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Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Monday, February 7, 2011
Friday, April 23, 2010
Why do the poets not speak of it?
The Improbability Pump (Jerry Coyne in The Nation)
Readers of The Big E are probably familiar with Jerry Coyne's incisive comments on science and religion, often published to youtube.com in video form, and this long article is of a piece with his other output.
I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, and in church we often heard denunciations of Darwin's evolutionary theory, all with the same tired objections which do not require enumeration here. To this day I'm embarrassed that I was ever captivated by such arguments. The Drake equation, for example, was paraded before us by so-called scientific creationists (chiefly John Clayton) to express the improbability of life arising by "chance:" only one kind of galaxy, one kind of parent star, one range of planetary orbit, one range of planetary makeup, and so forth, can give rise to "life as we know it." Though the constants in the Drake equation are all made up ones, it is true that even conservative guesses for these values do multiply out to an impressive degree of improbability: only a tiny fraction of worlds are potentially fecund. What was never mentioned in these sermons disguised as scientific lectures, was the denominator in this fraction: the staggeringly huge number of galaxies (even within the now-provincial observable Universe that we knew at the time of speaking, before the Hubble deep field drove home the point with not just stars but galaxies, "like dust"), stars within each galaxy, and so forth.
What really "gets me" about the rejection of evolutionary theory is how creationists (and the children they indoctrinate) are cheated of the appreciation of the world which science reveals to us. For Darwin's idea is not merely simple, apprehendable by even young children, but a beautiful one. That every living thing I will ever see is my cousin, that the world is very, very old, "circling on according to the fixed law of gravity" within a Universe that is even older, that complex things have simple beginnings, built incrementally over millions of generations, is so wonderful to contemplate, so special, that I weep that a huge segment of our culture is willfully blind to it.
Readers of The Big E are probably familiar with Jerry Coyne's incisive comments on science and religion, often published to youtube.com in video form, and this long article is of a piece with his other output.
I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, and in church we often heard denunciations of Darwin's evolutionary theory, all with the same tired objections which do not require enumeration here. To this day I'm embarrassed that I was ever captivated by such arguments. The Drake equation, for example, was paraded before us by so-called scientific creationists (chiefly John Clayton) to express the improbability of life arising by "chance:" only one kind of galaxy, one kind of parent star, one range of planetary orbit, one range of planetary makeup, and so forth, can give rise to "life as we know it." Though the constants in the Drake equation are all made up ones, it is true that even conservative guesses for these values do multiply out to an impressive degree of improbability: only a tiny fraction of worlds are potentially fecund. What was never mentioned in these sermons disguised as scientific lectures, was the denominator in this fraction: the staggeringly huge number of galaxies (even within the now-provincial observable Universe that we knew at the time of speaking, before the Hubble deep field drove home the point with not just stars but galaxies, "like dust"), stars within each galaxy, and so forth.
What really "gets me" about the rejection of evolutionary theory is how creationists (and the children they indoctrinate) are cheated of the appreciation of the world which science reveals to us. For Darwin's idea is not merely simple, apprehendable by even young children, but a beautiful one. That every living thing I will ever see is my cousin, that the world is very, very old, "circling on according to the fixed law of gravity" within a Universe that is even older, that complex things have simple beginnings, built incrementally over millions of generations, is so wonderful to contemplate, so special, that I weep that a huge segment of our culture is willfully blind to it.
...Which Is, I Suppose, What They Want.
21 April 2010 by Andy CoghlanMagazine issue 2757.
WHEN we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure, areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active. That's the finding of a study which looked at people's response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers.To identify the brain processes underlying the influence of charismatic individuals, Uffe Schjødt of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues turned to Pentecostal Christians, who believe that some people have divinely inspired powers of healing, wisdom and prophecy.Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Schjødt and his colleagues scanned the brains of 20 Pentecostalists and 20 non-believers while playing them recorded prayers. The volunteers were told that six of the prayers were read by a non-Christian, six by an ordinary Christian and six by a healer. In fact, all were read by ordinary Christians.Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer. Activity diminished to a lesser extent when the speaker was supposedly a normal Christian (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsq023).Schjødt says that this explains why certain individuals can gain influence over others, and concludes that their ability to do so depends heavily on preconceived notions of their authority and trustworthiness.It's not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians.
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