Comments on: Studying children’s belief in the afterlife http://www.numenware.com/article/510 Religion. Brain. Dogen. Language. Japan. Fri, 16 May 2008 13:37:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: Tony Rendle http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-645 Tony Rendle Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:30:42 +0000 http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-645 Would you please email the article. Would you please email the article.

]]> By: wolfgang brinck http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-438 wolfgang brinck Wed, 10 May 2006 16:50:18 +0000 http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-438 Attributing human mental factulties to evolutionary pressure is an interesting exercise, but at this point is not science. Scientific theories must be testable and disprovable. Scientific theories are not proven, only disproven. In any case, attributing mental features to evolutionary pressure would be a scientific enterprise only if we could actually set up an experiment that would show that two test groups, in this case, one with a belief in an afterlife and another without it had different survival rates. Seems kind of hard to do. Until someone comes up with some kinds of actual experiments to test the assertion on mental feature x offering survival advantage, they need to be regarded as interesting speculation and not science. I forgot the guys name, a neurologist who just for grins submitted an article to a scientific journal that proposed survival advantages of blondness just to make a point about how anyone can play this game and how ridiculous it is found to his dismay that the article was actually accepted for publication. Anyway, speculation about evolutionary advantage of various mental features is just speculation and not science unless it can be tested. Wolfgang Attributing human mental factulties to evolutionary pressure is an interesting exercise, but at this point is not science. Scientific theories must be testable and disprovable. Scientific theories are not proven, only disproven.

In any case, attributing mental features to evolutionary pressure would be a scientific enterprise only if we could actually set up an experiment that would show that two test groups, in this case, one with a belief in an afterlife and another without it had different survival rates. Seems kind of hard to do. Until someone comes up with some kinds of actual experiments to test the assertion on mental feature x offering survival advantage, they need to be regarded as interesting speculation and not science.

I forgot the guys name, a neurologist who just for grins submitted an article to a scientific journal that proposed survival advantages of blondness just to make a point about how anyone can play this game and how ridiculous it is found to his dismay that the article was actually accepted for publication.

Anyway, speculation about evolutionary advantage of various mental features is just speculation and not science unless it can be tested.

Wolfgang

]]> By: Jack Richardson http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-409 Jack Richardson Sat, 25 Mar 2006 13:58:16 +0000 http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-409 Emerging from the Void and Returning into human life Echos of eternity Linger in the mind. Emerging from the Void and
Returning into human life
Echos of eternity
Linger in the mind.

]]> By: Sed http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-399 Sed Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:23:40 +0000 http://www.numenware.com/article/510#comment-399 If you contact Jesse Bering by email, he will kindly send you the article (as a pdf file) back. If you contact Jesse Bering by email, he will kindly send you the article (as a pdf file) back.

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