Once more into the breech. Remember that dreadful series of four Intelligent Design articles in World magazine? Jason Rosenhouse has tackled the articles by Johnson and Dembski, and I took on Wells, which leaves one more: Jeffrey Schwartz. Though it leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth, we cannot leave such ugly droppings on the sidewalk for others to step in, so here we go once more.

Schwartz is actually a legitimate, competent researcher who has published some interesting work on cognitive behavior therapy. In his association with the Discovery Institute, unfortunately, all we see is a load of supernatural baggage, wilful misinterpretation of some good science, and a lot of wishful thinking...again.

While primitive, uneducated, and painfully unsophisticated people might be beguiled into believing that they had minds and wills capable of exerting effort and rising above the realm of the merely material, this was just-as Daniel Dennett, a widely respected philosopher of the day, delighted in putting it-an example of a “user illusion”: that is, the quaint fantasy of those who failed to realize, due to educational deficiencies or plain thick-headedness, that “a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances.” Were you one of the rubes who believed that people are capable of making free and genuinely moral decisions? Then of course haughty contempt, or at best pity, was the only appropriate demeanor a member of the intellectual elite could possibly direct your way.

This is classic creationist dichotomizing. Where they typically rant that we’re either damned godless meat or blessed creations of a loving god, with no other possibilities, in this Schwartz is here pretending that there are only two possibilities: we are either unfeeling robots incapable of anything but preprogrammed decisions, or that we are human beings, with all of the complexities that implies.

Stuff and nonsense.

Materialism and naturalism do not deny complexity, flexibility, depth, emotion, love, sophistication, fun, morality, decision-making. I save my pity for those who think it does.

On a societal and cultural level the damage such spurious and unwarranted elite opinions wreaked on the world at large was immense. For if everything people do results solely from their brains, and everything the brain does results solely from material causes, then people are no different than any other complicated machine and the brain is no different in principle than any very complex computer. If matter determines all, everything is passive and no one ever really does anything, or to be more precise, no one is really responsible for anything they think, say, or do.

How often have we heard this kind of crap from the blinkered conservative nutcases of the far right? “If we didn’t believe in god, we’d run around raping and murdering people!” “If we do not enforce absolute proscriptions on certain behaviors, it will lead to man-on-dog sex!"

I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe in god; the concept provides no constraint or incentive for my behavior. I also don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, or immortal souls, and similarly those concepts do not shape my behavior in any way. Yet somehow I’ve managed to be a functioning, law-abiding, responsible member of society, with a wife, three kids, and a cat, and I have no desire to harm anyone, let alone sate my lusts on some poor dog. I’m the kind of person Schwartz likes to believe doesn’t exist, because moral, loving people who do as they will without the promise of some nebulous supernatural torment or reward cannot be accommodated in his worldview, where evil and immorality flow as natural consequences of “Darwinism”.

Happily for the future of humanity, in the early years of the 21st century this all started to change. The reasons why, on a scientific level, grew out of the coming together of some changes in perspective that had occurred in physics and neuroscience during the last decades of the previous century. Specifically, the theory of physics called quantum mechanics was seen to be closely related, especially in humans, to the discovery in brain science called neuroplasticity: the fact that throughout the lifespan the brain is capable of being rewired, and that in humans at least, this rewiring could be caused directly by the action of the mind.

Something is dreadfully skewed in that paragraph. There are assumptions Schwartz is making that are simply wrong.

You don’t need quantum mechanics to explain the activity of the brain, particularly activities of the kind Schwartz is describing—unless you are actually doing quantum physics, I consider the habit of tossing in the word “quantum” in inappropriate contexts one consistent sign that you are dealing with a pseudoscientific crackpot.

Neuroplasticity does not require quantum mechanics, nor do I see it as having any value in understanding the processes of plasticity. Neuroplasticity is not a special property of humans. We can study it in insects and sea-slugs, and there has been no indication that there is a qualitatively different set of molecular (or submolecular) events involved in people.

It is not at all surprising that rewiring can be caused directly by the action of the mind. Again, I think the problem here is that Schwartz has this simple-minded preconception of how scientists envision the workings of the mind: it is definitely not a fixed clockwork that drives unthinking, zombie-like activity. And we’ve long held the idea that internal activity works to modify the way the brain works, at least since Hebb in the 1940s.

What Schwartz is clearly trying to do here is to appropriate basic ideas that have been won by hard-earned effort during a long history of the application of the principles of that ol’ bugaboo, methodological naturalism. He’d like readers to think that recent advances in the understanding of fundamental neuroscience, our knowledge of things like memory and learning (here dressed up in the lovely jargon word, “neuroplasticity”, which sounds so much more science-y and abstract) is dependent on revolutionary metaphysical viewpoints safely distanced from actual discussion and challenge by tying them to the difficult and similarly science-y, abstract realm of quantum mechanics. It’s misdirection and pretentiousness, nothing more.

In the 1990s it was discovered that OCD sufferers were very capable of learning how to resist capitulating to these brain-related symptoms by using a mental action called “mindful awareness” when confronting them. In a nutshell, mindful awareness means using your “mind’s eye” to view your own inner life and experiences the way you would if you were standing, as it were, outside yourself-most simply put, it means learning to use a rational perspective when viewing your own inner experience.

We have a good idea of the biological nature of the problem in OCD (although we don’t have as clear an idea of the causes, which are almost certainly multiple). It’s associated with damage to a set of inhibitory pathways that involve the basal ganglia, in particular the caudate nucleus, where we can see hyperactivity in OCD patients with brain MRIs. Schwartz’s claims aren’t at all radical or revolutionary; we also already know that this hyperactivity can be treated with varying degrees of success with pharmacology and cognitive behavior therapy. This is plainly acknowledged in, for instance, that big neurobiology textbook, Principles of Neural Science by Kandel, Schwartz (not Jeffrey, James), and Jessel, who even cite one of JM Schwartz’s papers.

This observation is not a surprise. It is not in conflict with materialist explanations for the workings of the brain. It does not negate the observed fact that neurological problems like OCD are a consequence of errors in circuitry or changes in the levels of chemicals in the brain. That we know that thought can change brain chemistry is evidence that the mind and brain are one; I’d be better persuaded to accept Schwartz’s apparent mind-body dualism if changes in thought or action were unaccompanied by changes in the material organization of the brain.

The rest, as they say, is history. Once a solid scientific theory was in place to explain how the mind’s power to focus attention could systematically rewire the brain, and that the language of our mental and spiritual life is necessary to empower the mind to do so, the materialist dogma was toppled. We may not have all lived happily ever after in any simplistic sense, but at least science is no longer on the side of those who claim human beings are no different in principle than a machine.

Errm, what solid scientific theory? As in all of the pieces in World magazine, note the damning elision. They never even speculate! Schwartz can’t even bring himself to plainly state what he’s getting at—he seems to want to claim that there is some non-material essence (soul?) that is driving the phenomena he describes (without actually admitting it), and that the Intelligent Design creationists are going to put the idea on a firm footing with science. I don’t see how that is going to happen with the kind of cowardly pussy-footing, vague handwaving, and miserable comprehension of real science that the gang at the Discovery Institute practices.

Look, this is a horrible, horrible review. I have absolutely nothing good to say about any of the dreadful dreck spinning out of the Discovery Institute, and really there is nothing positive I can recommend from this, other than that you can just crumple up World and toss it into the trash. So just to add a touch of good news to this, let me recommend something worthwhile.

I’ve been reading Steven Berlin Johnson’s latest book, Mind Wide Open. Let me just say that he is the Anti-Schwartz. The book is about the triumphs of good old materialistic science in actually learning new, fascinating, exciting things about how the brain works. The vibrant research described here is far more vital and promising than the old, flabby, dead nonsense we see coming from those vacuous creationists.

I’ll say more about Mind Wide Open in the future, once I’ve finished it and had a little time to digest it. It’s definitely among the best popular books on modern neuroscience that I’ve read, ranking right up there with Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory.