The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Question 11: Can biotechnology bring back extinct animals?, we have declared a winner, and it is binary! Twins!

Aussie ID and Nakashima.

I loved Aussie ID's information about the specifics of attempts to restore the thylacine - he calls it a Tasmanian tiger. Possibly due to culture issues, I am more familiar with hearing the animal called a Tasmanian wolf. But anyone interested should review his information.

I'd love to know what a staked out* sled pack in northern Canada would make of the marsupial Tasmanian. He doesn't look to me like he has three coats of hair, so he might need to work in the office.

I also appreciated Nakashima's thoughtful reflections on the question of how behaviour might not follow the physical recreation of an animal. I suspect he's right; it's an open question indeed.

Each of you must provide me with a valid postal address** in order to receive the prize, a free copy of Steven Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).

If you go here, you will get a bit of background on the contest, and read many interesting contributions, but for now, here is the skinny:

This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it.

In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."

Jurassic Park, anyone?

Additional notes on interesting posts as well.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

My concern with "neurolaw" (the attempt to scan brains to identify criminal behaviour) is this: Law is, or should be, concerned with "intent", not "motive."

Yes, yes, in detective fiction, everything hinges on motive: Cousin Harry murdered Aunt Sally to get her fortune; plain Jane murdered pretty Kitty because Kitty got the man; squadron leader Beeder murdered that guy because of a long ago wartime betrayal ....

However, real law depends on design inferences, not speculations about motive. Here is the story I sometimes tell to explain that:

Tom and Dick are enjoying beer and wings in a pub.

Suddenly, the conversation becomes loud and animated.

Tom seizes a dinner knife and tries to plunge it into Dick's chest. He is restrained by burly patron Harry and several others.

The whole thing is caught on videocam.

Mid-uproar, the bartender calls the police, who charge Tom with attempted manslaughter.

The police need not know his motive, only his intent - which was pretty obvious. That's a design inference.

Later, the investigating officer learns how the quarrel began: Dick had informed Tom that he was seeing Tom's girlfriend, so Tom should just buzz off. Tom didn't like that idea.

Knowing a person's motive certainly helps us understand the story. But intent - the demonstrated attempt at murder in this case - is what matters in law.

Here's the difficulty: Suppose Tom had just got up from the table and left, and spent three months fantasizing in the wee hours about killing Dick - without ever seeing either Dick or the former girlfriend again. He has plenty of motive, but the fact is, he never did anything.

Then Tom is of no interest to the law, as it now stands - though his family doctor should be concerned. Tom needs a more constructive way to deal with rejection. (He also needs a more faithful girlfriend, but all in good time.)

However, in a materialist environment, I would hardly be surprised to hear theories about Tom's violence genes and violence neurons, some based on neuroscience techniques - even if all the violence was inside his own head. Some may argue for action against Tom "pre-crime". That's where the threat to civil liberties comes in.

Neurolaw seems like materialism applied to law, hence a threat to civil rights, because it can easily confuse motive with intent - overturning centuries of progress in justice.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Intelligently Designed Nanotechnology

As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.

Listen here.

Yes, but sometimes people don't see the forest for the trees. The majority of humans think, where it is safe to do so, that there is a God, based on personal experience. No surprise there. If there is a God, he can communicate with humans when he wishes to do so, just as Elizabeth, Queen of England, can do*. And she would be the first to say that her rank is at a fundamentally much lower grade.

The question is, why is this controversial? Why should it be any surprise? Why do I keep running into efforts to prove it is not true?

If that is really science (space aliens, multiple universes), I could not distinguish it from witchcraft or some other foolishness. I think we'd just get more done if we accepted, with Antony Flew , that There IS a God and got on with useful projects in science, like cures for AIDS and non-polluting sources of energy. Oh, and weight loss programs for people who used to suffer from famine but are now afflicted with obesity - an outcome of modern science.

*I still have my father's commission, courtesy Elizabeth's father, advancing him to the rank of officer.

Also: Chris Mooney's War on Intelligent Design

Listen here.

On this episode of ID the Future, CSC's Rob Crowther interviews Casey Luskin about his in-depth response to Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, correcting fourteen major factual and logical errors in Mooney's chapter on intelligent design. How can Chris Mooney be so wrong on this issue? Listen in and find out.

Read the original response to Mooney here.

Yes, well, I don't know why anyone should be surprised. Darwinism has morphed into a major public enterprise and anyone who wants his finger in the pie ... I think we can wait a long time before a guy like Chris Mooney even needs to get anything right.

More stories from the Post-Darwinist:

Interesting design inference concerning a historic photo

Morning coffee!! Bear meets cat ... No! No! Not what you think!

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with comments

Darwinism and popular culture: A tour of the textbooks

(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Does curiosity kill more than the cat?, prof Stanley Fish wonders

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, "Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?"

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson's "trinity of inalienable rights: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, "a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality."

Interesting, considering that academic freedom is under huge assault these days.

I have said in private correspondence as follows:

It is good to be curious about the exact cause of Alzheimer syndrome or whether that fellow hanging around in the parking lot has lawful business around here.

It is not good to be curious about whether my neighbour is a closet racist or having an affair with the letter carrier.

I'd say curiosity is an inescapable and necessary human quality that must be steered in an appropriate direction.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose PS: I know a bit about cats. Curiosity does kill cats sometimes. But kidney disease is their biggest problem. Cats are obligate carnivores. So they generally last as long as their kidneys - or so a vet once told me, and in my experience it is certainly true.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience issues:

Do you really need a refrigerator when you have this?

Materialism and popular culture: The human brain as a machine?

Spiritual Brain: Polish translation rights bought

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Neuroscience is, unfortunately, increasingly taken over by what I often describe as neurobullshipping. You know, neuroeconomics,, neurolaw ... It basically amounts to determining which regions of the brains of carefully chosen subjects light up when certain propositions are introduced.

Relief at last!

Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics ("Neurotrash", Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). 'Bout time someone did, I'd say. What's really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.

He writes,

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the discipline of "Exp-phi" or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced "neuro-ethics", in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people's moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet's experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like "evolutionary" psychology all the time.

Responding to Tallis's article's title, "Neurotrash", I wrote to friends to say, more or less,

What we need is a really big neuro-trash can.

The result of all this nonsense is that neuroscience gets discredited when it is, used appropriately, an immense help in medicine.

Remember, it was neuroscience that established that stroke victims were losing use of limbs through learned helplessness, not irreversible brain damage. Jeffrey Schwartz, Vince Paquette, Mario Beauregard and others have also demonstrated that non-drug, non-invasive treatments of mental disorders actually work - especially important for those disorders that cannot be effectively treated by drugs or surgery. (I am sure there are others whose work I do not know.)

Here's what I know for sure: I remember the rows on rows of beds in the chronic care hospital I used to volunteer at in the 1960s. Compare that to the much more favourable prospects brought about by the Decade of the Brain (1990s)! But it wasn't easy. One neuroscientist all but lost his career introducing the "learned helplessness" concept (why stroke patients, in many cases, lost the use of limbs through simple non-use). Only neuroscience could really have uncovered that.

That's the real story, and Tallis talks about it. We should stick to it.

It's also why I always say neuroscience should stay close to medicine and far from silliness - like which area of the brain lights up if a woman decides to buy the flaming yellow pants with movie star decals instead of the quiet brown pair*.

Seriously, however, in the justice system, neuroscience, inappropriately used, could be quite dangerous. Cf neurolaw.

If we can't convict an alleged perpetrator of a crime on the external evidence, we should not be trying to scan his brain.

Who cares what that guy thinks anyway?

It's not a crime around here to think, only to act in a way that is outside the law. If the prosecution can't prove he did it, then ... they can't make their case, and that's just too bad for them.

And, as I like to say, if you don't like English Common Law (= whose basic principle is that the accused is innocent unless proven guilty), please live in some jurisdiction where no one has ever heard of it. We like it here.

In the meantime, enough with this neurolaw stuff.

(*The Unforgivably Bad Taste region, maybe? Wonder where it is? Not many women could make that work.)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Sometimes, when discussing the much misunderstood Scopes Trial, I have referred to the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, Hunter's Civic Biology, which seems to have been an amalgam of civics and biology, with a dose of eugenics thrown in, and smug assertions about "highest" or "lowest". Bad idea. Enough already with total subject confusion, ecological misunderstanding, and useless social conflict. Here's an interesting site where Ron Ladouceur gives us a tour of exotic textbooks of our storied past.

I am glad my own biology teachers focused on the cell theory of life, the germ theory of disease, and the life and times of the endangered ribbon snake (= ecology).

There is only so much students will take away when they graduate (if they do) , and you want it to be something they can make sense of in dealing with their own life and environment.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "When Listening to Music, Your Brain Is ‘Moving’ Even If You Are Not," a news release from the Society for Neuroscience (10/15/06), we learn,

One of the best-studied features in orientation maps is known as a pinwheel, a small region in which all orientations are represented in segments that appear to come to a point. "A long-standing question is, 'How are neurons arranged in the pinwheel centers?'" says R.C. Reid, PhD, of Harvard Medical School.

Reid provided the answer by using two-photon calcium imaging, which determines the physiological response of hundreds of cells simultaneously as well as their precise location in the cortical circuit.

"By recording from hundreds to thousands of neurons at each pinwheel center, we demonstrated that pinwheel centers are remarkably well organized," he says.

"Neurons selective to different orientations are arranged in an orderly manner even in the very center," he adds. "There was virtually no mixing of cells with different orientation preferences even at the center. Thus, pinwheel centers truly represent singularities in the cortical map." This finding is suggesting extraordinary precision in the development of cortical circuits.

and much else.

Ignore all the yap about evolution in the article, which is - as typical - intended to distract attention from the obvious conclusion.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Even though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition, I sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I don't have gaps in my teeth either. Check the unretouched photos.)

As the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed me about "superstition" the other day.

The issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers. Were they hoping I'd fall in?

The skinny: Some local people want their house numbers changed because they feel the current number assignment is "unlucky."

Look, guys, numbers here are assigned on a strict directional rota. If the number bugs you so much, move.

Don't mess up the street directory for everyone else. Paramedics, fire chiefs, police chiefs, et cetera, might need a directory they can make sense of. You might be glad for that yourself one day.

Anyway, I didn't get a chance to say this on the program so I will now: No numbers are evil or unlucky. All numbers are - in my view - created by God to march in a strict series or else a discoverable* series, and that is what makes mathematics possible. And mathematics is evidence for design, not superstition.

The interview may never have aired. I tend to flub the gap-tooth creationist moron role, so interviews with me are often not aired.

* I am thinking here of numbers like pi, that just go on and on and never shut up, but you can work with them anyway. (You just decide where you want to cut the mike.)

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and academic culture: ID film banned

Darwinism and academic culture: Darwinists blither on in the face of the gathering storm

Biotechnology: The quest to bring back extinct animals

Fun with Mark Steyn, but when isn't Mark Steyn fun?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Provide the Code: for Dawkins' WEASEL Program, we have declared a winner - 377 responses later - and it is Oxfordensis:

It seems that Dawkins used two programs, one in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, and one for a video that he did for the BBC (here's the video-run of the program; fast forward to 6:15). After much beating the bushes, we finally heard from someone named "Oxfordensis," who provided the two PASCAL programs below, which we refer to as WEASEL1 (corresponding to Dawkins's book) and WEASEL2 (corresponding to Dawkins's BBC video). These are by far the best candidates we have received to date.

Go here for more.

Note: Apparently, Bill Dembski is taking care of the award.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In the Huffington Post, Rick Smith (October 9, 2009) notes

In a 2005 article for the United Kingdom's Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, physicist Henry Stapp and psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz showed that sustained concentrated attention on any particular mental experience-a thought, an insight, an image, even a fear-not only kept the brain circuitry involved open and alive but also eventually produced physical changes in the brain's structure. In effect, by increasing attention, you are creating brain architecture specifically suited to the challenges before you. Little wonder, then, that performance should grow dramatically.

Schwartz is the lead author of The Mind and the Brain, which sets forth this thesis in more detail. Basically, our minds become what we focus attention on, and this can be good or bad for us, depending on what that is.

Meanwhile, this Dark Age blog post (October 11 2009) mentions both Mario Beauregard, the third author of the 2005 paper and yours truly as well.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack

Neurolaw: Mind readers bustle into the court room

Mind and society: Why you can trust the people, when they have a chance

Neuroscience: Stuff I didn't need to hear about what people care about, but pass along anyway

Atheism and pop culture: Religious commitment as mild dementia?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).