How Darwin and Wallace Split over the Human Mind

Alfred Russel Wallace, Animal Liberation, Anthony Flew, Anthony O’Hear, biology, consciousness, cosmogonism, Darwin, David Bentley Hart, David Hume, deism, Donald Hoffman, Erasmus Darwin, Europeans, Evolution, Francis Crick, How Darwin and Wallace Split over the Human Mind, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Lawrence Krauss, Lucretius, materialism, Michael Ruse, mind, natural selection, natural theology, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Peter Singer, Racism, rationalism, Richard Dawkins, Richard Rorty, Richard Spilsbury, Stephen Hawking, Ternate letter, The Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley, Tom Wolfe
Marvelously free of racist prejudice, Wallace noted in his fieldwork in far-flung locations that primitive tribes were intellectually the equals of Europeans. Source
Read More

How Plants Talk When We’re Not Around

anesthesia, associative learning, biology, Claude Bernard, communications, consciousness, fungi, gene expression, glutamate, Hailing Jin, heliotropism, Life Sciences, Mimosa pudica, miRNAs, nervous system, Neuroscience & Mind, plants, psychology, Rainer Hedrich, RNA, sensory hair, shameplant, TMAO, Venus flytrap, vernalization, worms
One genuine surprise in recent decades has been the discovery that plants have nervous systems like animals. Source
Read More

Can LSD Help Us Understand the Mind–Brain Relationship?

Aldous Huxley, brain, brain injuries, consciousness, Cornell University, Ferdinand Schiller, fMRI, forgetfulness, functional magnetic resonance imaging, hypnosis, Ian Sample, LSD, matter, mind, near-death experiences, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Oxford University, psychedelic drugs, The Guardian
Aldous Huxley noted that LSD “lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life.” Source
Read More

More Dispatches from the Science/Religion Classroom

consciousness, cosmology, Darwinian theory, Darwinians, Evolution, Faith & Science, fine-tuning, Francis Collins, geneticists, mathematics, methodological naturalism, natural selection, origin of life, particle physics, Philip Davies, population genetics, Richard Goldschmidt, Richard Lewontin, The Goldilocks Enigma, The Language of God, universe
Students are adept at spotting the incongruities, double standards, and tendentious arguments that often accompany methodological naturalism. Source
Read More