science has always been restricted to correlations between manifestations of third-person objective ontology. Lawful dependence correlates things. The correlations are generally quantitative, described by mathematics. A moving magnet (third person ontology) induces electrical current (third person ontology), in accordance with Maxwell’s equations.

We have no experience whatsoever with lawful dependence of subjective ontology (feelings, beliefs, desires) on objective ontology (mass, location, charge) in any way that approaches rigor. In fact, we have no experience with "lawful dependence" of subjective ontology on anything.

It is very difficult to imagine how "lawful dependence" would work for the relationship of first-person objective ontology on third-person objective ontology. How could we express the hypothetical "lawful dependence" of my love for my cat on the neurochemistry in my limbic system? Would the lawful dependence be expressed quantitatively by mathematics? How would subjective experience be quantified? In "cat love" units ("purrs")? What form would the mathematical description take? Algebraic equations that describe constant love? Differential equations that relate fickle love? Integral equations that sum up my love? Changes in what, measured how? How would the equations relate the (putative) codependence of my cat love on serotonin gradients, axonal transmembrane potentials, and cortical glial architecture? "Lawful dependence" looks a lot better in the abstract than in the concrete. You see the problem.

We can perhaps lawfully correlate behavior with material processes (e.g., I scratched his little chin at a rate of 1 Hz. when my cingulate serotonin level was 1 picogram/cubic mm). But this "lawful dependence" fails utterly. As Chalmers has pointed out so cogently, subjective first person ontology is the salient characteristic — the Hard Problem — of the mind. Yet my behavior (scratching his furry little chin) is third-person, not first-person, ontology. If we were to try to express genuine subjective ontology (my actual feeling of cat-love) quantitatively in a way that would rise to "lawful dependence," it seems to me that we inevitably would end up merely documenting the behavioral correlations of subjective ontology with brain states, which would not really establish a dependence of genuine subjective states on brain states. We would merely be bleaching out the subjectivity, and replacing it with an objective template fabricated to elide the inherent problem of constructing a lawful dependence of one kind of ontology (subjective) on a qualitatively different kind of ontology (objective).

I don’t even know what lawful dependence of mind on matter could look like.

So even if Darwinism in theory could account for the evolution of an immaterial mind by "lawful dependence" on matter, it's not clear how lawful dependence of mind on matter could take the form of a scientific law. And the lawful dependence of behavior on brain matter would elide, not explain, the hard problem of consciousness. Behavioral correlation with brain function we can do, and we already do, a lot. The paradigm for much of modern neuroscience is the empirical study of correlation between behavioral third person ontology and neuro-anatomical-electro-chemical third person ontology.

The only lawful mind-matter dependence relevant to subjectivity that I can imagine would be some permutation of the assertion that "matter causes subjective experience," without quantification, genuine specificity, or any real insight. Substitution of the materialist creed "matter causes subjective experience" for "lawful dependence" doesn't get us anywhere.

Thus, without genuine lawful dependence of immaterial mind on matter, the "evolution" of the immaterial mind could only be tacked on to the Darwinian construct ad-hoc, and could not be explained in any meaningful way by it. In that way, it must be admitted, the Darwinian explanation for the mind wouldn't differ substantively from Darwinian explanations for countless other aspects of living things. Darwinian 'explanations' leave most things unexplained in any meaningful way.

I believe that the relevance of the problem of consciousness to the problem of the origin of biological complexity is deeper than the question about the adequacy of Darwinism to "account" for the immaterial mind. The issue that links the ID debate and the debate about the mind is this question:

Can matter alone generate (apparent or real) agency?

Living things are replete with evidence for agency, and most people believe (and have always believed) that the agency is immaterial. Most people have ascribed that agency to God, in the various ways that they have understood Him.

Darwin (and his acolytes) proposed something radical: the apparent agency in the structure and function of living things is generated entirely materialistically. The Darwinian assertion is this: there is no need to invoke a mind (a designer) to explain biology.

Yet the adequacy of matter to generate agency (or apparent agency) is fundamental to both the problem of consciousness and the problem of the origins of biological complexity. If immaterial explanations are necessary to explain the agency inherent to the mind, then the view that immaterial explanations are necessary to explain the agency apparent in living things gains considerable traction. If the modest specified complexity inherent to this blog post requires an immaterial mind, then it is reasonable to infer that the luxurious specified complexity inherent to biological structure and function requires an immaterial mind — an intelligent designer.

It's an old question that gets to the heart of this issue: is the ultimate reality behind existence more like mind, or more like matter? All agree that existence is replete with evidence for agency, real or not. If Darwinists are right, agency in biological origins is only apparent and can arise without immaterial causation. If ID proponents are right, agency in biological origins is real and likely requires immaterial causation (we’ll leave out Crickian/Dawkinsean theories about alien ant farms, for now).

The intelligent design debate is one manifestation of a deeper debate about philosophical materialism. The problem of consciousness is a skirmish in this debate, and it is a skirmish in which those who are open to immaterial explanations for some aspects of nature are likely to have the upper hand. The problems with the materialistic Darwinian explanation for life are enormous, but are cloaked in arcana of biological jargon. The problems with the materialistic explanation for the mind are more accessible, and are much more difficult for advocates of philosophical materialism to elide.

Nature is replete with evidence for agency. As Chalmers cogently has pointed out, it's very difficult to explain agency — the mind — materialistically. An adequate explanation of existence seems to require causation at some level by immaterial agency. Intelligent design theorists would agree.

Agency is real, and it leaves fingerprints. Immaterial fingerprints.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For an extensive response to critics of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

Here's something you can do to help support academic freedom: Bring Ben Stein to your campus by scheduling a screening of the provocative documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. We can help students obtain a license to show Expelled featuring Stein or the documentary Icons of Evolution featuring biologist Jonathan Wells (based on the bestselling book of the same name). Each film highlights the fight to maintain academic freedom in academia and the sciences for those who speak out against Darwinian evolution.

This is a high-profile event that will raise the issue and help foster discussion on your campus. Screening a movie will attract a large audience and give you the opportunity to spread the academic freedom message farther across your campus.

Please e-mail us at academicfreedom@discovery.org for information on how you can screen these films at your school or organization

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

All natural functional biological complexity arose through the mechanism of non-teleological heritable variation and natural selection.

That's the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, in a nut-shell, and it's the cornerstone of biology.

The Neo-Darwinian synthesis may be divided into two professions, so to speak, the union of which constitutes the orthodoxy. Jacques Monod called them "chance" and "necessity," and it's a useful shorthand.

Monod's "chance" means absence of design. Chance means random in the sense of lacking teleology. There is no purpose in the raw material of Darwinian evolution. Of course, that doesn't mean that the "random heritable variation" generator doesn't obey natural laws. It does, like everything else, but it has no foresight. It’s random like flipping a coin is random. The coin obeys all the laws of physics, yet the outcome of the flip is random, in the sense that there's no design to the result. If there is design, then the flip is dishonest, and not random at all.

Of course, most biological events that happened are invisible in the mists of deep time. Randomness is difficult to ascertain in modern casinos, and randomness is damned difficult to ascertain in the Precambrian. This not to say that we can't draw reasonable inferences from the available evidence, but drawing self-evident inferences from helical blueprints and purposeful arrangements of parts "isn't science," so the Neo-Darwinian inference to chance is confessional, not empirical.

Monod's "necessity" means survival; more rigorously, it means relative reproductive advantage. Natural selection. Whatever got here won the "relative reproductive advantage" death match. That's what "survived" means. It got here.

So here's the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, colloquially:

Biological events happened, randomly, and things that survived got here.

Evolution is "a highly sophisticated scientific principle not deeply understood by most people", but on this synopsis — "random things that survived got here" — the architects of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis concur. Yet the consilience pulls up short. What is the unit of selection? What kind of "survivors" survived? There is a war in the pews about which things are the salient survivors, and which things are the superfluous survivors. Selfish Gene Adaptationists (Dawkins, Williams, Hamilton) insist that genes are the salient survivors, and that higher level survivors like individuals or groups are superfluous. San Marco Spandrelists (Gould, Mayr, Lewontin) insist that higher level survivors are often the salient survivors, and that genes are sometimes superfluous. Some evolutionary biologists — like E.O.Wilson — switch sides.

So is it all against all in evolutionary biology? Perhaps evolutionary biologists can find a way to embrace the ambiguity at the heart of their science — a Neo-Neo Darwinian Synthesis. Perhaps natural selection acts subtly, sculpting life without revealing her handwork. Perhaps there is consilience in the more subtle grandeur of forms most wonderfully evolved — survivors that are neither salient nor superfluous, but shy: surreptitious survivors.

But I'm pessimistic. The kerfuffle between those who believe that selection occurs only at the gene level and those who believe that selection occurs at higher levels of organization is unlikely to be resolved, at least until deeper misunderstandings are resolved. In evolutionary biology there are very deep misunderstandings. One would have thought that on the eve (no pun intended) of the Darwin Sesquicentennial the site of action of the most proven "fact" of science (natural selection) would be more or less worked out. After all, we've figured out that gravity acts on matter and that electromagnetism acts on charged particles and magnetic dipoles. Yet, in evolutionary biology, the salience of survivors remains a matter of ferocious dispute. Here's my take on natural selection, for what it's worth:

Survivors survive. Natural selection is a tautology, and speculation about the "unit of selection" is less testable inference than meaningless post-hoc guessing. Call it Bayesian Selection (B.S.). The only meaningful thing that Neo-Darwinists assert is that all life arose without purpose, an assertion not even remotely congruent with the evidence.

The salient debate — the elephant in the room — is whether there's evidence for teleology in biology, and that's the debate that Darwinists are scrambling to suppress. So why the ferocious debate about the "unit of natural selection," and the cone of silence about the evidence for design? There's an adage in academics: "The intensity of an academic debate is proportional to its irrelevance."

The "unit of natural selection" is the most intensely debated issue in evolution. When a scientific theory is vacuous, trouble brews.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 4:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I went to a public library to do some work, and I saw a book featured on top of a reference desk titled Life on Other Planets (by Rhonda Lucas Donald, Watts Library, 2003). The title page featured little green men with big alien bug-eyes, the kind of picture you might see on some nutty UFO website. The book and its display were clearly aimed at students — perhaps junior high or high school-aged. Fun and silly pictures don’t bother me if they get kids interested in reading about science. The problem here was that when I opened the book, what I found was not science, but science-fiction.

Where Does Your Information Come From?
The second page of the first chapter of Life on Other Planets, in large letters, reads:

A Recipe for Life

For life on Earth to exist, you need at least three things:
1. organic molecules
2. water
3. energy

(Rhonda Lucas Donald, Life on Other Planets, pg. 6 (Watts Library, 2003), emphasis in original.)

One extremely important component that is missing from our “recipe” for a computer also happens to be a key component of all life: information. As origin of life theorist Bernd-Olaf Kuppers said in his book Information and the Origin of Life, “The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.” Somehow, that key ingredient of life’s recipe was left off the list in Life on Other Planets. Might that be because experience teaches that the sort of information we find in life — complex and specified information — has only one real common source: intelligent agency?

It’s So Much Easier to Make Life When You Don’t Have to Worry About Information
Life on Other Planets went downhill from there. A few pages later it stated, “Put some common interstellar chemicals in a cold chamber with no air, zap it with radiation, and bing, you’ve got a protocell—a primitive cell membrane common to all life.” (pg. 11) Aside from the fact that “bing” isn’t much of a descriptive scientific term that tells the reader anything, the problem here is that such protocells are non-metabolic, i.e. they don’t exhibit metabolic biological growth, and they also don’t function like real cell membranes. As Cambell’s Biology states:

One of the earliest episodes in the evolution of life may have been the formation of a membrane that could enclose a solution of different composition from the surrounding solution, while still permitting the selective uptake of nutrients and elimination of waste products. This ability of the cell to discriminate in its chemical exchanges with the environment is fundamental to life, and it is the plasma membrane that makes this selectivity possible.

(Campbell’s Biology, 4th Ed., pg. 140)

Little Green Men
The final chapter of Life on Other Planets is titled “Little Green Men” and it discusses, as we might expect, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. According to the book, “Scientists busy with SETI …. believe that there may be intelligent civilizations in the universe … [T]o find evidence of them … they listen for signals from such civilizations...” (pg. 49) In other words, SETI researchers are trying to find “signals” that imply an “intelligent” source. Hmmm…

Life on Other Planets is correct in indicating that for SETI researchers, information is a key indicator of intelligent design. But if SETI can find signals that indicate an intelligent cause, why can’t we use the same reasoning within biology? Somehow, the book manages to avoid addressing that question.

Don’t You Know the Dewey Decimal System?
One of my all-time favorite movies is the cult classic UHF, starring Weird Al Yankovich, where a character called “Conan the Librarian” threatens library patrons with the question, “Don’t You Know the Dewey Decimal System?” Perhaps the folks at this library could have used a little prodding from Conan:

Despite the patent overstatements and blatantly false oversimplifications of origin of life research in this book, the Dewey Decimal call number for Life on Other Planets was 576.8 or “Life Sciences, Genetics and Evolution.” In my view, if you’re going to market these kinds of false speculations to kids, better forewarn them by classifying the book in the 800s — fiction.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

P.Z. Myers and I finally agree on something! In a recent post, I described several actual Darwinian medicine "theories":

'Children Hate Vegetables Because of Ancestral Reproductive Advantage of Avoiding Toxins' or 'We Will Evolve Oiler Skin Because of Frequent Bathing' or 'X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage.'

As I pointed out in my original post, these theories are real, and in fact represent the cutting edge of Darwinian medicine. Myers refers to these Darwinian medicine research projects as "silly":

No, none of those very silly talks were given.

But, as always, Myers professes stupefaction at the topic of eugenics. Myers is shocked — SHOCKED — that I would presume that he was attending a conference on eugenics when he blogged about attending the symposium "Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin," held in an old medical lecture hall. Who would ever connect "legacy of Darwin," a medical lecture hall, and eugenics? Furthermore, to accentuate my culpability in this misunderstanding, Myers notes that he had posted the conference schedule a while back, which I missed. Sometimes my Internet Content Filter screens out Pharyngula, so it's not always easy keeping up. I'll have to dial down the 'bigotry' and 'casual obscenity' settings.

Myers notes:

No, it wasn't a conference about eugenics, pro or con. No, it wasn't about medicine. No, none of those very silly talks were given. No, since evolution contributes substantially to basic biology, all that stuff about how cells work and interact and change, evolution has contributed significantly to modern medicine — Egnor's ignorance of the mechanistic underpinnings of what medicine does is no excuse.

Let’s take up Myers' assertion that I have an "ignorance of the mechanistic underpinnings of what medicine does." I'm a professor of neurosurgery and vice-chairman of my department. I've been teaching medical students and residents for twenty-three years, and I conduct basic science research on blood flow and cerebrospinal fluid flow in the brain. I'm not sure of Myers' medical teaching and research activities, but perhaps I could learn from his personal contributions to medical education. My own experience with medical research and education is that medical practice is a very effective check on b.s., because in medicine ideas often have immediately obvious consequences. Some of these consequences are deadly. Eugenics was the consequence of the application of the Darwinian understanding of human origins to medical practice, and is the most shameful aspect of medical practice in modern times. I love my profession, and I harbor considerable ill-will for eugenic ideology that brought so much shame and disrepute to my profession and so much harm to countless innocent patients victimized by "Darwinian medicine" 1.0.

So whence this modern promotion of "Darwinian Medicine" 2.0? Ernst Mayr, a pioneer in evolutionary biology, asserted in 1982:

'No biological problem is solved until both the proximate and the evolutionary causation has been elucidated. Furthermore, the study of evolutionary causes is as legitimate a part of biology as is the study of the usually physico-chemical proximate causes'.

Advocates of the renewed application of Darwinism to medicine insist that we need "evolutionary" explanations as well as "proximate" explanations to understand diseases and to properly conduct medical education, research, and practice. Of course, the proximate explanations are the actual scientific explanations; evolutionary explanations are fairy tales appended to the actual explanations. The purpose of the proximate explanations is to understand the science. The purpose of the evolutionary explanations is to provide jobs and grant money for evolutionary biologists — a kind of academic workfare for Darwinists-still-seeking-relevance.

We physicians and medical scientists haven’t forgotten the first application of Darwinian "science" to medical practice. Frankly, we’d be better off just paying Darwinists to leave medicine alone.

Like protection money.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)