There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain - PZ Myers - Part 1

Atheists Talk cable program by Minnesota Atheists.

"There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain - PZ Myers - Part 1" recorded 7/22/2007

"There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief"

P.Z. Myers, biologist at the University of Minnesota Morris, host of the website Pharyngula( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ ), and indefatigable defender of evolution, shares his expertise and insights on brain function, explaining how research into the brain reveals the evolutionary causes of religious belief.

In P.Z. Myers's own words:

"We've made great strides in the past century towards understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive brain function, and I will briefly present an overview of some of the major conclusions of that work. In short, though, what we have are sophisticated molecular regulators and sensors and effectors and modulators that generate patterned impulses in pathways throughout the brain, and the mind is ultimately reducible to highly organized chemistry—there's no room for ghosts, souls, or spirits, and no need for them, either.

"Recently, researchers have made progress in identifying the neural substrates of higher level patterns of thought. This work is much more tentative, and we have to be aware of the limitations of our interpretations, which is a consequence of the complexity of the data. I will discuss one narrow aspect of this research, the neural basis of religious belief, and explanations for its evolution. Religious belief is an emergent consequence of much broader genetically determined properties of the brain; I will make the argument that there is no "god gene", no specific hard-coding of religion into human brains, and that religion itself is a kind of conceptual parasite that takes advantage of other desirable and even "virtuous" intrinsic qualities of the brain."

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