The New York Times science section is all about evolution today.
(registration may be required, but its free, and they don’t spam your email)
This article is of interest to me, not because I agree with anything it says, but because it illustrates the extent to which science journalism has fallen into the false context of ‘fair and balanced’ reporting
It starts off strong:
The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is “unassailable fact,” the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”
Or as V. S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos,” but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans — all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.
This accurately reflects the current scientific thinking about the idea of a human “soul”. Why can’t the article leave it at that?
The article continues:
Dr. Haught, who testified for the American Civil Liberties Union when it successfully challenged the teaching of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, in the science classrooms of Dover, Pa., said, “The way I look at it, instead of eliminating the notion of a human soul in order to make us humans fit seamlessly into the rest of nature, it’s wiser to recognize that there is something analogous to soul in all living beings.”
Does this mean, say, that Australopithecus afarensis, the proto-human famously exemplified by the fossil skeleton known as Lucy, had a soul? He paused and then said: “I think so, yes. I think all of our hominid ancestors were ensouled in some way, but that does not rule out the possibility that as evolution continues, the shape of the soul can vary just as it does from individual to individual.”
Why give equal time to superstition and treat the statements of the superstitious with credulity, placing them on equal footing (even though they are not) with the statements of actual neuroscientists?
Why does the writer feel the need to provide an opposing point of view, especially one that is entirely without scientific merit? Conflict spices up a story, but is it appropriate to invent the false impression of a scientific conflict just to make an article more readable?
Journalism in general has fallen victim to the fallacy of “balance”. Its sad that science journalism is also giving in.