Last week I wrote about dualism – the philosophical position that the mind is somehow more than or separate from the biological activity of the brain. I argued that dualists commit the same error in thinking as creationists when they doubt the causal relationship between brain an mind because we cannot fully explain how the brain causes mind, not recognizing that this is a separate question from does the brain cause the mind. In the same way creationists confuse scientific knowledge concerning how evolution works with the evidence for the fact of evolution. We can know that life evolved without knowing all the details of how, just as we can know that the mind is a manifestation of brain function without knowing all the details of how brain function creates the experience of mind.

In response to this post The Agnostic Blogger wrote this response. In it he writes:

Simply put, he does not understand the dualist’s position. The dualist usually begins with an assumption- the mind exists. Now, this mind displays properties that are unlike physical entities- rationality, volition, awareness. Furthermore, science has not found a neural correlate for consciousness, and it is very possible that they never will. And it is the dualists that are being unskeptical?

It is true that I have never separated out the various forms of philosophical dualism. I am not a philosopher and when I discuss philosophy it is only to the extent that it intersects science, as the question of dualism certainly does. Further, I am interested in how critics of science use philosophy, which often reveals how philosophy has trickled down to the popular culture. Interestingly, while taking me to task for not distinguishing various types of dualism the Agnostic Blogger carelessly uses the phrase “the dualist’s position” – let us, rather, agree that there is a spectrum of dualist positions.

Continue Reading »

I promise my blog will not turn into all creationism all the time – but that has been a recent theme. I just can’t resist a juicy bit of illogical nonsense, and the creationists just keep serving them up.

In response to yesterday’s blog entry, reader James Collins wrote a pro-creationist response chock full of logical fallacies, ambiguous statements, misstatements of fact, and internal inconsistencies. Before anyone accuses me of picking on an easy target that is not representative of creationist arguments in general, or the best the creationists have to offer, read my other posts dealing with Michael Egnor and other prominent ID/creationists featured by the Discovery Institute. This kind of sloppy reasoning and lack of respect for facts is quite representative of creationists and is about as good as it gets.

Collins primary argument is this:

“If evolutionists want to end the arguments all they have to do is, get their brilliant heads together and assemble a ‘simple’ living cell. This should be possible, since they certainly have a very great amount of knowledge about what is inside the ‘simple’ cell.

After all, shouldn’t all the combined Intelligence of all the worlds scientist be able the do what chance encounters with random chemicals, without a set of instructions, accomplished about 4 billion years ago, according to the evolutionists, having no intelligence at all available to help them along in their quest to become a living entity. Surely then the evolutionists scientists today should be able to make us a ‘simple’ cell.”

Continue Reading »

I truly hate propaganda – the twisting of facts and logic for a pre-determined ideological goal. It represents the worst of those things in the intellectual realm that I loathe. Yesterday Michael Egnor, the silly surgeon who aspires to be the primary mouthpiece for ID propaganda, has given the world an excellent example of the depths of intellectual dishonesty and shoddy thinking that the Discovery Institute (an ID “think tank”) is willing to sink to spread their nonsense.

The one bright ray I always find when contemplating such a steaming pile of cognitive dung is that at least it makes my job a bit easier. The unifying theme of scientific skepticism is that process and method are what matter – not conclusions or beliefs. So when those arrayed against the skeptical position employ gross logical fallacies and misstatements of fact, it’s a sort of vindication.

Egnor writes about the Scopes trial of 1925 in which John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act, a recent Tennessee law prohibiting such teaching. The trial was contrived by those wishing to test the law, and Scopes volunteered to be the test case. The intention was for Scopes to lose so that the decision could be appealed in higher courts and eventually lead to the challenge of the Butler Act itself (in the US you need a case in order to challenge the constitutionality of a law).
Continue Reading »

Michael Egnor is slowly working his way through all the bogus and discredited arguments for dualism – the notion that the mind is separate from the physical brain. He just won’t stop. I think it’s a good skeptical exercise to go through these arguments and expose their fallacious logic. So as long as Egnor keeps setting them up, I’ll keep knocking them down.

His latest entries are thought experiments (and I use the term lightly). In the first he imagines scientists on an island finding a cell phone and whether or not they could discover if the voices coming from the phone were created by the phone for were merely being received by the phone. Get it – the phone is the human brain. He is recycling the argument that the brain is a receiver for the mind, not the generator of the mind. This is a way to explain all of the evidence that links the brain to the mind by saying that the brain is necessary, just as a phone is necessary to have a phone conversation. But the brain does not create the mind just as a phone does not create the voices that come out of it.

Orac has done a nice job of destroying this bit of nonsense from Egnor.  I will just summarize the main points, which Orac hit nicely, and extend them a bit.

Continue Reading »

I’m loving it. We have a nice little war raging in the science blogosphere between those of us defending science and reason (in this particular case evolutionary theory) and apologists for intelligent design (specifically the Discovery Institute’s latest mouthpiece, neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor). Recently I discussed the fact that training in neurosurgery does not necessarily prepare one to have a respectable opinion about evolution. I also took some jabs at ID proponents’ abuse of information theory. Well Dr. Egnor has fired back with an article about me on the Discovery Institute’s website.

First, I can’t help but be tickled that I am denigrated as a “Yale Darwinist” on the DI website. Let me quote the eminent politician and statesman James Danforth Quayle by saying, “I wear their scorn as a badge of honor.” So, thanks.
Continue Reading »

I love a good tussle with creationists. It’s like working out with a punching bag. Recently some Intelligent Design (ID) proponents have been mud wrestling with some science bloggers, and I was invited to join in. Of course, I couldn’t resist.

The scrap was provoked by the grotesquely misnamed Discovery Institute – a think tank of ID proponents barely pretending to do science – who recently claimed that the number of scientists “dissenting from Darwin” is growing. To highlight the point they trotted out their latest poster child – Neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor of SUNY Stony Brook.
Continue Reading »

Bill Maher has been getting a lot of heat lately and seems to be getting a bit defensive. He was particularly stung by Michael Shermer’s open letter in which Dr. Shermer thought it necessary to give Maher a basic lesson in germ theory.

Unfortunately, Maher has responded not by thoughtfully engaging his critics, but with a rambling defensive diatribe in which he simultaneously protests the criticism pointed his way while repeating and amplifying the pseudoscientific nonsense that garnered criticism in the first place.

Maher presents what we call a target rich environment for skepticism, so I don’t think I will be able to address every point, but I will hit the highlights.

Continue Reading »

This is my second entry discussing the issue of persistent vegetative state and Terri Schiavo. Actually it’s the third – the first was a review of a newly published study of the poor news coverage of the Schiavo case. In response Dr. Egnor wrote a blog entry (although he didn’t actually respond to any points I made in the post, it looks like he was just itching for an exchange on this issue), offering to discuss the relevant issues in our respective blogs. I wrote the first part of my response Friday, and here is part II.

In this entry I will review the medical facts of the Schiavo case, as best as I can reconstruct them. I was never directly involved with the case, I never examined her or reviewed original medical documents (except those made public, like the autopsy report). This is a minor problem, of course, as I must depend upon the examination of other neurologists. So to be clear I am not offering a direct medical opinion in this case – I cannot do that never having examined her myself – but rather an analysis of the public documents in the case.

To quickly review the medical history, Terri Schaivo collapsed at her home on February 25, 1990. Her husband, Michael, was home with her and immediately called EMS. Terri had a respiratory and cardiac arrest, although the exact cause of that arrest was never definitively determined. She was revived but suffered a diffuse anoxic injury (her brain had insufficient oxygen for a prolonged period of time) leading to extensive damage to her brain. For the next 15 years she was in a comatose state – a state of decreased consciousness and neurological function. Her case came to national attention over the controversy of her treatment. Her husband claimed that she had expressed the wish not to be kept alive in such a state. Her parents insisted that her religious views were such that she would want to be kept alive. Eventually her husband prevailed. Feeding and hydration were withdrawn and she passed away on March 31, 2005.

Continue Reading »