There is an internet cottage industry of physicians and scientists who regularly excoriate alternative medicine and other non-traditional or even fringe approaches to health or to scientific understanding. Steven Novella, Orac, and a host of other faux “defenders of science” decry the danger to the public from vaccine “denial,” homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, among others. Now, I agree with my medical colleagues that the scientific basis for most of these practices or viewpoints is missing or minimal. I don’t believe that the scientific evidence supports the view that vaccines cause autism. I am not a supporter of “alternative medicine,” and I objected when an effort was made some years ago to expand alternative medicine here at Stony Brook. Alternative medicine, like Read More ›

Mike Dunford and I have disagreed several times over the past couple of years about issues in the ID-Darwinism debate. Mr. Dunford was very upset recently that I had made a minor error in quoting him in a recent blog post. Of course, he offered no answer to my scientific critique of his earlier post, and one has the suspicion that his pique may be related to his difficulty in formulating a credible scientific answer. He fired off an e-mail to the Discovery Institute. Here’s his closing paragraph: …I would not dream of taking a position on whether or not you should continue to provide a platform for someone who is apparently incapable of meeting the basic standards of academic Read More ›

When I was a resident in neurosurgery I had a professor who had the annoying habit of claiming credit for quite a few advances in neurosurgery to which, by the record, he had made no contribution. He would frequently confide to me, in the operating room, “Mike, ya know that operation that we just did. I really developed it, back in the 50’s.” Invariably, the actual record of the development of the operation had nothing to do with my narcissistic professor. Claiming credit for advances that to the uninitiated seems credible is common in medicine and science. Darwinists have an annoying habit of attributing all sorts of advances in medicine and biology to Darwin’s theory. Darwinists have asserted that genetics, Read More ›

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 ›