Still more senile drivel from the neuroscience drones

 (Hey, you want Fair and Balanced, go to Fox News.)

It is one thing when neuroscientists shuffle out from their labs before their media enablers, and leave their droppings on morality, tradition, religion, the arts…but now one of the chief offenders has published an entire book on the subject.  Its title escapes me -- something like Brainthrust: What Beelzebub Tells Us About Morality.  [Note to Webmaster: Do not monetize this.]

Much of what she says is standard-issue relativism, and reasonable enough if that’s your cup of tea.  But the contribution of actual neu-ro-sci-ence is minimal; she is simply using her neuroscience creds (and indeed, for all we know, she’s a wizard in the lab) as a forged passport into an essentially unrelated area:  the way a film star may set himself up as a political pundit.  As a reviewer puts it:

The story she tells about morality is, as you'd expect, heavily biological, emphasizing the role of the peptide oxytocin.

Got that?  Morality comes from oxytocin;  executive summary.  We read it so you don’t have to.

(Those of you who nevertheless wish to read further, can learn of her epiphany based upon …prairie voles, which apparently have replaced sea slugs in her affections.   Heck, I have epiphanies all the time, just from hamsters;  but she goes much farther, expertly twirling the scientific method to conclude that the Sacramental Conception of Marriage is just so much horseshit:  neuroscience favors the Excremental Conception of Marriage, based upon little sqooshes and squirts from the whoopee-glands.)

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Not to be outdone, I have myself carried out a massive neuroscientific project, lasting years and costing billions, paid for by the grateful taxpayers.  And I have managed to determine, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that

=>   Mathematics is caused by caffeine  <=

This fact has long been known within the mathematical community, as witness the old chestnut “A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”   But it may be news to those outside the field, who had fancied that the field had any actual substance.

The skeptics among you may wonder:  How can a simple alkaloid produce mathematical truth?  

The answer is simple, in line with the stance of our neuroscientist friends.  The alkaloid does not, obviously, produce “truth”, any more than a peptide can produce “morality”.  It produces, rather, “truthiness”.   The actual theorems are of course completely arbitrary, socially constructed.  Among the Tibetans, pi equals 7; among the Tierra del Fuegans, it is sometimes 3, sometimes 4;  among the Esquimaux, pi does not exist.  All these values are equally valid.  Among the Urysohnians, any regular space with a countable basis is metrizable;  among the Teabaggers -- well, they just look at you funny.

[More deliciously abusive polemics against this crew can be savored here.]

[Update Dec 2011]  P. Churchland's Machwerk is dismissively reviewed by Robert J. Richards in the new issue of American Scientist.  His conclusion:

The answer to the question “What does neuroscience tell us about morality?”  turns out to be:  “Not much”.