One of those wacky Islamists took to pestering me on Twitter with a flurry of standard Allah-pologetics. They were embarrassingly stupid, and I finally had to block him. But I thought I’d share one example of his bad reasoning.
This is a standard approach they take. Here’s some remark made by Mohammed, usually something short and lacking in detail; now here’s some modern scientific discovery that superficially agrees with Mohammed’s vague comment; therefore, Mohammed had some deep scientific insight of divine origin, proving that he was a true prophet.
So let’s look at the quote from the Qur’an.
Do they not travel through the land, so that their hearts may thus learn wisdom. 22:46
Does that sound like a scientific declaration to anyone? It’s a poetic metaphor, is all. It might also be a warmed-over vestige of Greek philosophy, although it has become such a common colloquialism that I wouldn’t use it to claim that Mohammed was a serious scholar of Greek thought (especially since that is another prong of Islamic ignorance: Mohammed was really badly educated and ignorant, they say, so anything he got right had to have been introduced into his head by magic). But yes, the Greeks had complex ideas about souls, with an appetitive soul situated in your gut, a rational soul in your head (but probably not your brain), and an emotional, spiritual soul in your heart. And now people will say “bless your heart” or say that someone is “kind-hearted” or talk about a kind and generous person as “big hearted”.
It is not and is never intended as a scientific claim, that such people have a large cognitive center in their chests that is advising their brain to be charitable or friendly or loving. That would be silly. It’s an expression not intended to be taken literally. I think it’s safe to assume that Mohammed is similarly using an expression in a colloquial way.
But not our Islamist kook! No, Mohammed is literally arguing that there is a brain located in your heart. It has to be true, because Mohammed never lied and knows everything. So he’s going to take this simple phrase and mangle science to make it support his belief.
Scientists discovered that the heart thinks, learns wisdom, and contains neurological centers that save data. Heart contains 40000 nerve cells that form a “real brain”!!
Nope.
There is nervous tissue throughout your body; it’s how you sense the world, know the position of your body parts, and regulate the activity of your organs. Your enteric nervous system contains about half a billion neurons lacing through your guts, and you’ve also got a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These do not mediate conscious thought. They do not “think” as we recognize it, and they don’t necessarily learn, especially not in a way that we’d call wisdom. The heart contains nervous tissue that generates a rhythm, and that responds to electrical and hormonal signals to modulate the heart rate. It does not sit there composing Valentine’s Day greetings or responding to scenery during traveling with passionate odes to lovely landscapes. It is not a brain. No one calls it a brain. This guy is just making it all up.
One clue about that is the phrase contains neurological centers that save data
. Oh, bullshit. He’s just stringing together sciencey-sounding words to sound clever, when anyone who knows anything can read that and tell instantly that he’s pompously confabulating.
He’s doing something the fundamentalist Christians also do: making their prophets look like idiots by insisting on imposing narrow modern interpretations on their words. Mohammed is making a pleasant enough comment about how travel broadens the mind and increases our understanding, and that’s a sensible thing to say — it may be commonplace, but I’d have to agree that in the ordinary meaning of the phrases, Mohammed is saying something that is trivially true and reasonable. And then along comes @ahmdabdallah17, insisting that what Mohammed is doing is talking in a pretentious way about the anatomy and physiology of the heart, in which case he’s making Mohammed sound as ignorant and stupid as he is.
Ken Ham does the same thing when he requires a ‘literal’ interpretation of the Bible — it completely strips it of any literary quality, where the authors chose their language for poetry’s sake and for its emotional resonance, and turns it into a badly written, grossly erroneous engineering manual.
Why do these people despise their supposedly revered forebears so much?
Reminds me of one of those ridiculous “cultural competency” trainings I once attended. (Yes, cultural competency is a real thing but it’s usually taught wrong.) The presenter, to prove the importance of fore-knowledge of exotic cultures, told an anecdote about Kurdish refugees who were evacuated by American aid workers. Some of them said “My heart hurts” so the agency sent them for cardiology evaluations, not knowing that in the weird, exotic Kurdish culture people say this when they are sad and distressed. Of course, rather than learning idiomatic phrases in Kurdish (which in this case happen to be identical to English) cultural competence might just mean asking people what they mean by that.
I don’t know the explanation, but it does seem to be a human universal, or at least very widespread among cultures, to associate emotion with the heart. It’s probably that strong emotions of grief or happiness area associated with visceral sensations.
I wouldn’t rule out the idea that the apologist has also read some popular “spiritual” science. There are several stories of people who get heart transplants and suddenly and inexplicably start behaving like the donor instead of their usual selves. Now they love cats, or hate seafood, or want to go to the desert and it turns out that’s what the departed used to do! There are even some movies which show memory transfer or other psychic phenomenon going on. Iirc a few years ago some gullible doctor wrote a book on this topic which was all the rage among New Agey types.
Supernaturalists use stories like this to try to undermine mind/brain dependence and promote the idea that emotions are heritable through magical contact.
OMG Mohammed was also right that Medina exists!! It’s an amazingly accurate prophecy!!
PS – by that kind of reasoning, Epicurus (in his letter to Herotodus) outlined atomic theory, evolution, relativity, and probably prefigured the Koran itself. Dang!
By which of course PZ is referring to encountering new pathogens while traveling that cause swelling of the brain.
They insist on a literal interpretation because if they didn’t, it would set a precedent that threatens to reduce the fantastical elements to fable and metaphor: If one verse can be simple poetry, why not others?
Well, the enteric nervous system is occasionally referred to as our “second brain”, but it’s more of a distributed network than a brain that is associated with the central nervous system. The closest thing it can do to learn is individual and groups of neurons expressing more or less receptors, based upon stimulation levels. Learning, that is not. Learning is a brain function, creating and breaking down connections between neurons in the brain.
That doesn’t remove the importance of the enteric nervous system, it just makes it another cool, but different part of the body. Just as cardiomyocytes come in different types, some of which are conductive and those transmit impulses to contract our hearts properly.
Indeed, the cardiac conduction system is a field of study all of its own and one that has both lead to insights into heart disease and effective treatments for cardiac arrhythmia issues.
The same is true of other systems in our bodies. With science showing that one brain actually thinks, even if the processes involved in the very process of thought are more complex than previously thought.
Processes that are utterly uninvolved in the heart, stomach, spleen or the big toe, save if one stubs it. Then, it’d be the center of attention, but still not a part of thought.
In military medicine, I learned a fair amount about the cardiac conduction. Things like the SA node has a natural depolarization rate of around 100 beats per minute, which is modified by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system to rest around 70 BPM. The AV node, around 40 – 60 BPM, Bundle of His 30 – 40 BPM. The ventricle’s pacers, around 15 – 40 BPM.
Which pattern on the ECG, with which heart rate would then influence drug choice in stabilizing the patient for transport to definitive treatment.
It also came in handy reading my own ECG strip recently, noting a less than 15 degree left shift and moderate LVH, secondary to hypertension caused by hyperthyroidism. That means that I’m keeping religiously on my beta blockers. Lest that LVH proceed into heart failure in an otherwise healthy heart.
Remembering the calculations, now that was hard. Thank Google for Google Scholar for one of the formulae.
Excuse me. I’ve got a heart transplant horror story to write…
Solomon invented the jewelled watch-movement!
Would you rather be a good poet or an incompetent scientist?
I suspect the choice is more likely between being a bad poet or an incompetent scientist
Tabby, I think that ground was covered in The Twilight Zone with a murderous hand transplant. :)
wzrd1:
Yes, of course once a concept has been expressed, it must never ever be fucking expressed again. As the TZ was late to the show on that particular concept, why someone should sue them.
It might be nice if you went back to this thread, and apologized for being such an asshole.
In classical Chinese, “xin” (心), which means “heart” was consistently used as the term for the mind. So I guess the (not-even-monotheistic) Chinese figured this all out more than a millennium before Islam. Which, of course, must mean that Chinese folk religion is true; get your kitchen god shrines set up quick, everyone!
@Caine, that was a joke, as the treatment of the subject in that episode was rather poor and indeed, other stories did cover the story a bit better in various ways.
Including here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBEK53Kgm7s
As for the other matter, I’ll review that threat when I’m done work and can do the subject justice. My blood pressure plummeted that night and the entire night was a blur.
So, @ahmdabdallah17 is seriously arguing that 40000 ‘nerve cells’ make a ‘real brain’? Someone has spectacularly failed to grasp how structurally complex a human brain really is – 40000 cells is but a drop in the ocean by comparison. Perfectly good for what it actually does – helping to regulate heart beat function – but hardly a brain unto itself. Still, a fanatic having not the first clue about, well, anything is hardly surprising.
Most of the people here don’t think with their enteric neural tissue, PZ, but I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess about the likes of Ken Ham and @ahmdabdallah17. Whatever they are using to do their thinking, it clearly doesn’t really qualify as a brain.
Mark Twain did it better:
And other Muslims will kill you for drawing a picture of the prophet. But this guy gets to set up a ridiculous caricature of the man, and all he gets is a Minnesota-mild blog post? Something ain’t right.
Seriously, the prophet put in place several restrictions to keep folks from worshipping him instead of Allah. The lack of pictures was to prevent idolatry. But no, we get riots and killings and this kind of shit.
(I’m just recalling the Scientology meeting with a picture of L Ron on the wall. As it concluded we gave the picture a round of applause.)
Tabby Lavalamp @ 8:
I want to read that. Take my money!
Hum… Brain in the heart. Might explain why Time Lords are very intelligent.
It’s funny, because I just finished up a class on Ibn Sina, who was a pretty decent physiologist and physchologist for his time. It’s just interesting that the Islamic tradition apparently includes both “the brain has specific realms that do different things and stop working if you hurt them” as well as “the heart is somehow a second brain”
@Sastra #2:
The earliest one of those which I can recall was a Superman storyline from the 1970s…
@Menaymbal #17:
Good to know that Hubbard has reached the same heights of adoration as Stalin and Mao!
Although there were, of course, wacky fundamentalists even during the philosophical and scientific golden age. I can’t remember the name atm, but there was one philosopher/theologian that said that it’s just a coincidence that you feel hot when you get near fire, and that god is literally and specifically making your hand hot each and every time you move it to the fire.
Vivec@22, William Crathorn, perhaps? I understand he wrote a lot of mumblings about magic sky faeries, fire, and heat.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy seems to suggest he was also considered something of an eejit by his peers.
Nah, it was a 12th century islamic philosopher. It might have been Al-Ghazali, but I can’t remember.
Vivec, that reminds me of the Creationists insisting that the laws of physics require a lawgiver. The laws of motion basically state that rocks just sit there, getting rid of any angels pushing them about, and yet that somehow implies their god in particular.
Cervantes@1 : I think the connection between the heart and emotions is pretty straightforward. Your heartbeat changes with different emotional states, sometimes in ways that don’t actually require you to palpate your chest or a pulse point to detect.
“Why do these people despise their supposedly revered forebears so much?”
That’s easy to answer Professor, because they’re desperate, so any straw will do. There was another flurry of excitement a few years ago when some Islamo-loony informed me that the Quoran contained the first reference to the Earth as a sphere. I pointed out that the Greeks not only knew that the Earth was spherical but they had also calculated its circumference. There’s a widespread myth that even educated Europeans thought that the Earth was flat until the 15th century, they didn’t.
@24 Vivec,
“It might have been Al-Ghazali, but I can’t remember.”
I’d put my money on Al-Ghazali.
On top of that, it’s a quote mine (and a bad one at that) of the Quran. Here is the entire verse:
22:46 Have they not travelled in the land, and have they hearts wherewith to feel and ears wherewith to hear ? For indeed it is not the eyes that grow blind, but it is the hearts, which are within the bosoms, that grow blind.
So first, the quote you were given was not what the Quran actually says.
But second, let’s suppose their paraphrase makes sense. So if we’re going to say that Allah knew that the heart had a brain, then he also thought that it had visual processors and could go blind.
I wonder what Vedic Science has to say about this whole issue.
rrhain, while the poetry is poor, there may well be a defect of transliteration that makes the prose suffer. Just to be giving the benefit of the doubt.
That said, adding a brain to a heart sounds like an innovation of faith, which is expressly forbidden in Islam, where complete, accurate quotations are required, not paraphrasing.
The only way paraphrasing is allowed is after a faithful transliteration has been given, to further explain a point. Leading with that paraphrase or worse, invention is not permitted.
Innovation of faith is treated equally with apostasy and if one doesn’t promptly retract that innovation as an error, earns the same punishment, the chop-chop.
How many cells do the various ganglia have? If they have ~40,000, does that make them count as another brain? If so, isn’t it strange that Mo mentioned the special heart-brain, but none of the other multitudes.
The enteric nervous system in humans has around a 500 million neurons in total, the number tied together to make ganglion isn’t well documented from what a quick search revealed.
That said, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevertebral_ganglia#/media/File:Gray847.png doesn’t look much like any brain in any creature, be it vertebrate or invertebrate.
This is the Sura that describes Al-Haj, Tawah…circling the Kaaba, and diverse other subjects. Here’s another translation of the verse (from here):
This is similar to the translation rrhain provided, while both are quite different from the way the verse is rendered in the poster. “Glory to Allah” indeed. They’re probably hoping he doesn’t strike them down for mangling his text.
I looked into this because the reference to “they” intrigued me. Who are these “they” the Sura refers to. Here are the two previous verses:
So, not only does the poster mangle the text, but this part seems more about “disbelievers” rather than the thinking ability and neurology of the heart.
Of course, the Koran, like the Bible, is such an incoherent mishmash of texts that it’s difficult to make sense of it.
Good work, PZ.
My muslim next-door neighbour (he’s hard-core Hezbollah) is always trumping the Quran’s revelations of actual science as the final nail in the coffin of my pitiful Atheism.
We do part company, however, when you call this Tweeter (him?) a dishonest shit-for-brains. It doesn’t hurt to remember where on the axis of privilege and oppression this personal probably falls and a little temperance may not hurt in the long-term.
IMHO there’s little lost in distinguishing oneself in tone from the disgusting hate-filled racist, xenophobic bile which spews from the likes of Harris and Hitchens and their cronies when it comes Islam.
My favorite are the ones where there’s some line from the Quran or Hadiths that “is usually translated as” something that makes perfect sense in context but “can also be translated as” something that sort of vaguely resembles a poetic description of some later scientific finding if you hop on one leg and apply enough motivated reasoning.
How desperate can one be?
How about defining a muslim (or a Christian for that matter) as someone who limits her- or himself to an arbitrarily limited set of symbols, concepts, doctrines and teachings which are held to be exclusively sufficient to express and describe the most important elements of human nature and existence. Really, what else does “believing in something” in a religious context mean? To a certain mindset it is absolutely important that local practices be articulated in terms of their preferred set of terms, symbols, and doctrines. It allows believers to feel themselves to be part of something larger than themselves and feel their local prejudices and parochialisms have weight are not to be laughed at. Pretty much the same words, the same formulas are used the world over, but on closer inspection it turns out that the actual day-to-day content of those formulas and related practices vary greatly.
Believers like @ahmdabdallah17 are sincere in their faith, and they themselves are proof that sincerity counts for little. Religious believers are so convinced of the veridical power of their preferred aggregation of symbols and doctrines that they feel they are “blessing” science (in this case) by “showing” what Mohammed already knew. In reality, it is of vital importance to prior commitment to their arbitrarily limited aggregation of symbols & doctrines include science. This allows them to recognize the truths (but not the ***methods***) of modern science while asserting the priority and superiority of concatenations of their preferred formulas, doctrines and symbols. In other words holy gobbledygook is in their minds still truer than the results of any empirical investigation. Really modern religiosity means making a fetish of a particular assemblage of symbols, words, formulas, doctrines, creeds, etc.
The worst thing about this is that it’s stated multiple times in the Koran that it is not a book of intricate verses and hidden meanings, but a simple book of signs (not that there’s anything clear about what those ‘signs’ are; the closest it comes, from what I recall, is talking about the beauty of nature at some point and from that deducing that god, as specifically represented in that book, is real; or musing on how birds are suspended in air with nothing but god to hold them up). To torture phases in search of hidden clues of scientific knowledge that was not known back then and was never inferred from those writings for centuries to come is so blatantly against the spirit in which the Koran was supposed to have been written that I’m surprised there aren’t any Muslims getting publicly offended by this trend (there are enough instances of people posting about such “scientific knowledge” in the Koran that I’ll call it a trend).
seleukos, #36
Well, hodge podge religious texts are often contradictory.
Looking for meaning and twisting phrases to make all sorts of stuff fit isn’t against the spirit of the Quran at all. It is quite compatible with it and Islamic tradition and scholarship. It is widely recognized that there are two aspects of the Quran: the simple statements and commands (muhkamat) and the ambiguous verses (mutashabihat) open to interpretation. The Quran itself states that the book serves both functions. The whole point of Quranic exegesis (tafsir) is to come up with interpretations of its many vague verses.
Why couldn’t the heart think? Obvisouly, this guy’s rectal sphincter (also a muscle) can and does think.
Cristophe, providing “facts” is not thinking, they’re still rectally procured factoids.
You know, excrement with a new label.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons – that’s a pretty terrible “real brain” if a fruit fly has it beat by 5x.
My favorite thought on that is still, “Man, just think of all the past Muslims who took this to heart and traveled the world to gain wisdom, not knowing that was useless because Mohammed was really talking about cardiac neurons.”
Ah, but that travel then provides them with something that is invaluable, knowledge and experience with other cultures and different solutions to the same problems every human faces.
While the heart learned nothing, perhaps the enteric nervous system learned how to deal with radically different foods. ;)
Or not. Regardless, the brain that actually counts learned new things and therein lies the value, that others may have different cultural norms, they are still people and do value the same things all other humans value.
Test (apologies, difficulties posting)