This article originally appeared in Psychology Today.

By Daniel R. Hawes

An article appeared in PLoS one this past May which describes brain differences between Vegetarians, Vegans and Omnivores in the way they process pictures of animal suffering.

The study in question is a neuroimaging study intent on investigating whether

“the neural representation of conditions of abuse and suffering might be different among subjects who made different feeding choice due to ethical reasons, and thus result in the engagement of different components of the brain networks associated with empathy and social cognition”

The hypothesis behind this study is based on the observation that Vegetarians and Vegans tend to base their decision to avoid animal products on ethical grounds. Assuming that Vegetarians and Vegans – because of their underlying moral philosophies – show greater empathy towards animal suffering, it is very well possible that these differences in empathy extend beyond the animal domain and show up as general differences in the degree of empathy felt towards other humans also; even at a neurological level.

The study – in basic terms – investigates this hypothesis by placing subjects into a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine and looking at the “activation” of different brain areas as subjects view a randomized series of pictures. The pictures used for this study included neutral scenes and an even share of scenes depicting various kinds of animal and human suffering.

The first main finding of this study is that, compared to Omnivores, Vegans and Vegetarians show higher activation of empathy related brain areas (e.g. Anterior Cingular Cortex and left Inferior Frontal Gyrus) when observing scenes of suffering; whether it be animal or human suffering.

Further, pictures of animal suffering (in contrast to pictures human suffering) recruited specific brain regions in Vegans and Vegetarians that were not differentially recruited by Omnivores. These were areas which are thought to be associated with higher-order representations of the self and self values (e.g. medial Prefrontal Cortex).

In addition to generally higher activations in the above mentioned areas, a second main finding of this study is that there are certain brain areas which only Vegetarians and Vegans seem to activate when processing pictures of suffering. In particular, when viewing pictures of human suffering, Vegetarians in this study recruited additional brain areas thought to be associated with bodily representations that distinguish self from others. (Notably these areas were particularly active when mutilations were shown).

The study has – of course – its own shortcomings, and I am somewhat breaking one of my own rules here by presenting fMRI related research without a thorough discussion of the statistics involved, however I feel vindicated by the fact that the authors themselves remain moderate in their conclusions by stating that

“Our results converge with theories that consider empathy as accommodating a shared representation of emotions and sensations between individuals, allowing us to understand others. They also led us to speculate that the neuronal bases of empathy involve several distinct components including mirroring mechanisms, as well as emotion contagion and representations of connectedness with the self. In addition, brain areas similar to those showing different emotional responses between groups in our study have also been found to be modulated by religiosity, further supporting a key role of affect and empathy in moral reasoning and social values.” [italics added].

All things considered, the study suggests that Vegetarians are more empathetic to the suffering of others, but as I contemplate the well-documented health benefits of a Vegetarian diet, as well as the environmental and social hazards of current meat eating habits and production practices, I think it is obvious that reducing your meat consumption will first and foremost be an act of compassion towards yourself.

By Mary E. Hunt

Update: The Vatican has now issued the norms on dealing with priest sex abuse cases and other “more grave crimes” including “attempted sacred ordination of a woman.” They took great pains to distinguish the two, claiming there are two kinds of such crimes—one related to the sacraments and the other to moral issues. A Vatican official said, “The two types are essentially different and their gravity is on different levels.” This does not answer the question why they are both in the same list. — ed.

While Protestant churches like the Presbyterian Church USA have their annual gatherings in the summer, the institutional Roman Catholic Church, with no such meetings to worry about, uses the season to issue documents from on high. According to published reports, the Vatican is soon to release new norms that govern matters of sexual abuse by clergy. (Ho hum—but wait, there’s more.) They are expected to include the ordination of women under the delicta graviora, the same category of grave sin that governs sexual abuse by priests. Cue the music of doom!

It is hard to see past the PR aspect of this to the theological. Mixing the two issues, even under the same legal umbrella, is a profoundly perverse proposition. Either these gentlemen are more ethically tone deaf than one can imagine, or they are sly beyond the dreams of foxes in an effort to redirect attention from the criminal behavior of clergy against children to their wrath over the ordination of women. Neither option is terribly appealing.

The forthcoming norms are assumed to be the codification of the 2001 guidelines which made the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the powerful Vatican department formerly headed by now Pope Benedict XVI) the central location for handling sex abuse cases. These changes may make it easier for the Congregation in selected cases to forgo lengthy and costly ecclesial trials and simply laicize certain offending priests. But the Congregation’s track record under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who moved slowly if at all on many egregious cases, does not inspire confidence.

The new norms are not expected to be as clear and definitive as those adopted by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, when they were faced with paying more than $1 billion in compensation to victims and for lawyers’ fees. The Vatican deals with a global church, so its legalese tends to be more generic and open to interpretation. It will be interesting to see just how these norms are spelled out but no one expects unambiguous prose and zero tolerance. So what about the ordination of women? How did that sneak in here?

A Desperate Vatican?

The 2001 norms focused on “most grave crimes” against the sacraments and against morals. Some of the pedophilia crimes took place in the context of the sacrament of Penance or Confession. Breaking the seal of confession—that is, revealing anything told in the exchange between priest and penitent—is against the law. Another so-called grave matter dealt with in this way is “desecrating the sacred species.” That means taking a consecrated host and throwing it on the ground. Canonists will spend their summer parsing the implications of these matters, but we still need to track down the ordination of women which is now in the mix of sinful actions.

The Congregation declared in 2008 that women who get ordained “simulate ordination.” According to the Vatican official’s lights, the women, and the bishops who ordain them, automatically excommunicate themselves. It all sounds rather contorted. In this soon-to-be-published document, the ordination of women is said to be spelled out as one of those dicey matters which is not only a violation of the sacrament of Holy Orders, but so serious as to warrant the attention of Rome.

Perhaps they reason that the women’s ordination cases will keep them so busy that the pedophilia crimes will go away. Maybe they think people will be so scandalized by women wanting to get on with the ministry of the church at a time when the institution is morally bankrupt that they will forget the cover-ups that necessitated this revision of law in the first place. Or, perhaps the foxes may really think that this effort to centralize power with even less accountability can take place quietly since so many people will be exercised over the mere suggestion of women priests.

Stay tuned, but I think they miss their guess. There is simply no comparison between a theological argument over who is “fit matter” to be ordained and the destruction of a child’s life; not to mention the thousands of people who have been abused by clergy. The public simply won’t buy it, and the end result is that the institutional Roman Catholic Church will look even more out of touch with reality than ever.

I generally refrain from commenting on these matters without the document in front of me, but this is such a classic case of how church law is made—yes, like watching sausage being made—that it invites conjecture. It may turn out that the concerns over women’s ordination being linked with priest pedophilia are unwarranted. We will see by late summer when the document is expected.

Laws are made in relation to real events. There must have been a time when desecrating the sacred species was common enough to warrant comment. So, too, there have long been violations of the seal of confession. Another sticky wicket that got this kind of attention was “forgiving an accomplice in a sin of impurity.” This was when a priest had sex with another adult (usually referred to in the Latin instructions on this as “Titus, a man” with “Bertha, a woman” though we now know there were more options) and then forgave the sin in confession. It was considered a catch-22. So a law was made to send such cases to a higher authority.

Unless there are more women in the pipeline than I think, the ordination of women might be something the Vatican could have afforded to ignore in the hope it would go away. If women’s ordination really makes the list this time it implies three things:

First, the institutional church recognizes that women are being ordained both by the Roman Catholic Womenpriests initiative and in other congregational settings. Pity the form is so similar as to arouse the Vatican’s attention when the real news is that many local communities simply go ahead with shared ministry without ordaining anyone. The theologies vary, but the whole movement represents a challenge to the Vatican’s claim as sole authority in choosing priests. Like birth control, I think the ban on women priests will soon be honored by so few Catholics that even the institutional church will try to sweep it under the theological rug. That is one reason the ban on abortion has such a high profile: because Catholics’ use of birth control is simply a done deal.

Second, since its male priests are among those who will be sanctioned, the Vatican is obviously worried that the tide has turned against it inside as well as outside. Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois participated in a women’s ordination celebration in 2008 and was told to recant his actions. To date, no final word has come down on his refusal to do so. Maybe this law is it. More likely, it is a warning to other priests who might break clerical ranks and stand with feminists in ministry. Here’s hoping they have the courage and good sense.

Third, by drawing attention to women’s ordination, even if it is a tactic to distract attention from the pedophilia crimes and cover-ups, the Vatican is signaling its own desperate situation. Rumors of internal dissension in the Vatican ranks are rampant. One can only imagine what discussion ensued on this matter. Or maybe there wasn’t any discussion at all, which would be worse.

Catholics Go On Living while the Vatican Translates Dicta

But there is some good news coming from Catholicism this summer; two lovely examples serve as a reminder that all is not lost. First, those who are not Catholic are beginning to react to this ungodly mess with creative and courageous solidarity. Recently, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which provided financial support for the Holy Family Adoption Services, told the group they could no longer consider same-sex couples as potential parents for the infants and children they place. The agency refused to cooperate, losing a good bit of its financial support in the process.

Happily, Bishop Jon Bruno of the Episcopal Diocese offered to sponsor the group under Episcopal auspices. Robert K. Ross, President and CEO of The California Endowment, a donor agency issued a wonderful letter spelling out why the Endowment donated $50,000 and asking other people and agencies to do the same. He wrote:

While civic and public discourse these days seems to be dominated by scapegoating, intolerance, and even hate—Arizona’s anti-immigration legislation and California’s Prop. 8 battle embody such activity—we want to take a quiet moment to acknowledge the moral courage of the board of directors of Holy Family Adoption Services and Bishop Jon Bruno.

Amen to that.

A second break with Catholic institutional action is found in the increasing number of Catholics living their faith according to their consciences, ignoring the Vatican entirely. At the recent memorial mass for William R. Callahan, one of the founding directors of the DC-area social justice-oriented Quixote Center, such new practices were in evidence.

Bill Callahan was a Jesuit priest. A feminist before most men could even spell the word, he was dismissed from the order in the 1990s for reasons including his support of women’s ordination. He declined to leave his public ministry at Quixote and return to Boston as ordered. In other words, he refused to cop to a false notion of obedience that was really just a show of institutional church muscle. Instead, he continued on for decades as a dedicated champion of the rights of people in Central America, as a proponent of the full rights of women and LGBTQ people in both church and society, and as an all-around mensch.

He also continued to be a priest; not of the timid institutional sort, but a priest of the people who was called upon countless times to preside at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. He could be relied on to lead a Eucharist where everyone from the Irish grandmother to the smallest child was included, welcome at the table, and edified. According to Catholic theology well understood, all Catholics are priests by virtue of baptism.

Bill Callahan’s funeral liturgy held recently in a public school all-purpose room (sans air conditioning) was one such example of this reality. The gifted radio show host Maureen Fiedler of Interfaith Voices handled the whole celebration with aplomb. Bill’s companion of forty years in ministry, Dolly Pomerleau, spoke movingly and humorously of the man and his ways; a Catholic, married, male priest and a Catholic, married, woman bishop were the presiders.

The joyful celebration of a sad loss reflects the emerging model of small base communities that come together on important occasions. It was suspiciously like the early Church, which eventually built cathedrals for just such periodic gatherings of the local groups that otherwise worshiped and carried out their justice work in their own homes and centers.

So while the Vatican staff is busy translating its latest dictum into various languages, Catholic people, with the help of our friends, are living new models of Church. We do so in the hope that we might salvage the heart of the tradition we value, even while the institution persists in its own demise.

For centuries, this 27-square-mile town on the road from Delhi to Agra has been the holiest of holy places for devotional Hindus. Drums, brass hand cymbals, and the chanting of ancient prayers echo out each morning from Vrindavan’s 5,000 temples.

Yet recent changes such as satellite television, digital phone service, and real estate development have brought this medieval site on the banks of the Yamuna River into the 21st century. Not everyone is happy with the transition.

“It is a painful subject,” says Shrivatsa Goswami, whose family traces its roots to Vrindavan’s 16th-century restorers. “In those days, this place had the most beautiful riverside architecture in India’s history. It was like a miniature painting come alive.”

Goswami notes that previous generations of temple authorities understood the importance of holy places and took responsibility for their maintenance. Today, he says, that sense of stewardship is absent.

“Many religious leaders here have a narrow view,” Goswami says. “They don’t see the universality of their own message. They don’t see how a sacred site such as this can inspire people of all faiths. What they see is commercial opportunities, and the result is garbage and sewage backing up. In a few more years, my own children will not want to come here.”

Beginning in the 17th century, Moguls and other invading forces razed Vrindavan’s temple domes and left the town in architectural ruin. But according to Goswami, the real damage began with India’s independence in 1947. Rather than return to its spiritual roots, the nation became a secular industrial power. India’s cultural heritage in general, and holy places in particular, suffered.

“We are only two hours from Delhi,” says Goswami, “and people are feverishly spending millions to turn Vrindavan into a suburb. Because there is so little appreciation for holy places, developers get away with using the Yamuna as a dump for their construction. Instead of dredging to restore the river’s natural beauty, they have laid a tar road along its banks and in the riverbed to facilitate more traffic. I refuse to walk on it.”

Indic scriptures identify Vrindavan as the place where Krishna, the Sanskrit name for God in personal form, appeared 5,000 years ago. Followers consider Vrindavan as having its genesis in the spiritual world. Devotees consequently worshipped the town as fervently as Krishna himself.

Yet with modernization, the nature of pilgrimage to this holy spot has shifted dramatically. As recently as the 1980s, hardly one car a day arrived here, and there was little to distract from an all-day walking tour of medieval sites. Today, traffic backs up along the newly completed six-lane National Highway. A water park has opened less than seven miles from Govardhan, a hill that is among Vrindavan’s most sacred spots. Near the actual site of Krishna’s appearance in nearby Mathura, Pepsi-Cola has constructed a production plant. Cell phone towers loom up into the sky over temple domes.

“There is a risk of the spiritual experience becoming diluted,” says Braja Bihari, an American scholar who has lived in Vrindavan for 27 years. “Previously, you never saw people playing boomboxes or contaminating the roads with plastic bags. They came here to get away from those influences. The deep, contemplative experience is still available, but you have to work a little harder to find it now.”

Some environmental organizations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature are working to restore Vrindavan through programs of reforestation. Ranchor Prime, the project’s India liaison, notes that ecological values have always played an important role in Hinduism but have suffered in the rush of modernization.

“If the faith leaders brought back their own tradition of cleanliness and respect for nature here, in one of the greatest holy places of India,” says Prime, “it could have a dramatic impact nationwide. Environmental awareness is not a hollow religious sentiment. It makes practical sense.”

Not everyone sees the changes in dire terms. Lokanath Swami, a religious leader from South India, sees an upside to modernization: comfortable facilities attract clients.

“First, people have to want to come to a holy place,” he says. “Then the inner experience can occur.”

Still, he agrees with Goswami’s assessment that leadership must take an active role in protecting the site’s integrity.

“The scriptures tell us that the real pilgrimage is not bathing in a river,” he says, “but taking instruction from the saintly people who make such places their home. And certainly they have an added degree of responsibility.”

Historically, holy places have been the refuge of ascetics seeking escape from the material world. It would take days or weeks to arrive at a holy place. Once there, pilgrims confronted austere conditions that quickly separated spiritual dabblers from the truly devout. Today, the opposite holds true as developers encourage tourism and Vrindavan struggles to adjust, for the first time in history, to market economics. Like many other places of pilgrimage in India, this is a town faced with reconciling its cultural and spiritual purposes with its need for a stronger economic infrastructure.

Even staunch defenders of Vrindavan’s innate sanctity acknowledge the inevitability of modernization and accept, as well, its potential value. From the roof of his art institute, called Sri Caitanya Prema Samsthana, Goswami can see solar panels on buildings in surrounding villages. The panels feed energy to satellite dishes that connect farmers to Hindi-language Internet Web sites, which provide district-specific weather reports, current market prices and tips on modern growing methods.

More than half the residents in the Vrindavan area live off the land, and Goswami acknowledges that the technology could lead to improved quality of life and possibilities for saving Vrindavan from urban blight.

“Spirituality has never been an enemy of science and technology,” he says. “Devotion and knowledge have always gone together. That is the Indian approach. I’m not afraid of laptops and satellites. It is losing the spiritual content of Vrindavan that has me concerned. That cannot be stopped by better technology alone. That can only be stopped if the religious leaders come out of their shells and renew their emotional bond with their own culture and history.”

This article originally appeared on beliefnet.com with the title, Hindu Holy Place Altered by Technology, Development, Pollution.

By William Neuman and Andrew Pollack

DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.

But not this year.

On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.

Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.

Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.

Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.

Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.

That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.

If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.

“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

Read the rest of the article, here.

In this lengthy article from the

By Nathan Schneider

For decades, sociologist Margaret Poloma struggled against the tone-deafness to spirituality that rules her discipline; she wanted to study prayer, to measure divine love, to “see God as an actor.” In the meantime, having held a tenured post at the University of Akron since 1970, she built a respectable career with a long list of journal articles and books to her name. She became an authority on Pentecostalism and on the family lives of modern women. But all along, Poloma says, “I felt like I was swimming alone upstream.”

That changed in the early 1990s, when she found an ally in David Larson, a psychiatrist who longed to integrate religion into the practice of medicine. He was in the process of founding the National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR); what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to medicine writ large, the NIHR would be for “the forgotten factor” of faith. In 1995 Larson brought Poloma to a conference organized by his funder: the John Templeton Foundation, established by the eponymous investor who died in July 2008 at 95. “That conference was a magical experience for me,” Poloma remembers. It was there that she met Stephen Post, a bioethicist who would later create the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love with Templeton money. With Post she began receiving grants from the foundation. By 2007 she was co-director of the Flame of Love Project, administering $2.3 million from Templeton to establish “a new interdisciplinary science of Godly Love,” with a focus on the Pentecostal tradition.

Other scholars aren’t quite sure what the “science of Godly Love” means, exactly. Anthea Butler, a historian of Pentecostalism at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers that when Poloma’s Flame of Love request for proposals appeared, “nobody in the field could figure out what the hell she was talking about.” Many applied anyway. “She went from being an outsider to someone with tons of money who can set the terms of discussion,” says Butler.

“This grant is something I would never have dreamed of,” Poloma told me. “I feel like I’m soaring like an eagle.” For her, all gratitude is due to the funder. “Where but Templeton would you find that kind of dialogue going on?”

Nowhere—and that’s what has some people so concerned. The kind of research Poloma and her colleagues propose, however empirical and peer-reviewed, seems to come as an affront to centuries of purported progress in disentangling natural science from supernatural belief. Depending on whom you ask, Templeton represents either the hijacking of nothing less than the meaning of life, or the restoration of its luster, which has been dulled by politics and cynicism.

Poloma’s story repeats itself throughout the cluster of academic fields that the Templeton Foundation has chosen to flush with money. This past January $4.4 million went to a project on free will, headed by philosopher Alfred Mele at Florida State University. In a particularly arresting case, between 2006 and 2009 MIT physicist Max Tegmark received $8.8 million to set up the Foundational Questions Institute (with the dashing acronym FQXi), which funds first-rate scientists to explore basic problems about time, space and the origin of the universe. Its conferences have been “a coming-out-of-the-closet experience,” says Tegmark. “Lots of people reconnect with the real reasons they started doing science in the first place.”

Templeton has a history of seeding fields of study almost from scratch. After the foundation’s initiative for research on forgiveness began in 1997, the number of psychology journal articles on the subject went from fewer than fifty per year to more than 100 in 2000 and nearly 250 in 2008. When Templeton first financed Larson’s NIHR in the early 1990s, the number of medical schools with courses on religion could be counted on one latex glove. Now, according to Dr. Christina Puchalski of the Templeton-funded George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, three-quarters of US medical schools have brought spirituality into their curriculums.

What connects, say, unlimited love with string theory? According to the foundation, they are among life’s “Big Questions,” the exploration of which constitutes its mission. Templeton money supports other causes, like promoting virtue, encouraging gifted youth and fostering free enterprise, but its core concerns are more cosmic: “Does the universe have a purpose?” “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” “Does evolution explain human nature?” As the advance of knowledge becomes ever more specialized and remote, these questions seem as refreshing as they are intractable; the foundation wants them to be our culture’s uniting, overriding focus. For those who work on matters of spirituality and science today, Templeton is around every turn, active in disciplines from biology and cosmology to philosophy and theology. Many leading scholars speak of it with a tone of caution; some who have not applied for grants expect to do so in the future, while a few have taken a principled stand against doing so.

Like debates about religion broadly, debates about Templeton often get mapped onto the culture wars in black and white, or red and blue. It doesn’t help that the foundation is a longstanding donor to conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. And while its founder preferred eternal questions to worldly politics, the son who has succeeded him, John Templeton Jr.—Jack—is a conservative Evangelical who spends his personal time and money opposing gay marriage and defending the Iraq War. Since his father’s death, concerns have swirled among the foundation’s grantees and critics alike that Jack Templeton will steer the foundation even further rightward and, perhaps, even further from respectable science.

Read the entire article, here.

By Jesse Bering

…The first study to directly demonstrate the antisocial consequences of deterministic beliefs was done by University of Minnesota’s Kathleen Vohs and her colleague Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist from the University of British Columbia. In this 2008 report [pdf] published in Psychological Science , Vohs and Schooler invited thirty undergraduate students into their lab to participate in what was ostensibly a study about mental arithmetic, in which they were asked to calculate the answers to 20 math problems (e.g., 1 + 8 + 18 – 12 +19 – 7 + 17 – 2 + 8 – 4 = ?) in their heads. But, as social psychology experiments often go, testing something as trivial as the students’ math skills was not the real purpose of the study.

Prior to taking the math test, half the group (15 participants) were asked to read the following passage from Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis (Scribner):

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons … although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.

In contrast, the other 15 participants read a different passage from the same book, but one in which Crick makes no mention of free will. And, rather amazingly, when given the opportunity this second group of people cheated significantly less on the math test than those who read Crick’s free-will-as-illusion passage above. (The study was cleverly rigged to measure cheating: participants were led to believe that there was a “glitch” in the computer program, and that if the answer appeared on the screen before they finished the problem, they should hit the space bar and finish the test honestly. The number of space bar clicks throughout the task therefore indicated how honest they were being.) These general effects were replicated in a second experiment using a different, money allocation task, in which participants randomly assigned to a determinism condition and who were asked to read statements such as, “A belief in free will contradicts the known fact that the universe is governed by lawful principles of science,” essentially stole more money than those who’d been randomly assigned to read statements from a free-will condition (e.g., “Avoiding temptation requires that I exert my free will”) or a neutral condition with control statements (e.g., “Sugar cane and sugar beets are grown in 112 countries”).

Vohs and Schooler’s findings reveal a rather strange dilemma facing social scientists: if a deterministic understanding of human behavior encourages antisocial behavior, how can we scientists justify communicating our deterministic research findings? In fact, there’s a rather shocking line in this Psychological Science article, one that I nearly overlooked on my first pass. Vohs and Schooler write that:

If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.

Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth,” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. Perhaps they’re right. Consider the following example.

A middle-aged man hires a prostitute, knowingly exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted infection and exploiting a young drug addict for his own pleasure. Should the man be punished somehow for his transgression? Should we hold him accountable? Most people, I’d wager, wouldn’t hesitate to say “yes” to both questions.

But what if you thought about it in the following slightly different, scientific terms? The man’s decision to have sex with this woman was in accordance with his physiology at that time, which had arisen as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular genotype, which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants of similar traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. Even his ability to inhibit or “override” these forces, or to understand his own behavior, is the product itself of these forces! What’s more, this man’s brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness; rather, his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioral algorithms that responded, either normally or in error, in ways that had favored genetic success in the ancestral past.

Given the combination of these deterministic factors, could the man have responded any other way to the stimuli that he was confronted with? Attributing personal responsibility to this sap becomes merely a social convention that reflects only a naive understanding of the causes of his behaviors. Like us judging him, this man’s self merely plays the role of spectator in his body’s sexual affairs. There is only the embodiment of a man who is helpless to act in any way that is contrary to his particular nature, which is a derivative of a more general nature. The self is only a deluded creature that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member.

If this deterministic understanding of the man’s behaviors leads you to feel even a smidgeon more sympathy for him than you otherwise might have had, that reaction is precisely what Vohs and Schooler are warning us about. How can we fault this “pack of neurons”—let alone punish him—for acting as his nature dictates, even if our own nature would have steered us otherwise? What’s more, shouldn’t we be more sympathetic of our own moral shortcomings? After all, we can’t help who we are either. Right?…

It’s the ultimate science experiment, really — taking a handful of chemicals, mixing them in just the right combination and presto — life!

And after nearly 15 years of such toiling in his labs in Rockville, Md., J. Craig Venter, co-mapper of the human genome, has done just that. Reporting in the journal Science, he describes a remarkable experiment in which he and the team at his eponymous institute have pieced together the entire genome of a bacterium and then inserted those genetic instructions into another bacterium. The cell booted up, and life — by nearly any definition — was created.

“We’re basically getting new life out of the computer,” Venter says. “We started with a genetic code in the computer, wrote the ’software,’ put it into the cell and transformed it biologically into a new species. We’re still stunned by it as a concept.”

With Venter’s breakthrough it’s now possible to splice and snap together genetic material to create a Legoland’s worth of new genetic combinations. Ideally, some of these would have robust industrial purposes, such as manufacturing bacteria that can churn out valuable vaccine components to shorten production times during an epidemic, or co-opting organisms such as algae to pump out new sources of biofuel-based energy.

“Just imagine these cells where all we do is put in a new piece of chemical software and all the characteristics of the cell start changing to become what was dictated by the new software,” says Venter. “These are biological transformers.”

The paper is the final and most critical step toward realizing what began as scientific curiosity among the scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute back in the early 1990s, when many of the same researchers first succeeded in sequencing the entire genome of a self-replicating organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. That led to the generation of the complete sequencing of the smallest known genome, at 582,000 base pairs, belonging to another bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. Such smallness was intriguing because it led Venter to the philosophical question that inspired the current research — what was the minimum genome required to create life in the lab?

For the study just released, the answer turned out to be about 1 million, and the paper describes how he did it. DNA is made up of millions of paired molecules known as bases, some of which make up genes, that when read by enzymes produce the proteins essential for sustaining life. Venter intended to build his own version of the tiny M. genitalium genome, but the species replicates slowly and that would have caused delays in his study. Instead, he turned to the larger but significantly quicker bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, with 1 million base pairs. He fed the blueprint of the M. mycoides genome into a computer, mixed together varying combinations of the four basic elements of DNA — the bases adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine — and pieced them together in three stages. To ensure that the strings of bases were lining up in the correct order, he and his team attached known segments of DNA to the ends of each piece, allowing them to find and link up with their appropriate sections like genetic Velcro joining.

What made the work unwieldy is that even a very small genome has a lot of base pairs and current sequencing machines can handle only 50 to 80 at a time. To align the ever-growing strings of DNA, Venter thus enlisted the help of some natural born synthesizers — yeast and E. coli. These organisms are quite adept at stitching together huge pieces of DNA, and once they did their job, the genome was complete.

But that was only half the goal. The next step was to insert the man-made genome into a cell and see if it could function properly and cause the cell to divide. “The first transplants we did — we usually do them on a Friday and on Monday morning we come back to see if anything grew — didn’t work,” Venter says. “Then a month ago, I got a text at six in the morning that we had a colony.”

Venter is the first to concede that while what he has created is life, it’s not new life, since the synthetic genome is a copy of an existing one, albeit with a few modifications. In order to confirm that the genome they generated was indeed entirely manmade, the scientists inserted some genetic watermarks, including their names and three philosophical quotations. Since the four-based genetic code is read in three-letter triplet combinations, the scientists devised a new code in which the 64 possible triplets symbolize the letters of the alphabet and punctuation. One of the quotes, by James Joyce, was especially apt: “First to live, to err, to fall, to triumph and to create life out of life.” Says Venter understatedly: “The chances of finding these sequences in the natural genome are close to zero.”

Read the entire Time article, here.

Several weeks ago, Indian military doctors from the Defense Research Development Organization, took up the challenge of disproving the claims of an 82-year old mystic. The yogi, Prahlad Jani, made headlines throughout the sub-continent recently with his claim that no food or water had passed his lips for 70 years.

Despite the doubts of many skeptical medical researchers, the military doctors decided to test Prahlad’s claim because, if true, they believed his ability may be able to save lives in the future.

They transported the octogenarian spiritualist to a hospital in Ahmedabad, Gurjarat, India and placed him in isolation for a two-week hospital stay that ended last week, according to Indian news reports.

The doctors had conscientiously monitored Prahlad around the clock.

After 14 days without food or water, stunned doctors reported that the mystic’s body had not shown any adverse effects from either hunger or dehydration.

A ‘Breatharian’.

Claiming to have left his home at age 7, Prahlad became a ’sadhu’ (holy man) and eventually people accepted him as a ‘breatharian’—a  person who can live solely by spiritual force. He claims that he’s nourished by a goddess.

An Indian doctor, Sudhir Shah, who studies people claiming spiritual abilities, proclaimed Prahlad as authentic. Others have dismissed the wandering yogi as nothing more than a village fraud.

For many centuries it has been a common practice for certain Jains and Hindu yogis to embark upon spiritual fasting for up to 8 days. Usually their fasting had no deleterious affect.

Shah examined Prahlad in 2003. According to the doctor, the sadhu had no food or water for 10 days. The mystic’s urine appeared to be reabsorbed by his body after forming in his bladder. Some doubts about Prahlad’s claim were raised when his weight fell slightly on the 10th day.

This time around, at the Ahmedabad hospital, the breatharian did remarkably well. The astounded doctors confirmed that Prahlad had not eaten a thing or drunk any fluids for two weeks. And like his performance during the 2003 trial, he had not urinated or passed a stool.

Doctors admitted they expected to observe noticeable muscle mass loss, significant dehydration, weight loss and fatigue. Some believed  organ failure might occur—yet the mystic remained perfectly healthy.

Simply impossible.

Despite the testimony of the Indian military doctors, Dr. Michael Van Rooyen dismissed Pahlad’s claim saying, “But that’s simply impossible.” Van Rooyen is an emergency physician at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate professor at Harvard’s medical school, and the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative that focuses on providing aid to people lacking food and water.

Depending on the climate, a human could survive about 5 or 6 days without water. Humans can forgo food a much longer time, Van Rooyen explains. People can survive up to three months without food if they drink water supplemented with the proper balance of vitamins and electrolytes.

Prahlad was allowed to bathe and gargle with water, although the doctors took pains to measure what the holy man spit out.

“You can hold a lot of water in those yogi beards,” Van Rooyen asserts. “He must take in water. The human body cannot survive without it.”

The debilitating effects of starvation and lack of water are well known. As  Van Rooyen explains, “Without food, your body chemistry changes. Profoundly malnourished people auto-digest, they consume their own body’s resources. You get liver failure, tachycardia, heart strain. You fall apart.”

Especially if the individual is in his 80s.

“You go from being a grape to a raisin,” Van Rooyen says, “and if you didn’t have a heart attack first, you’d die of kidney failure.

Yet some Indian scholars are not as eager to dismiss the yogi as is Dr. Van Rooyen. They explain that breatharians exist and it can be a real, acquired ability. A person can learn to gather energy from sources other than the traditional ones. The term ‘breathers’ is accepted as the ability to obtain energy from the ‘prana’ (universal energy source) in the environment.

Upon the completion of the tests, Prahlad thanked the mystified doctors and then left for his village in northern Gujarat where he continues his daily meditation and yoga routine.

An interesting article from TimesUK about near-death experiences, their place in modern science, and “regaining out soul.” Follow the link at the end of the excerpt for the remaining portion, which delves deeper into related philosophical issues and quantum mechanics.

By Bryan Appleyard

You are dying. Twenty seconds ago your heart and breathing stopped and your pupils became fixed and dilated. Your brain cells are in a state of panic, trying every trick they know to get hold of oxygen and glucose. An electroencephalogram (EEG) would show no electrical activity in your cortex, the thin outer layer of your brain. You have flatlined.

As usual, a young, inexperienced doctor is first on the scene. They’re fitter and faster. There’s only time to confirm you’re not breathing before starting 30 chest compressions followed by two breaths into your mouth. A cart arrives with a defibrillator, the electric-shock machine, as do a few older, less fit doctors. The machine is not, sadly, one of the sexy, telegenic ones with paddles and George Clooney shouting “Clear!” With this machine the electrodes are stuck to your chest. The paddle variety caused too many shocks to the staff, so they’ve been dropped by the NHS. You are shocked. Nothing. A blood sample is taken and rushed for instant analysis. You’re given repeated injections of adrenaline and, depending on your exact condition, atropine, amiodarine and magnesium. Still nothing. The doctors and nurses work furiously for, say, 10 minutes if you’re an old lady with pneumonia or half an hour or more if you’re a young man who’s fallen into a cold pond. Nothing. Finally, a watching consultant officially announces that you no longer exist. It’s over. The confusing babble known as “your life” has ended. Or has it?

You see, the weird thing is that you may have flatlined, be “clinically dead”, but you’ve been watching the whole thing from the ceiling. As soon as your heart stopped, you just drifted out of your body and found you could float anywhere. You feel incredibly well, bathed in bright light, suffused with a deep sense of peace and knowing that, at last, it all makes sense. Some of your dead relatives are here and, behind you, there is a tunnel from which the light floods down. Perhaps you can see Jesus at the far end of it, or Muhammad or Krishna. The chaos at your bedside is interesting, amusing even, but trivial. Death, you now know with absolutely certainty, is an illusion.

You’re having a near-death experience (NDE). They happen all the time. They may happen to everybody, however they die. Remarkably similar experiences have been reported throughout history in all cultures. Obviously, most are lost to us, because being near death is usually the immediate prelude to being dead. But precisely because high-tech hospital resuscitations are so effective — around 15% of cardiac-arrest victims are revived — we can now regularly hear news apparently from beyond the grave. And it sounds like very good news indeed. You don’t really die and you feel great. What could be nicer?

NDEs are so common, so vivid and so life-transforming — survivors frequently become more compassionate, religious and serene as a result of what they experience — that scientists, philosophers, priests, psychologists and cultists all want a piece of the action. Their problem is that the human mind is unreachable. We can’t see what’s going on in there. Even if we could rush cardiac-arrest patients into an MRI scanner, we’d only see lights in the brain. We wouldn’t know what they meant. But now NDEs are to be scientifically investigated in a US and UK study involving 25 hospitals. This is co-ordinated by Dr Sam Parnia at Southampton University and is designed to find 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrests — “clinical death” — who tell such stories.

“I see no reason why a priest should tell us about death when we have all this technology available,” says Dr Parnia. “Death is a biological process and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t study it through medicine.”

Getting a scientific handle on this phenomenon is fiendishly difficult. Dead people don’t report back, and it is very hard to assess the status of survivor accounts — are they merely hallucinations occurring before the crisis or just after? Perhaps they are no more than the brain’s way of soothing your path to extinction.

Cardiac arrests are a good place to start because they provide a clear-cut moment when the dying process begins and when, clinically speaking, you may be said to be dead. “It might in fact be better,” says Dr Parnia, “to say that experiences after cardiac arrests are actual death experiences rather than near-death experiences.”

Arrests also happen a lot in hospitals, so the experimental conditions are reasonably controllable. But details like bright lights, tunnels and feelings of peace cannot be pinned down experimentally. One aspect of near-death experiences, however, can be: the out-of-body experience (OBE), seeing yourself and your surroundings from outside. When you are looking down from the ceiling, what, exactly, do you see? Many survivors report with remarkable accuracy what went on when they should, in theory, be utterly unconscious. This seems to be hard, testable evidence.

There are thousands of reports of OBEs but the two most famous cases are Pam Reynolds and Maria’s Tennis Shoe. Reynolds, an American singer, watched and later reported on with remarkable accuracy the top of her own skull being removed by surgeons before she moved into a bright glowing realm. But it was Reynolds’s account of the surgical implements used and the words spoken in the theatre that make the case so intriguing.

Maria, meanwhile, underwent cardiac arrest in 1977. She floated out of her body, drifted round the hospital and noticed a tennis shoe on a window sill. It was later found to be exactly where she said it was. The shoe was said to be invisible from the ground and not in any location where Maria could have seen it. Such stories suggest that OBEs should be scientifically verifiable.

Parnia’s study is aimed solely at OBEs in cases of cardiac arrest. It uses a technique known as “hidden target”. In the participating hospitals he is placing pictures on high shelves so that they will be invisible both to patients and staff. But anybody floating near the ceiling would see them. A substantial number of accurate reports of the pictures would seem to establish the reality of OBEs. There are numerous problems with this. Parnia’s study does not have enough money to put laptops on the shelves generating random pictures to ensure that cheating is impossible. Furthermore, previous hidden-target experiments by, among others, Parnia himself and Dr Penny Sartori at Morriston Hospital in Swansea have failed to produce a single positive result. In fairness, this may be because the last thing that a floating dying person, with Jesus behind him and his body being pounded in front of him, will notice is some odd picture left on a shelf. This leaves believers in OBEs with an evidential mountain to climb.

There are plenty of sceptics who will pounce on negative results or even positive ones with any signs of ambiguity. Dr Peter Fenwick, a neuro-psychiatrist who has overseen Parnia and Sartori’s work, admits that, whatever the outcome, there will still be “wriggle room” for sceptics.

“People can say they could have cheated, but if we have 50 or 60 of these cases where people leave their bodies and some see the pictures and some do not, then it looks like from the phenomenology that this does occur,” he says.

Hidden targets are the best key science has for unlocking the true nature of NDEs. If Parnia comes up with positive results, then even the most hardened sceptics will have to pay attention. They will force a serious rethinking of all current ideas about the brain and the mind.

“This is definitely a legitimate scientific inquiry,” says Chris French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths College, London, and co-editor of The Skeptic magazine. “Refereed proposals of this kind have my full support. There’s no doubt that people have these experiences, and there is something of great psychological interest to be explained here.”

French’s position is important. He specialises in paranormal beliefs and experiences. In some cases his position is that of outright scepticism. For example, people started reporting alien-abduction scenarios — flying saucers, anal probes — in large numbers only after a single case, that of Betty and Barney Hill, was publicised in Look magazine in 1966. This was clearly a kind of mental virus, made more virulent by the fact that most of the accounts were retrieved under hypnosis. But NDEs were widely reported even before they became known to a mass audience through Raymond Moody’s 1975 book Life after Life. And hypnosis has not been involved in retrieving the accounts. The consistency and clarity of these reports across cultures and time zones convince French that, even if NDEs may not prove the afterlife, they do cast light on the human mind.

“There is a core experience that is essentially the same across cultures. Christians don’t see Hindu gods and Hindus don’t see Jesus, so there is some kind of cultural overlay, but we are dealing with people attempting to put an ineffable experience into words. There’s a common core that has as its basis the fact that we all have very similar brains, so when things go awry we are likely to have similar experiences.”

And, as in all things, it is the human mind that is at the heart of the matter. If we can float out of our bodies, then the mind is separable from, and, perhaps not dependent on, the brain. Twelve years after Tom Wolfe famously announced in Forbes magazine that, as a result of developments in neuroscience, “Your soul just died,” it may be time to say: “No, it didn’t.”

But is such a thing as a separable mind possible or even conceivable? The answer is yes. In explaining why, it will be necessary to plunge into philosophy and quantum mechanics. Bear with me: it will be as painless as a cardiac arrest and much more interesting. And at the end of it, you might just believe you are immortal.
________________

Read the full article, here.

For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings.

During the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.

It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.

Replicating a result helps establish its validity more securely, but the common tactic of combining numerous studies into one analysis, while sound in principle, is seldom conducted properly in practice.

Experts in the math of probability and statistics are well aware of these problems and have for decades expressed concern about them in major journals. Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.

“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”

Ioannidis claimed to prove that more than half of published findings are false, but his analysis came under fire for statistical shortcomings of its own. “It may be true, but he didn’t prove it,” says biostatistician Steven Goodman of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. On the other hand, says Goodman, the basic message stands. “There are more false claims made in the medical literature than anybody appreciates,” he says. “There’s no question about that.”

Nobody contends that all of science is wrong, or that it hasn’t compiled an impressive array of truths about the natural world. Still, any single scientific study alone is quite likely to be incorrect, thanks largely to the fact that the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical. “A lot of scientists don’t understand statistics,” says Goodman. “And they don’t understand statistics because the statistics don’t make sense.”

Read the entire ScienceNews article here.