We’re about to leave lovely Madison, Wisconsin and the Freedom from Religion Convention. So here’s a short summary: it was a good meeting and I was impressed with most of the speakers; Christopher Hitchens “pissed off” most of us as he promised to do, and the organization of the meeting could have been greatly improved.
Now the details.
I read an interesting article in the New Yorker the other day. It followed the research of neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his work on patients in vegetative states. In some patients, when he gave the verbal command to “imagine you are playing tennis,” their brain regions lit up on an fMRI indistinguishably from your average walking, talking, and recognizably conscious human being asked to perform the same task. Moreover, the patients were able to sustain this activity (so presumably the tennis imagination) for over thirty seconds suggesting some degree of focus.
The article goes on to discuss implications. It points out that Owen only found a few patients in vegetative states with this ability. Others were not at all responsive. It was a pretty good indication that the patients who were able to follow his command had some sort of retention of cognition that others did not. However, they were not diagnosed incorrectly. The question then becomes: if the criteria by which physicians diagnose vegetative states applied to these patients, do we need a better test?
We are about to finish Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer in class this week and I’ve been reflecting on how, despite science’s deep impact on how we think and act, we still have subconscious belief in superficial myths that slip out despite our common knowledge of biology and the world around us. For instance, Zimmer illustrates the battle that people like Thomas Willis went through in trying to draw attention to the superiority of the brain over the heart in its control over all our emotional and reasoning faculties. After dissecting thousands of brains, comparing and contrasting the anatomies of animals and humans, anatomies of past (Galen) and Willis’s present (Harvey), and pushing these ideas at just the right time over two decades and through two revolutions, Willis was finally able to solidify the brains mastery over the human body and personality rather than the heart.
Yet despite this great fight to make the brain’s superiority over the other organs common knowledge, we throw it all to the wind with sayings like “she broke my heart,” or, “he has a wicked heart.” Why have these sayings survived, and why do we still feel that emotions and our persons are derived from the heart? Can I say something like, “when she left it was like getting shot through the amagdyla,” or, “I’m so excited dopamine might spill out of my ears,” and not sound completely awkward?
Despite common knowledge about such happenings in the brain, we still communicate better with the myths of the past, such as the belief that the heart is the center for production of emotion and regulation of our actions and thoughts. I guess it really depends on how much we cling to these myths, and how far these myths go in messing true science. Most people know that emotional processes and personality are regulated by the brain, however, it is still easier to communicate our feelings and thoughts (which is essential to any culture) through common myths. Perhaps we’ll all use “scientifically correct” phrasing someday, but what has to happen to completely turn a culture to the truth?
Here’s a simple little video game: Michael Behe vs. The Mousetraps. It does need some sound effects, and it’s far too easy for Behe to get ID points.
One source of fuel hydrocarbons in the 19th century was the whaling industry. I guess that won’t work in the 21st century.
According to industry website SaveTheWhales.org, a sperm whale could produce 2000 gallons, or 47.6 barrels, of oil. Thus a touch of long division tells us that we will need to slaughter approximately 630 million sperm whales each year in order to completely replace our petroleum production. Since there are only an estimated one million sperm whales currently living on Earth, wiping out the entire species would power the global economy for about half a day.
Too bad. I wonder how much oil we could squeeze out of puppy dogs and bunny rabbits?
This one won’t cost you a thing: vote for Shelley Batts to win a scholarship. She’s a freethinking neuroscientist — she’s on of us. Give her a click, that’s all we ask.
Last night, I attended talks by Katha Pollitt and Julia Sweeney here at the Freedom from Religion Convention, and I learned that the godless are a happy, humorous, good-natured group — even if I weren’t philosophically inclined this way myself, I’d want to be a member of this community.
Then this morning, I checked in on my DonorsChoose challenge and discover that you’re all generous and charitable, and that you care about kids and education. I’m having a grinch moment right here…my heart is growing a few sizes larger, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a symptom of congestive heart failure. We met my initial challenge to raise $10,000, and then some.
So then, because this particular atheist is a cruel taskmaster, I simply bumped up the challenge amount to $20,000, and added a bunch of new grant requests, including some that asked for tools to do developmental biology in the lab, and some on fossils. So if you haven’t yet kicked in, you’ve still got an opportunity.
If that isn’t enough for you, or if you’d rather not have your donations going to a group labeled “freethinkers”, check out the Scienceblogs leaderboard — there are lots of unfunded proposals in those other guys spaces. I told them they should have tapped into the charitable goodness of the godless if they really wanted to draw in donations.
Oh, and many thanks to Phil for drawing in the astronomy crowd. Even people who stare into the cold, unfeeling void for fun are glad to help a good cause.
And thanks to all of you!
While I was reading the assigned chapters of the book Soul Made Flesh (Zimmer, 2004) for class this past week, I came upon the story of the physician Thomas Sydenham. He was particularly good at making careful bedside observations while he was treating patients. In fact, he made the observation that diseases acted the same in everyone, and they were not unique to an individual. He made careful notes on disease symptoms, and even suggested that perhaps diseases should be treated as if they are individual species.
Sydenham’s work turned out to be controversial, because when prescribing a treatment, sometimes he would not use the traditional one, but instead would experiment with different treatments. Other physicians wanted to get his license revoked because his experimentation outraged them, even though Sydenham documented which treatments seemed to work better. We discussed this a bit in class, but I want to know why his new treatments were so controversial. If he devised his treatments in a manner that seemed logical, and he had experimental evidence to back it up, why was there such resistance? Is it perhaps that people could not accept that traditional treatments really did not work, and that they may now be responsible for the deaths of many people that could have been saved? Or is it simply a matter of people not being able to accept that things change?
I unashamedly stole that title from Warren—it was just too good to pass up.
If I was an opponent of framing before, I’m afraid my views have now hardened far more: one Framer thinks Al Gore, winner of the Nobel, is a flop. What does a person have to do to convince the framing crowd that they’re communicating science? That they’re opening up the public discussion? That they’re making people think? We already know that writing a best-selling book doesn’t do it, and now we learn that winning the acknowledgment of the world community with a Nobel prize isn’t significant, either. “Framing” seems to alienate atheists and evolutionary biologists, and now it’s dissing the environmentalist movement.
I mean, come on. The guy just won a Nobel Peace Prize, and your response — from the perspective of someone who claims to be an expert in communication — is that Gore just might be hindering the discussion that the global community just lauded him for advancing.
“Framing” has gone beyond annoying to insane. I wash my hands of it.
