Missing Shades of Grue

Phillip Resnick, one of the leading witnesses in Andrea Yates' defense, certainly believes in the value of expert psychiatric testimony in court. He testified that delusions caused by postpartum psychosis qualified Yates for the insanity defense under the Texas standard. But while he completely disagrees with those who think Yates was guilty in any normal sense of the word for her killing her children, his reasons have nothing to do with fMRIs or other high-tech windows to the brain.

He drew his conclusions the old-fashioned way, a way that doesn't necessarily require a medical expert: by observing Yates and by talking to her and to people who knew her. He believed, from such evidence, that she was in the grip of psychotic delusions when she killed her kids, delusions that made her think that drowning them was in fact the right thing to do to save their souls.

Resnick's belief convinced the second jury, without any recourse to objective neuroscience and its promises to help us understand exactly what in our brains makes us think, feel, and act as we do. Even in the 21st century, our ability to make those kinds of legal and moral judgments remains largely untouched by purely objective science. To make the judgments about human beings and their behavior that courts need to make, Resnick says, "You need to understand why. And you can't see why on an fMRI."

The brain responses were measured by a functional M.R.I. machine as a series of transactions occurred. Sometimes the student had to choose whether to donate some of her cash to a local food bank. Sometimes a tax was levied that sent her money to the food bank without her approval. Sometimes she received extra money, and sometimes the food bank received money without any of it coming from her.

Sure enough, when the typical student chose to donate to the food bank, she was rewarded with that warm glow: increased activity in the same ancient areas of the brain -- the caudate, nucleus accumbens and insula -- that respond when you eat a sweet dessert or receive money. But these pleasure centers were also activated, albeit not as much, when she was forced to pay a tax to the food bank.

The most intriguing results were the ones from two of the experimental subjects, students whose brain scans made them definite egoists yet who were also among the most generous in donating. You could dismiss them as statistical outliers, but I like to think we have finally spotted the creature dismissed by so many scholars as myth.

These two women enjoyed no neural reward from charity ? their brains didn?t get enough of a warm glow to compensate for the pain of parting with their money ? yet they made anonymous donations anyway. Diogenes, we may not have found an honest man, but we do seem to have located a couple of true altruists. Either that or two determined masochists.

The Grass Traveling Scientist Program presents Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky of Stanford University's Dept. of Biological Sciences in a seminar sponsored by the Dept. of VCAPP and the Northern Rocky Mtn. Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience.

According to Brownback, we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith, but accept them if they're compatible. But the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago. Are we supposed to reject this as "atheistic theology" (an oxymoron if there ever was one)? The religious conviction that "man" is unique in ways that really matter is compelling in many ways%u2014surely our language, art, music, and science itself are unique products of life on this planet--but holding our uniqueness to be a dogma immune to scientific analysis is an arrogant, and ultimately foolhardy, declaration of authority.

This attitude has enormous political--and educational--implications. What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician's "spiritual truth"? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it's not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone.

The Enquirer's naive anticipation of the opening of Answers in Genesis' Creation Museum is disappointing but not surprising. For months Answers in Genesis has played The Enquirer like a Jew's harp.

In three pages in the May 20 Sunday Community Forum and most of page 1, The Enquirer exhibits the credulous coverage it usually awards to zoo babies, new rides at Kings Island or the glitzy makeover of a snake-bitten shopping mall. Missing is recognition that Answers in Genesis isn't a new challenge to evolutionary theory; it's the latest reaction to attacks on the literal truth and inerrancy of the Bible that began in the mid-19th century.

Missing is an explanation of evolutionary theory, the scientific method, why religious faith isn't science and why this battle over Hebrew Scripture is waged only by some Christians.

Missing is evidence of intelligent design in the planning and editing of this journalistic fiasco.

I know Enquirer editors smart enough to have produced a balanced preview of the Creation Museum. They must have been touring the new Slavery Museum, dedicated to biblical passages approving human bondage, when this project was planned and executed.

Too bad The Enquirer lacks science and religion reporters who might have explained why its approach is bogus. WVXU-FM and The Cincinnati Post produced much smarter stories.

When the teen-age Steve Earle left San Antonio, Texas, where he was raised, for Greenwich Village, in 1974, he had an image in his mind: the cover of ?The Freewheelin? Bob Dylan,? showing Dylan and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, strolling through the West Village on a snowy day. That was where Earle wanted to be. He made it as far as Nashville. There he became a prot?g? of Townes Van Zandt, and developed his talents as a songwriter, a country singer, and a hard-strumming guitarist, all of which were on display in his fine first album, ?Guitar Town? (1986). By the end of the eighties, Earle seemed on the verge of becoming a troubadour to rank with Dylan and Springsteen. But he had also become an alcoholic and a heroin addict, and in 1994 he was sentenced to a year in prison on drug-related charges. After serving four months, he was released into a twelve-step program, and there, to his surprise, he said, ?I had a genuine spiritual experience.? His career recovered, and his most recent album, ?The Revolution Starts . . . Now,? won a Grammy in 2004.