Creationists declare war over the brain

As I wrote two days ago, in a letter dated 14 October the European Court of Human Rights informed Declan that the Court decided on 7 October to declare the application in the case of Heavey v the United Kingdom “inadmissible”. In many ways I am relieved the Court won’t have further dealings with Declan: two days after the Court’s letter of 16 June informing him that his application of 8 September 2007 would be considered “as soon as practicable”, our main bag, containing all our money and documents, was robbed in the Catholic Dellow Centre (see blog of 18 June “Declan robbed in the Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre”); and the day before the Court’s decision of 7 October, The Big Issue informed Declan, in effect, that after almost two years selling The Big Issue magazine – sold by homeless people on registered street pitches – from 10 November we will not be able to have a registered pitch (see blog of 7 October “Letter to the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue”).

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). Yesterday I sent a total of 312 emails but only got eight out-of-office autoreplies – 210 emails went to the United States, from which I got two autoreplies. In fact, from all the emails I sent on Friday, Sunday, Monday, and yesterday – 844 in total (115, 132, 285 and 312 respectively) – no one has signed; if I include Thursday last, it is one signing from 1,004 emails.

As I stated in the previous blog, in addition to number of autoreplies, there are two other reasons why it is not credible that no scientist or academic would sign Declan’s petition: within two weeks Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is likely to be elected President of the United States (he will be lifting the funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research imposed by President George W Bush), and the United Nations is set to revisit the issue of therapeutic cloning next week (see blog of 19 October “United Nations Set to Revisit Cloning Issue”); not to mention that the petition has been signed by 564 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates.



An article in this week’s New Scientist by Amanda Gefter, an editor on New Scientist’s Opinion section based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, argues that there is a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement that is attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial. World-renowned thinker and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker (who is also an honorary associate of NAC and an early signatory of Declan’s petition to the UN) told Reason: “The doctrine of the ghost in the machine is that people are inhabited by an immaterial soul that is the locus of free will and choice and which can’t be reduced to a function of the brain. The ghost in the machine [idea] lies behind the religious and cultural right – literally in the case of people who want to couch the stem cell debate in terms of when ensoulment occurs.” Accordingly, our campaign in support of hESC research and therapeutic cloning will incorporate brain science (origins of brains, minds and consciousness) and track the “non-material neuroscience” movement.

In her New Scientist article, Gefter reports that at a September symposium in New York psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz met with much applause from the audience after thundering: “You cannot overestimate how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about … how Darwin’s explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it … I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.” Earlier neuroscientist Mario Beauregard told the audience that the “battle” between “maverick” scientists like himself and those who “believe the mind is what the brain does” is a “cultural war”.

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of the growing “non-material neuroscience movement”. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism “in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul,” says Gefter. The two have signed the “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. Gefter: “When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

“Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be ‘Darwinism's grave’, as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons – is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute’s mission as outlined in its ‘wedge document’, which seeks ‘nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies’, to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.”

Now the institute is funding research into “non-material neuroscience”. One recipient of its cash, Gefter notes, is a philosopher at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 “evolution hearings” in Kansas. And William Dembski, one of ID’s founding fathers and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is currently co-editing The End of Materialism with Schwartz and Beauregard, according to Gefter. Meanwhile, she adds, Schwartz has been working with Henry Stapp, a physicist at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who also spoke at the symposium. They have been developing non-standard interpretations of quantum mechanics to explain how the “non-material mind” affects the physical brain.

“Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools,” writes Gefter. But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, told her: “This is real and dangerous and coming our way.”

He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons, Gefter explains. “Progress in science is slow on many fronts,” she quotes John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, as saying. “We don’t yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn’t mean cancer has spiritual causes.” And for Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, “it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn’t currently explained doesn’t mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics.”

And as Clark observes: “This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as ‘Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,’ but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn’t follow at all. There’s nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that’s just brains changing brains.”

Gefter concludes: “That is the voice of mainstream academia. Public perception, however, is a different story. If people can be swayed by ID, despite the vast amount of solid evidence for evolution, how hard will it be when the science appears fuzzier? What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain – and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the ‘God of the gaps’.”

The Discovery Institute is also opposed to hESC research, according to Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute (see previous blog “Bernard Siegel: The new US President must heed calls for stem cell research”). Siegel: “Many social-conservative think-tanks created specific bioethics agendas opposed to embryonic stem cell research. Organisations such as the American Enterprise Institute, Family Research Council and Discovery Institute, with combined budgets of millions of dollars, are the architects of endless legal gambits. They are authors of the media ‘talking points’ used by the social conservative politicos and allied cable news pundits. All are geared towards delay and obfuscation, not illumination.”

Being a psychologist, I very much look forward to dealing with the science of the brain in our campaign.