Literature
Post details: Is your brain endowed with "anachronistic junk"?
06/07/07
Is your brain endowed with "anachronistic junk"?
We've had the "Junk DNA" debacle; now it is the turn of the brain to be analysed as endowed with "anachronistic junk". According to David Linden, the brain is a product of the tinkering blind watchmaker espoused by Darwinist biologists. Unfortunately, few readers will realise that this "central thesis" is a deduction from dogma and not empirical evidence. The data that is discussed is perfectly capable of being understood within a design perspective, including the tendency for our minds to distort reality and to act foolishly.
The reviewer, although sympathetic, baulks at the crassness of the thesis: "More difficult to show is that the use of pre-existing parts imposes functional constraints or 'bad design'." Also: "Linden is right to stress that brains evolved, but hasty to conclude that they are flawed in their design. We still know too little about the brain's inner workings to judge how well it does its job. What we do know, and what The Accidental Mind helps us to realize, is that the human brain is not designed as many have imagined."
Some of us look at the biology of the brain and find exquisite design, not an organ full of flaws. It is true to say that the science of understanding the brain is in its infancy: without hesitation, a prediction can be offered that, as research develops, exquisite design will replace "an imperfect amalgam of shoddy components" in the minds of researchers. This book tells us more about the ideology of its writer than it does about the human mind.
Books like this, and reviews like this, demonstrate yet again how unlevel the playing field is in contemporary science journals. Contributions that deny design, meaning and intelligent agency are given space, whereas proponents of design, meaning and intelligent agency are excluded (and told they have abandoned the scientific method). This is a good example of the tendency for "our minds to distort reality and to act foolishly"!
Brain botch
Georg Striedter
Nature 447, 640 (7 June 2007) | doi:10.1038/447640a
A review of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David Linden, Harvard University Press: 2007. 288pp.
The human brain, and hence the human mind, is not an optimal, designed-from-scratch apparatus. Rather, it is an imperfect amalgam of shoddy components. That is the central thesis of David Linden's new book The Accidental Mind. Neurons are slow, leaky, and unreliable - hardly ideal computing elements. The whole brain, too, is not designed to the plan of some omnipotent engineer. Instead, evolution has endowed it with plenty of 'anachronistic junk': Which is why, according to Linden, our minds often distort reality and can lead us to act foolishly. [snip]
See also:
http://accidentalmind.org
Literature
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| << < | > >> | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
Search
Categories
Archives
- May 2008 (6)
- April 2008 (13)
- March 2008 (10)
- February 2008 (11)
- January 2008 (18)
- December 2007 (8)
- November 2007 (12)
- October 2007 (12)
- September 2007 (9)
- August 2007 (5)
- July 2007 (18)
- June 2007 (10)
- more...
Linkblog
Links - Groups and Organizations
- Access Research Network
- Discovery Institute
- Evolution News Blog
Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
- Intelligent Design Network (IDNet)
- Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center
- Intelligent Reasoning
A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
- International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
- Telic Thoughts
We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
- The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
- The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA)
- www.themonkeytrial.com
Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.
Links - Of General Interest
- A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
- A Quick Guide to Sequenced Genomes
- ARN Related Web Links
- Creation/Evolution Quotes
Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
- CreationEvolutionDesign
Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
- Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
- ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
- John Mark Reynolds Blog
A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
- NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Misc
Syndicate this blog 
What is RSS?
powered by
Original template design by François PLANQUE.
