Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
While Adams wrote other books, it was Watership Down(published in 1972, and initially rejected by four publishers) for which he’ll be remembered. I read it as soon as it came out, and although I was already 21, I still teared up at the ending, which I’ll never forget—and which was the quote given with the short notice on Adams’s site.
“It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits and to try to get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses.
“‘You needn’t worry about them,’ said his companion. ‘They’ll be alright – and thousands like them.”’
Well, that of course implies an afterlife, but it doesn’t matter: the oblique description of Hazel’s death, which still makes my eyes misty, was a way of at once letting younger folk know that animals died but also soothing them at the same time. It has extra resonance because my dear friend Kenny King died on a walk near the Down.
We’re featuring again today the photos of our youngest contributor, Jamie Blilie (12). His dad James gives the descriptions (indented):
My 12-year-old son Jamie has been busy with his camera again! [JAC: it’s a Canon Powershot SX 530 “super zoom” camera.] I am amazed at how vivid their colors are in winter. Our feeders are really bringing in the birds. My wife has seen a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) come to the feeder but Jamie and I weren’t around for that. Jamie’s big ambition is to photograph a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). They are quite shy.
Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis). I am amazed at how vivid their colors are in winter.
Downy woodpeckers (Dryobates pubescens). I particularly like the silhouette shot:
And, the big one this morning [Dec. 17]: A Coyote (Canis latrans), crossing our pond. This is suburban Minneapolis/St. Paul. Plenty of coyotes around here.
It’s Wednesday, December 28, 2016: just two days before the end of Koynezaa—the holiday celebrating a Jewish boy with the initials JC born at the end of the year. It’s also National Candy Day, which I’ve already celebrated with a piece of chocolate. Indulge: there must be lots of goodies left over from Christmas! Finally, it’s the third day of Kwanzaa, another weeklong holiday.
On this day in 1836, Spain signed a treaty recognizing the independence of Mexico. And in 1879, the Great Tay Bridge Disaster took place, in which a Scottish bridge collapsed (after a storm) when a train was crossing it, killing everyone aboard: about 75 people. The event was memorialized by perhaps the worst published poet in history, William McGonagall (another Scot, 1825-1902), whose great epic, “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” ends with these stirring lines:
It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
If you have a chance, read some of McGonagall’s other poems. To my mind, his only close rival in poetic badness was the American writer Julia A. Moore, whose masterpiece, “Little Libbie,” never fails to bring me to tears of mirth in its last four stanzas. On this day in 1895, the commercial cinema made its debut when The Lumière brothers showed a film in Paris to a paying audience. And, in 1973, the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
Notables born on this day include Woodrow Wilson (1856), Arthur Eddington (1882), John von Neumann (1903), Stan Lee (1922), Kary Mullis (1944), and Denzel Washington (1954). Those who died on this day include Maurice Ravel (1937), Sam Peckinpah (1984), Clayton Moore (“The Lone Ranger’; 1999), and Susan Sontag (2004). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the beasts are being visited by Marta, the daughter of Elzbieta (and stepfather The Other Andrzej), who are in turn the staff of Leon. Hili and Cyrus vie for Marta’s attention:
Hili: Pushing your head for patting when I’m being patted is illegal.
Cyrus: Kiss my nose.
In Polish:
Hili: Podsuwanie twojego łba, kiedy ja jestem głaskana jest nielegalne.
Cyrus: Pocałuj psa w nos.
Lagnaiappe: reader jsp sends a Pearls Before Swine Comic by Stephan Pastis; this one is Google versus God:
The New York Times gave graphic results of a survey (using Facebook and ZIP codes) of how popular an array of 50 U.S. television shows were in different areas of the U.S. The results are more or less as you expect, and display a cultural divide manifested largely by geography. For example, here’s the popularity of “Duck Dynasty” (which I’ve never seen), versus “The Daily Show” (which I see rarely on YouTube). The darker the red, the more popular a show is (the higher ranked in a given area):
And here’s the margin of lead of either Trump and Clinton; the Trump +-margin map follows the popularity of “Duck Dynasty” nicely, even up to Maine.
And, I guess based on my location, the NYT told me what’s popular and not popular in Chicago. (I don’t know what “It’s always sunny in Philadelphia” is about.) It also compared Chicago’s tastes to other places in the U.S, with the expected results.
There are 48 other maps on the NYT site, so go see who shares your tastes in television.
CNN just announced that Carrie Fisher has died at 60. Given her serious heart attack on an airplane last week, this wasn’t unexpected. But it’s still sad; Princess Leia was too young.
This year really sucked. Prince, David Bowie, George Michael, Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell—and now this. And I’m not even mentioning Trump.
I’ve posted repeatedly (e.g., here) about the dilemma that Adam and Eve pose for some believers, since population genetics shows not only that our species never dipped below a total of about 12,500 in the last 50,000 years or so. That directly contravenes Catholic (and some evangelical) doctrine that Adam and Eve were real people and the ancestors of us all. This is codified in Pope Pius XII’s 1950 statement from De Humani Generis(my emphasis):
37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism [that we descended from more than just two people], the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
In other words, the Pope said that all living humans, starting with Adam, had to be descended from him, and that Adam cannot simply stand for a “certain number” of first parents. Not accepting the statement above means you don’t accept Church dogma. Of course, theologians are still busy trying to force the idea of Adam and Eve into the Procrustean Bed of population genetics, with the predictably risible results.
A few days ago I got an email from reader John, who said this:
“There’s one thing I don’t believe you addressed that I’ve recently seen sophists (err, theists) suggesting: that each of us is related to either Adam *or* Eve, but not necessarily to both–i.e. that there was an initial pool of 10,000+ humans, and only Adam and Eve had souls, but at this point all living human beings are distantly related to either Adam or Eve (but not necessarily to both of them).”
He then pointed me to a reddit thread on Adam and Eve, in which one commenter tried to reconcile Catholic doctrine with the evidence that the human population didn’t undergo a bottleneck of only two people. The commenter said this:
You are not engaging my point, and ignoring my argument for it. To remake my point, then. Catholic doctrine does not require a bottleneck of only two people. To insist that all people are descended from one particular pair does not equate to saying that all people are descended from only that particular pair. Here’s a visual representation of my point: all the yellow blocks are descended from the red pair, but at no point is there a bottleneck of only two people.
In other words, Adam and Eve for some reason, were two among many people (A&E in red), but that all living people somehow can trace their ancestry back to the Primal Couple. But this violates both science and the Pope’s doctrine in several ways. First, there are clearly “true men after Adam who did note take their origin through natural generation from him as the first parent at all.” These are the white rectangles in the second row, and of course there would have been many more white rectangles had there been more than six people alive, and those rectangles would have extended into future generations. Second, the Bible clearly says that Adam and Eve were the only two people around then; it doesn’t mention a population of humans created with them. If you’re going to take Adam and Eve as literal ancestors, why not accept that they also were the only two humans on Earth?
Further, as I wrote in the thread above, were Adam and Eve the genetic ancestors of all of us, then
. . . all the genes of every living human should “coalesce” back to the same time and the same two people. But we don’t see that either: each gene segment had its ancestor at a different time (and often at a different place) in the past: the Y chromosome, for instance, coalesces back to an ancestor who lived about 60,000 years more recently than the female ancestor who bequeathed us the genes in our mitochondria. So this solution is also untenable.\\
And that solution is untenable even if you think we all inherited Adam’s Y chromosome (if we’re male) and Eve’s mitochondrion.
Now this of course leaves aside how “Original Sin” is inherited. It cannot segregate like a gene, which is present in pairs and thus a given gene has a 50% chance of getting into a single offspring. Rather, Original Sin must be passed on to EVERY offspring. So if every offspring of an Adam and Eve, and all their descendants, had Original Sin—as if it were a virus spread by both sperm and egg—then yes, every living person could have Original Sin, if you see them as all descended from Adam and Eve. But the genetic data show that even the claim, that Adam and Eve lived at the same time, is wrong. Ergo, there’s no way to save the Catholic dogma on the First Couple. It is, as all rational people realize, a complete fiction: a story descending from the ignorant childhood of our species.
My adopted Polish mother, Malgorzata, emailed me about the recent UN Security Council Resolution 2334 on Israel and Palestine, which you can find here. Among its stipulations are these (taken from Abu Yehuda’s site; Yehuda also has questions and answers about the resolution, which he considers “unbalanced”, while CNN lists other questions and answers):
The statement that Israel’s establishment of settlements across the Green Line (including eastern Jerusalem) “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace,” and the demand that Israel “cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”
The condemnation of attempts to change the “demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.”
The statement that the UN will recognize no changes in the pre-1967 lines except those agreed upon by both sides.
The call for “all States … to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”
The condemnation of violence, terrorism, incitement, etc. (The “fig leaf” that allowed the US to abstain on what was originally a 100% anti-Israel resolution).
The request that the UN Secretary-General report on the progress of implementing the resolution every three months.
The resolution also includes designating area of the Western Wall (“Wailing Wall”) as “occupied territory.”
The significance of this vote, as CNN notes, is this:
. . . this is the first Security Council resolution in more than 35 years to deal with Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The resolution lays out guidelines for dealing with the settlements, which is something no US President has done at the Security Council since 1980.
The vote on this resolution was 14 in favor, none against, with one country abstaining: the U.S. Previously the U.S.—clearly under Obama’s direction—had voted “no” in favor of similar resolutions, which canceled them, but the US abstention here, which led to the resolution passing, was designed by Obama to send a message: Israel better stop building settlements. As CNN noted, “Obama has exercised the veto power of the United States at the Security Council on every other resolution relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Now this resolution isn’t binding in any meaningful sense, and Trump, who is more sympathetic to Israel than is Obama, may try to overturn it, but that’s unlikely given the Security Council. But the resolution does send a signal to the world that, according to Malgozata, Israel is uniquely bad among all countries.
At any rate, Malgorzata was very disturbed by this resolution and the U.S.’s abstention rather than veto. I asked her to tell me why the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal, and she gave me this answer (indented and in quotes, all quoted with permission):
“There is no ban on building in a territory occupied legally (i.e., taken in a defensive war with no possibility for a peace treaty) in any of the legal texts comprising international law—until the UN resolution of 23 December 2016 declaring Israel’s building – as the only state in the world in a similar situation – as being illegal. The Geneva Convention, as so many are quoting, does not speak about voluntary movement of people from one territory to the other but about forced transfer of populations and was, according to the authors of this convention who were interviewed many times, not applicable to Israel’s situation (it was designed to prevent repetition of the actions of Stalin and of the Nazis). In other situations, like Cyprus, Tibet, and West Sahara, nobody is ever talking about “illegal building”. On the contrary, the E.U. had even an aid project for building homes in the part of Cyprus which is occupied by Turkey. You can’t have an international law which is directed to just one country. The law must apply to all countries in a similar situation.
Israel is building houses mostly on the areas which it absolutely needs for defence reasons. This is in Area C, which is not an occupied territory (or at least wasn’t until December 23, 2016) and which, according to the Oslo Accords, is fully under Israeli administration and is a disputed territory; the fate of this territory was supposed to be negotiated between Israel and Palestinians. The blocks of settlements, according to negotiations done until now that area was understood (and confirmed in writing by consecutive American Presidents) to remain in Israeli hands and Israel was supposed to compensate Palestinians with other pieces of Israel proper.
By the way, Israeli settlements on the West Bank occupy less than 2% of West Bank’s area. And the building that the West is shouting about takes place INSIDE existing settlements when a new school, kindergarten or flats are needed. There are other settlements, built by Jewish fanatics, far from the border, which are built without any Israeli permission and are deemed illegal according to Israeli law. They have been mostly demolished. If you don’t know about that, it’s only because nobody in the West writes when an Israeli house is demolished, only when houses belonging to Arab murderers are demolished. But this is a digression.
So, until 23 December of this year, there was no international law saying that Israeli settlements are illegal, nor international practice to judge such settlements illegal when it was not Jews building them. However, the Security Council is a body which has powers to establish new laws. And now they did just that. Who did it? Russia (occupies Crimea, not to mention Chechnia); China (occupies Tibet), former colonial powers France and Britain (and what about Gibraltar and Falkland Islands?), New Zealand—a colonial creation—and assorted groups of dictatorships and failed states.
There is also a problem of what is an occupation. According to Wikipedia: “Military occupation is effective provisional control of a certain ruling power over a territory which is not under the formal sovereignty of that entity, without the volition of the actual sovereign”.(Actual sovereign is a state.) So whose territory is Israel occupying?
A very short history: the territory was for 400 years under the rule of Ottoman Empire. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations divided its lands into mandates. They established a British Mandate for Palestine which encompasses the territory of today’s Jordan, Israel, West Bank and Gaza, with the aim of building there a Jewish National Home for Jewish people persecuted in Russia, Eastern Europe, Arab world and other places. The civil rights of existing Arab population were to be guaranteed, but the national rights belonged only to Jews.
After a short time Great Britain cut off over 70% of the land and created Transjordan, which was accepted by the League of Nations statement that Transjordan would be for Arabs (Jews who lived there were expelled and no Jew was allowed to settle there), while the rest, from Jordan River to Mediterranean Sea, was to be Jewish (without moving any Arab from this territory).
Jews accepted, Arabs refused. British allowed uncontrolled Arab immigration to the Jewish part and very, very restricted immigration of Jews – contrary to their Mandate.You often hear the argument that Arabs were a majority in the land: the above is an explanation of why it was so. In 1948, when Arab armies invaded the newly established Israel (after rejecting the UN Resolution about Partition which Jews accepted), Jordan managed to occupy the West Bank and the part of Jerusalem containing the Old Town and places considered most holy by Jews. They murdered and expelled all Jews from this part of Jerusalem (Jews were for quite a few centuries a majority population of Jerusalem), blew up synagogues, and destroyed Jewish homes. Of course, no Jew was allowed to visit the Temple Mount or the Western Wall.
This part of the old Mandate of Palestine came back into Jewish hands 1967, when Jordan, in spite of entreaties by the Israeli government and in the belief that Arab armies would destroy Israel any moment, started to shell the Jewish part of Jerusalem and went into attack. Because Jordan didn’t have any rights to this piece of land and there was no other state that could be called sovereign over it except the League of Nations resolution about the Jewish state stretching to River Jordan – how can Israel be considered an “an occupying power”? There is a very good paper about it “Palestine, Uti Possidetis Juris and the Borders of Israel” by professors Abraham Bell and Eugene Kontorovich. Moreover, a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994 states this:
The international boundary between Jordan and Israel is delimited with reference to the boundary definition under the Mandate as is shown in Annex I (a), on the mapping materials attached thereto and coordinates specified therein. The boundary, as set out in Annex I (a), is the permanent, secure and recognized international boundary between Jordan and Israel, without prejudice to the status of any territories that came under Israeli military government control in 1967.
There is more (for example, treating an armistice line from 1949 as “1967 borders”) but perhaps this is enough to give you an idea why I think that the U.N. resolution is a shameful scandal. I don’t know what to do now: there are over 500,000 Jews who live in settlements which are now legal according to Israel and illegal according to the new “international law” which is applicable to only one state in the world. And this new “international law” says that Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is illegal. Evicting squatters in the West often causes demonstrations and protests. But the world wants now to evict from their homes over half a million people, many of whom were born there and had their own children there. Well, why not—after all, they’re all Jews, aren’t they?”
I then asked Malgorzata this: “Why were the settlements widely called ‘illegal’ BEFORE December 23, though?” Her reply:
“The answer why it was called illegal is another long story. Arabs en masse thought that any state which is not Islamic on a territory once in possession of Muslims is illegal. This is stated in the Koran. The more fanatic among them even think that Spain is illegal because of Andalusia. Additionally, Jews having their own state was something that was for them absolutely abhorrent. Jews, if they are allowed to live at all, should be “dhimmi”— subservient and humiliated. The USSR, which initially hoped for Israel would be its Communist colony in the Middle East, discovered that Israelis are not too keen on Communism. So they changed their mind and started to slander Israel however they could. It is a Soviet invention to equate Israel with a colonial enterprise. Catholics (and broader Christians with the exception of Evangelical Christians) felt threatened. Judaism was supposed to disappear and Christians to take the place of Jews as God’s Chosen People. The restoration of the state of Israel and Jewish Jerusalem was an anathema to them. (The Vatical recognized Israel only in 1993.)
So you have many strands which converge on illegality of Israel as such: Islam, Christianity, Communism, anti-Americanism and anticolonialism. Now, Israel was recognized by U.N. and in 1967 the memory of the Holocaust was fresh enough, so nobody except Arabs were comfortable saying that Israel as such was illegal. But when in 1967 Israel got more territory in the defensive war with Arabs, well, now they could start to shout about illegality and the Palestinian nation.
You do know that while Judea and Samaria (renamed the “West Bank” by Jordan after it occupied it – illegally – 1948), as well as Gaza, were in Arab hands from 1948 to 1967, and yet nobody talked about a Palestinian State, not to mention building one. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), established in 964 (what were they suppose to “liberate” when the “West Bank” was in Jordanian hands?) even had in their charter an article stating that they have no wish to take the West Bank from Jordan and that the West Bank is NOT a subject of their aspirations.” The UN, with its automatic anti-Israel majority (first Communist states and their clients plus Arab states, then just all Islamic states and all dictatorships) passed a disproportionate number of resolutions condemning Israel. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said himself: “Over the last decade, I have argued that we cannot have a bias against Israel at the U.N. Decades of political maneuvering have created a disproportionate number of resolutions, reports and committees against Israel. In many cases, instead of helping the Palestinian issue, this reality has foiled the ability of the U.N. to fulfill its role effectively.” Here you have some numbers of resolutions calculated by UN Watch:
UN Human Rights Council: From its creation in 2006 to 2016, the UN Human Rights Council, over one decade, adopted 135 resolutions criticizing countries; 68 out of those 135 resolutions—more than 50%—were against Israel.
UN Nations General Assembly: From 2012 through 2015, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted 97 resolutions criticizing countries; 83 out of those 97 have been against Israel (86%).
UNESCO: Each year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopts around 10 resolutions a year criticizing only Israel. UNESCO does not criticize any other UN member state in a country-specific resolution (100%). An exception occurred in 2013, when, under pressure from UN Watch, UNESCO adopted one resolution on Syria.
World Health Organization: For one week every year, the UN World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO),meets to formulate global health policy. Resolutions are adopted to address global health issues. There is one exception: the annual resolution entitled “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan,” which singles out Israel for condemnation; no other country in the world is condemned by the WHO.
ILO:The International Labour Organization (ILO) was established to improve conditions of labor, regulate work hours, fight unemployment, assure adequate living wages, and protect workers worldwide. At its annual conference, however, the ILO produces a single country-specific report castigating Israel.”
That ends Malgorzata’s take on the resolution. I just want to add that Fatah, considered the more moderate faction of Palestinian politics, published two cartoons about this resolution, which apparently thanked the 14 countries voting in favor of this resolution. PMW notes this:
Three days ago Fatah’s official Facebook page posted a drawing of its map of “Palestine,” which includes all of Israel and painted like the Palestinian flag, being used to stab the word “settlement.” The text above the image: “#Palestine will defeat the settlement ” (First drawing below)
Yesterday in response to the UN Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal, Fatah republished the identical image but added a pool of blood at the bottom, and the words “Thank You” above the image, and the names of the 14 countries that voted in favor of the UN resolution (second drawing below):
Readers are invited to discuss all this, and I expect Malgorzata will be around to give comments and answer questions.
UPDATE: As the first comment in the thread (by Coel) shows, I was correct in assuming there’s a religiosity to Gunderman’s argument: he’s a trustee of the Christian Theological Seminary. Further, someone who once knew him emailed me and described him as “ultra religious.”
________________________
The motto of the site The Conversationis “academic rigor, journalistic flair”, and it’s funded by an impressive roster of organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (see bottom for the list). But there’s neither rigor nor flair in a recent article by Dr. Richard Gunderman, “Why you shouldn’t blame lying on the brain“. (According to his bio at the Radiological Society of America, Gunderman is “a professor and vice chairman of the department of radiology at Indiana University, with faculty positions in pediatrics, medical education, philosophy, philanthropy, and liberal arts.” He’s also written both technical books on his field and popular books like We Make a Life by What WeGive.)
Gunderman’s point, which completely baffles me, is that our ability to lie proves that we can actually override the material processes in our brain, and that “the human mind is not bound by the physical laws that scientists see at work in the brain.” In other words, lying proves that there’s a ghost in the machine—a non-physical aspect to our brains and behavior that gives us a form of dualistic free will.
Gunderman begins by noting that functional MRI (fMRI) scans of the brain have shown that lying can be detected by a decrease of activity of the amygdala, which to Gunderman suggests that “subjects may become desensitized to lying, thereby paving the way for future dishonesty.” I haven’t read the studies, so I have no idea whether that last conclusion has any support.
But Gunderman wants to dispel the notion that because lying can be seen as changes in brain activity, it must therefore be a product of the neurological/biochemical processes of brain activity. One section of his piece, called “brain not simply a machine,” argues that because the brain is complicated (with 100 billion neurons and 150 trillion synapses), and because it actually experiences the world through consciousness and emotionality, we can never find a physical basis for those things. Ergo, the brain isn’t a machine!. Gunderman:
As Nobel laureate Charles Sherrington, one of the founders of modern neuroscience, famously declared, natural sciences such as physics and chemistry may bring us tantalizingly close to threshold of thought, but it is precisely at this point that they “bid us ‘goodbye.‘” The language of natural science is inadequate to account for human experience, including the experience of telling a lie.
Consider Mozart’s “A Little Serenade” or Rembrandt’s self-portraits. We can describe the former as horsehair rubbing across catgut, and we may account for the latter as nothing more than pigments applied to canvas, but in each case something vital is lost. As any reader of Shakespeare knows, a lie is something far richer than any pattern of brain activation.
This is a misguided argument, because you can’t describe the effects of Mozart as horsehair on catgut, and no scientists claims such a thing. The sounds have an emotional resonance in our brain after they enter it through our ears. That emotional resonance, of which we’re conscious, depends on our genes and environment: the factors that have built our brain. Just because we don’t understand how it all works manifestly does not say that the brain isn’t a machine. It’s simply a machine whose workings we don’t fully understand.
Gunderson then makes a weird argument about why the brain is “not the mind” (well, the mind is really a product of the brain, just as a knee-jerk reflex is, but never mind). While admitting that we can change how the mind works by physical intervention, he still claims that there is a dualism in our thoughts not explicable by our brains:
A second dangerous misinterpretation that often arises from such reports is the notion that brain and mind are equivalent. To be sure, altering the chemistry and electrical activity of the brain can powerfully affect a person’s sensation, thought, and action – witness the occasionally remarkable effects of psychoactive drugs and electro-convulsive therapy.
But in much of human experience, the causal pathway works in the opposite direction, not from brain to mind, but mind to brain. We need look no further than the human imagination, from which all great works of art, literature and even natural science flow, to appreciate that something far more complex than altered synaptic chemistry is at work in choices about whether to be truthful.
What is the “mind” that is not part of the brain, then? Is it a soul or something not embodied in physical matter? As Mencken said of Thorstein Veblen, “What is the sweating professor trying to say?” Just because art springs from the imagination and perception (and one’s experiences) does NOT mean that all those things are not coded in the brain. In fact, you can efface many aspects of perception and imagination by destroying parts of the brain. Gunderson’s claim that works of art must reflect something more than synaptic chemistry is an unsupported assertion; in fact, the data so far show that he’s wrong. He really needs to specify exactly how he think the mind is independent of the brain; I’m puzzled that a doctor (unless he’s religious) can even make such a claim. If the mind is disconnected from the brain, how does imagination get from the mind to the brain? Is there a soul above it all?
But the most bizarre part of Gunderman’s article is that he sees lying as proof that the mind is independent of the brain:
In fact, our capacity to lie is one of the most powerful demonstrations of the fact that the human mind is not bound by the physical laws that scientists see at work in the brain. As Jonathan Swift puts it “Gulliver’s Travels,” to lie is “to say the thing which is not,” perhaps as profound a testimony as we could wish for free will and the ability of the human mind to transcend physical laws
In the Genesis creation story, it is after woman and man have tasted the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and hidden their nakedness that God declares that “they have become like us.” To be able to lie is in a sense divine, implying a capacity to imagine reality as it is not yet. If used appropriately, this capacity can make the world a better place.
What is going on here, I think, is that Gunderson (whose quotes from scripture imply he’s religious, which may explain his dualism) is espousing a form of “free won’t.” That is, while our positive, truthful statements may reflect the activity of our brain, the fact that we can tell untruths somehow means that the Ghost in the Machine is overriding what we’d normally do. (Benjamin Libet, who did the first experiments showing that decisions can be predicted in the brain before they come to consciousness, didn’t believe in free will per se but did in “free won’t”: the idea that we can decide to change our minds by overriding a conscious decision.)
But this shows nothing of the sort. The decision about whether to be truthful is simply built into our neurons, and often as an adaptive mechanism (By “adaptive,” I mean something that we think will be good for us, not necessarily something that’s evolved—though I think Robert Trivers is right that a certain amount of deceit and self-deception are evolutionary adaptations.) When someone says, “Do I look too fat in these clothes?”, it’s to your benefit to say “no”. That can be a lie, but why on Earth does it show that that decision about how to answer is independent of the physics of our brain? If you say “yes,” is that just the product of our brain-machine?
Gunderman steps further into this argument—one that any sensible person can see through—at the end of his piece, when he simply makes his flat assertion again:
In reality, of course, lying is not the fault of the brain but the person to whom the brain belongs. When someone tells a lie, he or she is not merely incorrect but deceptive. People who lie are deliberately distorting the truth and misleading someone in hopes of gain, placing their purposes above the understanding and trust of the person to whom they lie.
Of course many of our truthful statements are made in hopes of gain, placing our own purposes above those of others.. So how does the fact that we sometimes use deception prove dualism? Gunderman goes on (my emphasis):
Even in the era of functional neuro-imaging, there is no lie detector that can tell with certainty whether subjects are telling the truth. There is no truth serum that can force them to do so. At the core of every utterance is an act of moral discernment that we cannot entirely account for except to say that it reflects the character of the person who does it.
Lying is not a matter of physical law, but of moral injunction. It is less about chemistry than character. It reflects not merely what we regard as expedient in the moment but who we are at our core. Ironically, while it is less momentous to act well than to be good, we are in the end little more than the sum of all the moral compromises we have made or refused to make.
This is why we abhor the deceptive conduct of narcissists, crooks and politicians, and why we esteem so highly the characters of people who manage to tell the truth even when it is especially inconvenient to do so. Such acts are morally blameworthy or exemplary precisely because we recognize them as the products of human choice, not physical necessity.
Why does telling a lie show a nonphysicality of the mind in a way different from telling the truth? This is the main question, and Gunderman doesn’t answer it.
I think he’s straying into religious territory here. For every aspect of our character comes from our brain, whether we’re lying or not. And all data show that that character depends on the brain, for character can be profoundly altered by brain injuries, surgery, experience of the world, or drugs. Dragging in the claim “we are in the end little more than the sum or all the moral compromises we have made or refused to make” suggests a religious theme, one based on moral choice, which to many religionists means dualistic free will. If we don’t choose how we behave, but our brain chooses for us, what does “moral choice” even mean? Just because most people are dualists, and think that at any time we do have a choice about how we behave (we don’t), doesn’t mean that we can accept conventional wisdom for reality. “Right” and “wrong” acts are to be praised and condemned for the good of society, but we shouldn’t accept that common notion that we could at a given time choose to behave either good or ill.
Gunderman’s argument is so tortured, so unsupported by evidence, that I suspect it’s motivated by religion. That’s just a guess, but anyone who drags in scripture and morality to prove that the mind is disconnected from the brain has to be working on premises that aren’t scientific.
Gunderman
Funding partners for The Conversation, which funded Gunderman’s misguided essay,.
