Phrenology has long been discredited. In brief, this 100+ year-old theory of personality and mental illness asserted that psychological characteristics could be read in the shape of the skull. While a large brow meant one thing, a shallow area on the top of the head meant another. Depending on its location.
But alas, psychiatrists can’t diagnose individuals today by feeling their heads, as one might test a melon for freshness.
The phrenologists may have been heading in the right direction, however (pun unintended). MRI research over the past couple decades has been examining the link between deep brain structure/form and psychological characteristics.
[T]he brains of schizophrenic patients have abnormalities in the shape and asymmetry of the hippocampus.
Should we consider these types of study neo-Phrenology via MRI?
Personally, I think there may be something to “deep phrenology.” But I also recognize that while this research may help us to understand the working (and disorders) of the brain better, I am skeptical that one day they will be used as definitive diagnostic tools. There can be a tremendous gap between discovering average differences in brains and applying the knowledge to individual cases.
But who knows? Maybe in the distant future users of services such as match.com won’t need to answer a lengthy questionnaire. Instead, they’ll use their handy USB head-scanner to “tell” about themselves. And be matched to the melon of their dreams.
The vast distances above contain more than simple, individual stars. Much more.
In the less-vast distances of the “interweb” there is much more material than one person could ever read. May I point you in the direction of two blog carnivals recently compiled?
1) First, over at TechSkeptic’s Data Daily we have the most recent edition of the Skeptics’ Circle. This one cleverly and picturesquely presented as A Skeptical Journey Through the Universe!
Hmm. I wonder . . . is skepticism more of a liberal endeavor or a conservative one? Most skeptics I know tend to be at least socially liberal. Yet we can be viewed/portrayed as intellectually conservative by believers in woo. We lack the imagination and freedom to see the validity of their unconventional beliefs. Or so they allege.
Maybe we non-believers in the Biblical Creation story should show some compassion toward non-believers in evolution. For the very ground they walk contains fossil evidence which they must deny or rationalize away. If that weren’t bad enough, the rapidly advancing field of genome research is revealing a trail of clues leading back not to a Creator, but to ever more remote ancestral forms.
Sometimes maintaining ignorance just ain’t easy.
Consider this relatively run-of-the-mill science news release: Evolutionary Event Underlying Origin Of Dachshunds, Dogs With Short Legs, Discovered. This article, like hundreds of others, is not pro-Darwin or anti-Gawd. It is simply pro-better-understanding. And that understanding has threatening implications for those who resist evolving on a cognitive level.
First, the finding:
A single evolutionary event appears to explain the short, curved legs that characterize all of today’s dachshunds, corgis, basset hounds and at least 16 other breeds of dogs, a team led by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health.
Now the intellectually treacherous part . . . to benighted minds:
“Every species, including canine and human, carries an amazing record of evolution scripted in its genome that can teach us about the mechanisms at work in biology, as well as about human health and disease,” said NHGRI Scientific Director Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D. “This work provides surprising evidence of a new way in which genome evolution may serve to generate diversity within a species.”
Oh-oh. DNA research spells disaster for Creationists. Maybe not today. But one day.
In some cases ignorance may be bliss, but in others it is emotionally taxing hard work. You’ve got to sympathize with the old-school fundamentalists.
In a few days my wife and I depart for the Bahamas. No, not for the resorts. In fact, we’ll be staying miles away from that part of the island. Affordable access to a reef is the reason. It’s not the best reef in the world, but there is miles of it, a brief, inflatable kayak-paddle away.
Off the Florida shore nearest where we live there is sand, sand, and more sand. Not a rich ecosystem for wildlife. Reefs, in contrast, teem with life. And I can’t wait to do some silent, underwater exploring.
I remember reading about a statistical finding from a few years back. The average CEO of major U.S. corporations is significantly taller than the average non-CEO. It seems that it is easier for people to metaphorically rise above the crowd when they literally do so.
[T]aller people, particularly men, earn more money – with every five centimetres of height being worth about $950 per annum.
Humans, it seems, have an innate height prejudice. Why? As you may have discovered through my An Almighty Alpha posts, my answer is “because we are primates — a species primed to establish and recognize hierarchical relations.” Being tall sends an impressive non-verbal/vocal message, accurate or not, and while gestures of dominance include upward movement, submissive gestures go the other way.
Sure, show respect for people. But must we respect their ideas? As you can surmise from the cartoon below (thanks to www.atheistcartoons.com) I generally don’t think so.
Of course, the “respect it or not” is an overly simplistic question. To best and most fully answer the question we’d have to add some when, wheres and hows.
Our kind tends to love little ones: newborn babies and toddling children. But not all equally. Those that more resemble us we tend to love more. And I don’t mean in terms of inter-species love, although it is likely true in that case as well (i.e., humans tend to be more fond of mammals with two, forward-facing eyes than we are of, say, many-eyed arachnids).
What children do we tend to love best? Those that are most closely related to us. It certainly makes genetic sense. (Those selfish genes!) A recent study confirms this tendency. The ScienceDaily post, Fathers Spend More Time With Children Who Resemble Them, Study Suggests, begins this way:
Darwin’s theory of evolution predicts that men will take more care of children that look like them.
Time out! A bit of critical thinking here. Does Darwin’s theory really predict the above? Hmm. . . implies? Or one can infer from?
Semantic nit-picking aside, the researchers did find a correlation between these two measured variables: 1) the rating of similarity of looks between father and child by strangers & 2) the mother’s rating of the amount of time a father spent looking at, interacting with individual children, as well as the amount of money he gave to them.
Interesting. Sure, adopted children can be very well-loved. But for fathers, in the least, resemblance (as a cue to genetic relatedness) plays a role in which children are loved best.
Well, kind ‘of. I guess. Without clouds, no flower petals. But the interconnection in this case is not magic or manifesting the influence of some sort of spiritual glue. It’s rain. In this instance, at least, the presumed profound interconnectedness of the universe is all wet.
Here’s a fact about me: I’m deaf in one eye and extremely hard-of-hearing in the other.
Huh?
Furthermore, I suspect that the sterling silver spoons in our cutlery drawer are very weakly connected to the piles of lion dung on the plains of the Serengeti. If at all.
My point: To sound spiritually profound, say or write something general. Something not obviously true, but not obviously false or obtuse. If you get specific . . . not so profound. Why? For an answer to this question I suggest examining an inkblot through a microscope.
