Uncommon Descent Contest Question 18: Can the ancient reptile brain help explain human psychology? If so, how? If not, why not?

(Note: Go here for Contest 16 ("Are materialist atheists smarter than other types of believers?") and here for Contest 17 ("Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion?"). )

We have, we are told, three brains - reptilian, mammalian, and primate. Here is a conventional science explanation, and here is the pop psychology that results.

It all sounds bit too neat to me, for two reasons: First, all the areas are interconnected, and second, it is not clear that reptiles uniformly fail emotionally compared to many mammals. See here, for example.

Honestly, it all sounds like pop psychology, straight from the airport paperback kiosk to the bored passenger. But I would be glad to know more. Here is a popularrendition of "reptile brain" theory, as employed by some lawyers in law courts.

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007), which argues for non-materialist neuroscience, answer this question: If so, how? If not, why not? What can it really tell us?

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 18 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Also, here are some posts at The Mindful Hack that may be of some use or interest:

Reptile brain: Even reptiles don't have one, or not exactly, anyway

Rooks in captivity show more feats using tools. [How come some birds are so smart and others are fairly stupid?]

Great majority of neuroscientists on wrong track?

Is your brain full of anachronistic junk?

Reptilian brain a barrier to investment?

Some fun You Tubes:

Training an alligator:



Alligators and crocodiles as parents







This one is not very funny at all - the alligator death roll - and is presented only as a caution:



Lots of people have died or suffered serious injuries trying to outsmart a crocodilian in a situation where the reptile is the expert.

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 17: Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion?

Well, it certainly sounds like debunking to me. According to the evolutionary psychologists, either compassion is a useful gene or it somehow spreads our selfish genes or it is an accidental "spandrel" in our makeup. Or whatever. It's not a choice, and it's not identification with another human being derived from the independent reality of a mind thinking today. Humans do it the way ants might do something else.

Evolutionary psychologists never feel the need to debunk rage or deceit, for example, so why compassion?

Here, I reference Robert ("Non-Zero") Wright's effort to explain the evolution of compassion. See also Clive Hayden here and Steve Pinker here.

Darwinists and materialists in general keep scratching this itch. Why? What is the threat? Also, how convincing are their claims that society will be better off if we accept their version?

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007): Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion? What's in it for them?

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

(Note: For the record, compassion is not necessarily a virtue. The social worker who inappropriately identifies with an abusive mom, as opposed to the child she is employed by the government to protect, is showing misdirected compassion that can end in the child's death. Compassion must be allied with reason and virtue in order to count as reasonable or virtuous.)

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 17 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

Notes on compassion that may be of interest:

Psychology: Compassion is an emotion, not a virtue unless disciplined, prof says

The philosopher and his mother, a moral tale

Entrepreneur doctor honours promise

Desperate atheist rage

Is the altruism spot edging out the God spot in pop science?

The power of one: Compassion is strictly a one-to-one thing

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 16: Are materialist atheists smarter than other types of believers?

At any rate, so claimed a 1986 study about which Regis Nicoll writes here.

I say "smarter than other types of believers" because atheism is a form of belief like any other. Usually, in North America today, materialist atheism is meant. There are non-materialist varieties of atheism, but they are not usually strident, like the new (materialist) atheists.

Interestingly, materialist atheism tends to develop structures similar to other religious institutions (the latest is summer camps for kids). It all reminds me of Julian Huxley's 1959 proposal for a religion of evolution - but that for another day.

So, for a free copy of the The Spiritual Brain, which argues for non-materialist neuroscience, provide the best answer to this question: Are materialist atheists really smarter than other people? By what measure would we know? What difference does social privilege - such as tenure at a tax-funded institution and general acceptance in popular media make in determining who is smart?

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 16 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.


Here's a bit of background on the subject.

Atheism and popular culture: Religious commitment as mild dementia

Albert Einstein on the importance of faith in the reality of what we see

An event I did not happen to attend: British atheist graces Toronto

Spirituality and popular culture: Amazon's #1 atheist book is Christian

Religion: There is atheism, and then there is materialist atheism

The new atheists: Santa's sleigh came and went, and never gave them what they needed

Intelligent design and ecology: Environmental change via biosphere feedback mechanisms

British physicist David Tyler writes at Access Research Network (10 December 2009):

With millions of eyes on Copenhagen, this seems an appropriate time to ask whether ID thinking has any relevance to understanding the Earth's environment. Can design concepts help us weigh the diverse and often conflicting messages? I think ID is helpful, because features of the Earth's environments and ecologies start to take on new meaning. In this blog, I am thinking particularly of negative feedback mechanisms. Human design engineers will use negative feedback to promote stability and positive feedback to amplify an input signal. They select the mechanisms they need to achieve the desired effect. By analogy, if the Earth is designed for life, we would expect to see negative feedback mechanisms predominating to achieve stable environments. What do we find?

In the scientific news recently are two research papers relevant to biological feedback mechanisms. The first concerns the quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), a dominant species in many northern forest ecosystems. "Aspen growth has increased an average of 53% over the past five decades, primarily in response to the 19.2% rise in ambient CO2 levels." "Trees are already responding to a relatively nominal increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 50 years," says Rick Lindroth, a UW-Madison professor of ecology and an expert on plant responses to climate change. [. . .] The study's findings are important as the world's forests, which cover about 30 percent of the Earth's land surface, play an important role in regulating climate and sequestering greenhouses gases. The forests of the Northern Hemisphere, in particular, act as sinks for carbon dioxide, helping to offset the increase in levels of the greenhouse gas, widely viewed as a threat to global climate stability. A second study is concerned with the impact of fertilisers on the species diversity of grasslands. These chemicals more than double the availability of nitrogen and whilst this stimulates some plants to thrive, others are quickly out-competed and they die off. "In a long-term open-air experiment, grassland assemblages planted with 16 species were grown under all combinations of ambient and elevated CO2 and ambient and elevated N. Over 10 years, elevated N reduced species richness by 16% at ambient CO2 but by just 8% at elevated CO2. This resulted from multiple effects of CO2 and N on plant traits and soil resources that altered competitive interactions among species. Elevated CO2 thus ameliorated the negative effects of N enrichment on species richness."

These are but two examples of negative feedback to promote stability. There have been many examples like this in the past, and there will be many more to come. Examples of positive feedback are rare. The effect this has in my mind is to reinforce the thought that the Earth's environments and ecosystems have a robustness about them. This means that when a catastrophe comes, like the eruption of Mt St Helens volcano, recolonisation rarely takes as long as was first anticipated. Whilst this does not prove the Earth is designed, the marks of design are easy to find and the evidence is fully consistent with design.

Go here for the rest.

This reminds me of something that Sarah Mims, daughter of Forrest (one of 50 best brains in science) Mims discovered a couple of years ago, that fungus spores travel on smoke from forest fires, establishing themselves in non-burnt-out zones. Here's more. Sarah Mims has the unusual distinction of being the lead author of a science paper* while still in high school.

Anyway, I'm one hundred per cent in favour of better home and planet, but would like to help out with a recycling program for "The End Is Near" sandwich boards, which too many people wear these days. Things have been worse. I remember when pollution particles collected on the windowsill outside my apartment in Toronto in 1970. Now, it's just bugs or snow.

*Sarah A. Mims and Forrest M. Mims III, Fungal spores are transported long distances in smoke from biomass fires, Atmospheric Environment 38, 651-655 (2004).

Toothless birds: Deprogramming from Darwinism

We are informed in this New Scientist article that "Early birds may have dropped teeth to get airborne." (Colin Barras, 08 December 2009)

If true, it would be no surprise. It's the same reason airports impose luggage weight restrictions on passengers. Not clear why this is even a story. Apparently, four extinct groups of birds all lost their teeth independently.

That theory is "as good as any other", says Mike Benton at the University of Bristol, UK, though he remains sceptical. "Losing teeth wouldn't make a huge difference to balance in the air."

Essentially, the big problem for birds isn't losing their teeth, it is replacing them. The birds needed a whole digestive system that substitutes small stones and grit, swallowed into the "crop", and the behaviour pattern of seeking them out and swallowing them.

I wonder how all that would happen by a multitude of slow Darwinian steps before they starved to death?

There's got to be more to this. Why did all four known groups lose their teeth without exception? (Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0885)

(Note: ) It's coffee time. Cartoon birds do have teeth. Here are some images. It's interesting that, when making a bird think and talk like a human, the cartoonist cannot resist adding teeth.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: