There’s more to atheism than Hitchens, you know!

We got back from Madison later than I’d expected yesterday, and it’s no fun to have to scramble to compose a lecture in a car, and then rush to assemble the data after midnight for an 8am class. But I have survived! Now I have to go drink a few liters of good black coffee, and while I do that, you can catch up on the godless goings-on that I missed.

  • It’s time for the latest Humanist Symposium. I’m not a humanist myself and have mixed feelings about the philosophy (which can be summed up as “not enough squid”), but it’s a good part of our godless community.

  • The Carnival of the Godless addresses the theme of morality this time around. I wish we could just strip the issue of morality from the discussion altogether, but we can’t…because the religious falsely claim to have a moral system based on their superstitions.

  • The Freethinker Sunday Sermonette discusses the recent polls that show the declining popularity of Christianity. Simple reason: people can think scientifically.

Pick on some other discipline for a while, will ya?

This is mere satire, but it would be much more interesting if Ben Stein were to challenge Newton, rather than Darwin. It would be just as absurd, but I think physicists need more abuse than just a few flaky zero-point energy guys and the New Agers using the word “quantum” in every sentence.

And hey, where are all the chemistry abusers? Won’t someone criticize Boyle and Lavoisier?

Hitchens at FFRF

Somebody recorded the Hitchens talk, and has uploaded the first parts of it to YouTube. I’ve put what’s currently available below the fold; this only covers about half of the talk, I estimate.

I know there has been a lot of talk about his state of sobriety, but it’s all baseless. He looked perfectly normal up there on the podium, and there was no sign of impairment that I could detect. Judge the man by what he says, not his imagined blood alcohol level.

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FFRF recap: heroes of the revolution, Hitchens screws the pooch, and the unbearable stodginess of atheists

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.

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Student Post: Imagining Tennis

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?

Student Report: Why do we still talk about the heart

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?

Cross that solution off the list of alternative energy sources

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?