Carl Zimmer (whose computer is down, or he’d tell us about it) has noticed that Gregg Easterbrook has done it again, firing up his word processor to grace us with yet another round of nonsense.

Easterbrook writes a column on football. OK, but somehow, in his latest, he starts talking about Sylvia Browne, the phony psychic who claims to speak to the dead. To his credit he recognizes that she’s a fraud, but has one peculiar bit of reasoning behind his rejection. Easterbrook (calling himself TMQ, or Tuesday Morning Quarterback) thinks that some of the commonly reported phenomenology of the death experience is evidence against evolution and for a supreme being.

The latter biological possibility is actually one of the reasons TMQ believes that human beings were made by a God who loves us. Why would natural selection have cared about reducing a person’s trauma at death? All natural selection cares about is fitness in passing down genes; if after replicating its DNA an organism dies in pain or panic, what’s that to evolution? In Darwinian terms, there would be no “selection pressure” favoring the peaceful death over the horrible death. Yet there appear to be biological mechanisms that help most people die peacefully. Why are such mechanisms in our physiologies? Maybe because somebody loves us.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of a few flaws in his logic.

• The big one: most people don’t die peacefully. Are all the painful deaths due to cancer evidence against his god?
• An obvious consequence of death is that organ systems may be progressively shutting down. The dying may not be able to express what they are experiencing, and loss of brain function may mean they aren’t experiencing, period.
• Evolutionists don’t argue that every feature of every organism is a consequence of selection.
• We could easily imagine that the processes invoked by the stress of death are the same processes that are adaptively useful for dealing with less terminal stresses in life. It’s a spandrel.
• There are other explanations, such as that painless death is less traumatic to your children and is thereby beneficial, but I don’t give them much credit.

Basically, he’s trying to claim that the fact that people sometimes lose consciousness before dying is a god-given grace that is unlikely to have a material cause. What a dweeb.

Oh, well. He did manage to squeeze in photos of pageant winners and cheerleaders in bikinis, so the article isn’t all bad. The pretty pictures may also explain how his brains were scrambled.