My Reply to Dr. Novella’s Critique of Intentionality as a Property of the Mind

Steven Novella recently replied to my post in which I pointed out six properties of the mind that were not properties of matter. Strict materialistic theories of the mind restrict themselves to purely materialistic explanations. The difficulty is that the salient properties of the mind — intentionality, qualia, continuity of self through time, restricted access of thoughts, incorrigibility of mental states, and free will — are not known to be properties of matter, including brain matter. The important things that characterize the mind are not material. How then can the mind be explained completely by materialism? I’ll review the first property (intentionality) here, and the other five in subsequent posts. I’ll first give my original observation about it, then Dr. Read More ›

Oh…No…No…No…This Is Important Spit!

In his recent post on Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers comments on the “breakthrough” in our understanding of human evolution that has emerged from an analysis of the genes in humans and apes that code for salivary amylase, an enzyme in spit that helps digest carbohydrates. For unfathomable reasons, this research, led by Nathaniel Dominy and George Perry, has captured quite a bit of attention in the scientific community and even in the press. Concurrent with publication of their paper in Nature Genetics last year, Dominy and colleagues put out a press release entitled: “Extra gene copies were enough to make early humans’ mouths water.” Dominy bizarrely credits mutations in salivary amylase with the evolution of the human brain:

If Neuroscience Is a Victory for Materialism, What Would Defeat Look Like?

Dr. Steven Novella has taken exception to my recent post suggesting that the materialist theory of the mind has characteristics of a superstition. In the recent past, the Yale neurologist has been so confident of the truth of his materialistic ideology on the mind-brain problem that he has asserted that “The materialist hypothesis- that the brain causes consciousness- has made a number of predictions, and every single prediction has been validated.” Leaving aside the hubris (has any reputable scientist ever claimed that ‘every single prediction’ of his pet theory has been validated?), one of Dr. Novella’s implicit predictions seems to have frustratingly failed to materialize. In his latest post, Dr Novella seems to have been certain that, following his pronouncement Read More ›

Mike Dunford: “Alleles That Survive, Survive”

Recently I used the analogy of a genetic disease (spinal bifida) that kept afflicted men out of the army in WWI to point out the vacuousness of “evolutionary” explanations for disease. The “evolutionary adaptation” provided by the handicap may have led to a transient increased prevalence of men with spina bifida in England, but from the standpoint of medicine, the evolutionary vignette was of no tangible value. Medicine needs more than stories about differential survival, which is the only unique thing that evolutionary biology offers to medicine. The genuine accomplishments of medical science and practice, for which Darwinists persistently claim credit, such as the understanding of bacterial antibiotic resistance or heterozygote advantage in the protection from disease (such as the Read More ›

Darwinian Medicine 2.0

I recently pointed out that Darwinian stories about the evolution of diseases were of no tangible use to medical science. Few physicians and medical scientists and educators with genuine experience with medical education, research, and practice, and who are not ideologically committed to the materialist-atheist metaphysics for which Darwinism is the creation myth, honestly believe that evolutionary biology is important to medicine. There are many important disciplines in medicine today, such as microbiology, epidemiology, molecular and population genetics, and mathematical biology, that deal with the real science for which evolutionary biologists routinely claim credit, and these genuine medical disciplines, unlike evolutionary biology, are very important to medicine. We’ve done very well for more than half a century without Darwinian medicine. Read More ›