December 29, 2005--Ommmm
Not only did the Intelligent Design folks hit a speed bump recently, but the Dalai Lama is also in trouble. For some of the same reasons.
Just as the judge in Dover Pennsylvania ruled that the ID folks were “hypocrites” when they asserted they were interested purely in science, not in promoting religion, when calling for the inclusion of an alternative to evolutionary theory in the school district’s biology curriculum, some members of the Society for Neuroscience claimed that it was scientifically irresponsible to invite the Dalai Lama to their annual meeting to talk about the neurobiology of meditation.
The initial report in the NY Times about this flap (see article linked below) said that those calling for the Society to rescind its invitation were Chinese or of Chinese descent and thus were being “political” and not scientific. But when one looks more closely at who is leading the objecting, unless Dr. Nancy Hayes is from Beijing and married a Mr. Hayes, it seems that something else might be at work.
It is, and again it reminds me of the Dover Monkey Trial. As there, the controversy is about the nature of science itself. If you at all follow this blog you know that at times I have taken a poke at the Dalai Lama—for his self-marketing, his affiliation with celebrites-- cheap shots, I admit, but hopefully a little fun? This time, though, I stand with Richard Gere in support of the DL because there is very interesting early evidence, real scientific evidence, that there are significant neurobiological changes when people are in deep meditative states. And that these states cause brain activity in those parts of the brain that are associated with happiness, positive emotions toward others, loving kindness, and compassion. To quote a lyric, “What the world needs now.”
But my support is not just based on some smarmy hope that we might be able to meditate ourselves toward peace (though most other strategies do not seem to be working very well), but also because when potential new paradigms in science emerge they are not initially neatly tied up in clearly replicable studies—one of the essential measure of true science—and are thus fragile. I’m OK with that—ultimately things do need to be verified and replicated experimentally--but this research may just be at the important beginning of a new set of discoveries. Perhaps we need to leave it alone and allow the ideas to be heard and debated. To quote Dr. Robert Wyman, a neurobiologist at Yale, “This research is a first pass on a new topic, and you just can’t do perfect science the first time through. You get curious about something and you mess around. That’s what science is in the beginning, you mess around.”
Keep messing around guys; we can use all the help you can offer. We’re in a real mess here.
Just as the judge in Dover Pennsylvania ruled that the ID folks were “hypocrites” when they asserted they were interested purely in science, not in promoting religion, when calling for the inclusion of an alternative to evolutionary theory in the school district’s biology curriculum, some members of the Society for Neuroscience claimed that it was scientifically irresponsible to invite the Dalai Lama to their annual meeting to talk about the neurobiology of meditation.
The initial report in the NY Times about this flap (see article linked below) said that those calling for the Society to rescind its invitation were Chinese or of Chinese descent and thus were being “political” and not scientific. But when one looks more closely at who is leading the objecting, unless Dr. Nancy Hayes is from Beijing and married a Mr. Hayes, it seems that something else might be at work.
It is, and again it reminds me of the Dover Monkey Trial. As there, the controversy is about the nature of science itself. If you at all follow this blog you know that at times I have taken a poke at the Dalai Lama—for his self-marketing, his affiliation with celebrites-- cheap shots, I admit, but hopefully a little fun? This time, though, I stand with Richard Gere in support of the DL because there is very interesting early evidence, real scientific evidence, that there are significant neurobiological changes when people are in deep meditative states. And that these states cause brain activity in those parts of the brain that are associated with happiness, positive emotions toward others, loving kindness, and compassion. To quote a lyric, “What the world needs now.”
But my support is not just based on some smarmy hope that we might be able to meditate ourselves toward peace (though most other strategies do not seem to be working very well), but also because when potential new paradigms in science emerge they are not initially neatly tied up in clearly replicable studies—one of the essential measure of true science—and are thus fragile. I’m OK with that—ultimately things do need to be verified and replicated experimentally--but this research may just be at the important beginning of a new set of discoveries. Perhaps we need to leave it alone and allow the ideas to be heard and debated. To quote Dr. Robert Wyman, a neurobiologist at Yale, “This research is a first pass on a new topic, and you just can’t do perfect science the first time through. You get curious about something and you mess around. That’s what science is in the beginning, you mess around.”
Keep messing around guys; we can use all the help you can offer. We’re in a real mess here.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
4:45 PM
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