One of the many things that bugs me about the mostly vapid discussions you see online are the arguments made by folks on both sides of the believers/non-believers divide related to evolutionary theory. Most atheists tend to believe that one cannot be a Christian and simultaneously believe in evolutionary theory of the Neo-Dariwnian sort. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christians, particularly fundamentalists, who are quite happy to fit right into that stereotype. They’ll argue passionately against Neo-Darwinian evolution, or at best will use the cringe-worthy phrase, “It’s just a theory, not a fact.”

I happen to be a person of deep Christian faith who also happens to be a long-time student and teacher of evolutionary theory. To me, there is no conflict whatsoever between my faith and the paradigm of Neo-Darwinism.

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a short article about this debate. I wrote this article for a little electronic magazine I was writing on the old StarText system. StarText was a text-based BBS and was one of the first online services and virtual communities in existence prior to the rise of the Internet. The electronic magazines on this system were basically like blogs. You could write whatever you wanted to, and then readers would send you electronic messages with their opinions on what you wrote.

Two copies of my little e-zine (called the “Darwin Times”) have been stored away on the Internet (I’ve since lost the other copies). Given my recent encounters with people who can’t seem to understand how a person of faith can believe in evolution, I’ve decided to reprint a portion of an article here. I’ve not edited it, and paste it here the way it appeared on StarText back in 1991.

* Commentary: Evolution or Evilution?

We have all heard it before for our entire lives. Unfortunately,
many people are under the mistaken impression that to believe
life evolved and IS evolving on this planet is to NOT believe
in God and the Bible. In my view, nothing could be further
from the truth.

These are some of the basic reasons why I feel that modern
evolutionary theory need not contradict religious beliefs or
thought. All of this is simply my opinion. Science and
evolutionary theory deal with the HOW question of life on
our planet. Religion deals with the WHY question of life on
earth. These are entirely different questions, and must be
looked at from entirely different perspectives.

Last June, on the Monday after Father’s Day, I decided to quit my job as a Lead System Engineer at a large financial services company in San Antonio. It was the culmination of 6 months of sheer misery for me, as I had stumbled into a nest of some of the most vile people I have ever encountered in my professional life. As it turned out, the whole company culture was one made up of “good ol’ boy” networks. And if you were not fortunate enough to be deemed worthy to be part of one of these networks, then your co-workers and your managers simply made life miserable for you. You were actively shunned, humiliated, and made to feel as badly as possible.

The canned response to a situation like this is, “No one can make you feel badly without your permission.” I generally agree with this view, but there are sometimes when the old joke is true: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t really out to get you.

My manager turned out to be a classic psychopath, of the sort with a very charming personal style, yet with no conscience or integrity whatsoever. Even with a Ph.D. in psychology, I failed to recognize this until it was too late. I fell out of favor with him, and that was magnified by the fact that I was also out of favor with the reigning in-group. From about March until June, 2009, each day at work was an exercise in subjugation and humiliation for me. I was slowly being phased out of all aspects of my team’s operations, and nothing I did was ever good enough. Every month or so, my psychopathic manager would meet with me and give me his latest non-constructive opinion of what I had been doing wrong lately. On the Friday prior to Father’s Day, we had one of these meetings and he told me that he was putting me on a “performance improvement plan.” At this workplace, a performance improvement plan was simply a method used to begin the documentation process necessary to fire you within the next 3 to 6 months.

After that meeting I called my wife and told her what had happened. We both agreed I was about to be fired. She was also deeply concerned about me, as I had been coming home every day deeply depressed for the past few months. I was earning a nice six-figure salary at this job, and I told my wife I should stick it out for these final months while we cut back our expenses and saved some money. She disagreed, and told me that I needed to quit immediately, and that we’d figure out the financial situation later.

Over the weekend we discussed it further, and by Sunday morning I had made the decision to quit this job. It was a terrifying prospect, since my wife earned less than half of what I earned, and I had no other job lined up. But ultimately I decided that I had been wronged and that I just had to leave a toxic situation. That job had killed me emotionally and spiritually, and it was about to kill me physically as well.

So, on the Monday after Father’s Day, I go into work and await the arrival of the psychopath. When he shows up I sit down at his desk and tell him I’d like to give my 2 weeks notice. His answer: “OK, no problem.” He told me they’d pay me for 2 weeks of work but that I would be leaving there today. As I cleaned out my desk, one of his henchgirls came by and asked me what I was doing. When I told her I had quit, it was obvious that she could barely contain her glee.

A couple of hours later, after all the paperwork was completed, the psychopath escorted me to the exit, and we parted ways without saying a word. I had a tremendous sense of relief that day! That afternoon I started applying for jobs, and because God takes care of me, I found a job that Thursday. Yes, it paid much less than my old job, but it was a job nonetheless, one working with good people.

For the next 3 months or so after I quit that job, I actually experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sleepless nights, depression, and unexplainable bouts of rage. The rage I felt was sheer hatred and anger, because I had been treated so badly by people who were so blissful. The unfairness of it all made my blood boil.

This whole experience taught me a lot of things. First off, I learned what it was like to work in a pathological corporate culture. I had been spoiled by working for companies like EDS and IBM. Sure, EDS and IBM had their problems, but for the most part my experiences there were very positive. Their cultures were one where creativity, collaboration, and professionalism were the rule, the exact opposite of this workplace I had just left. In order to grow as a professional, as a leader, and as a person, I had to experience a workplace where service, loyalty, honesty, and integrity didn’t matter.

The second thing I had learned from all of this was the power of forgiveness. I could have let my PTSD get worse, and let the rage build up, but that’s something that would have ultimately done me in. That’s what anger and hatred do to you. They eat you up and cause you to die from within. Meanwhile those that have wronged you have completely forgotten about you. As some friends said to me, “Why let those bastards live rent free in your head?” This is where I learned about the power of forgiveness, the power of letting go of your anger, and of letting go of the memories of your past wounds. By forgiving, you start the process of healing yourself, of learning from you past mistakes and of making sure that your anger and rage do not manifest themselves in some horrible way. I had to convince myself that I had simply fallen into a bad situation with some immoral people. Yes, they are immoral, but they’re human beings, loved by God every bit as much as I am. Forgiveness is much more than just rationalizing what happens to you. It is an active process of detaching yourself from your pain, and replacing that pain with love for those who have hurt you.

I can honestly say I have completed half of that process, namely detaching myself from the pain. I see it now as a set of valuable lessons learned, and nothing more. But I am still working on the part of replacing my pain with love for those who hurt me. I think that will take more time. And more prayer. In the end I’ll be a better person for it, one who truly understands the power of forgiveness and one who has grown more as a spiritual being and child of God.

Meanwhile, just an hour south of Austin, lies Lames-ville, AKA San Antonio. While the visionaries in Austin have been moving forward on their transit plans, we have a huge group of troglodytes in San Antonio fighting light rail and toll roads tooth and nail. Thanks to these pinheads, metro transit in the San Antonio area (with over 1.2 million people) remains barely usable for all but the poorest citizens.

So it is business as usual in San Antonio, while Austin continues to enjoy long-term economic and social benefits from far-sighted, progressive planning.

San Antonio is in fact a beautiful city filled with good people. Adding light rail, toll roads, more parks, and a reliable broadband internet infrastructure would do much to secure San Antonio’s economic future and attractiveness.

Great.

The Apple support site offered little help. There was no way to talk to anyone about this problem, and the discussion forums just directed you to the email forms on the Apple support site. So I sent off a message and waited. I got a reply the next day from a person named “Trish” who basically told me, “Too bad, but someone else will get back to you on this.” Of course, no one ever did. I replied 3 times to Trish’s email, all to no avail. I then called a so-called “Apple Expert” who actually tried to help. However, all he could do was to eventually tell me that the reason my account was disabled was because there had been repeated attempts to log in, in order to purchase gift cards.

Great.

It would have been nice to have received an email message that my account was disabled. Better yet, it would have been nice to be able to talk to someone who could fix it, or at least go to a web page where I could fix it myself.

But no, not even the stupid form of communication they have set up will work. I have had this iTunes account for years, since the release of the first gen of the iPod. And now I’m locked out and can’t even get anyone to help me. This is no way to treat someone who has paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for his music.

So I give up. As soon as I can, I am going to just ditch my iPhone and iTunes, and find another solution. This whole episode has me thoroughly disgusted with Apple. As the chief technology officer for the organization I work for, I’m also going to make sure no more Apple products find their way into our organization. We’ve spent thousands of dollars on Mac Pros and Macbooks, that comes to an end effective today.

Assholes.

Over the last year or so, I have been searching for groups or individuals in the San Antonio, Texas area who might be interested in starting a project to launch a Roman Catholic “classical education” college in the San Antonio area.

A classical education college is one where the curriculum is based upon the great works of Western civilization, and teaching is done in the Socratic method. The best example of such a school is Thomas Aquinas College in California.

I’ve never done anything like this before, and have no idea what is required. But I figured I would move forward in the following fashion:

1. Look for like-minded persons who might be interested in exploring the possibility of setting up such a school.

2. Work with these folks on putting together a feasibility paper describing the mission, goals, and plan for starting the school.

3. Once the feasibility study is done, and if it looks good, begin to shop the idea around to the Archdiocese of San Antonio and to potential donors

4. Concurrently, look to put together a starting Board of Trustees and teaching faculty, and perhaps begin operations on a small scale.

5. As part of the faculty hiring, find someone to manage the accreditation process.

This could all be a pipe dream and completely unfeasible. But I figure you don’t know until you at least try.

Thus, as a first step, I’d like to ask anyone interested in working on such a project to contact me via email at RL at WELL dot COM. Drop me a note, letting me know what you background is, and why you’d be interested in working on such a project. If I get enough people responding over the next year or so, then maybe we can meet face to face and discuss things further.

Overall, the report was very encouraging. From 2006 to 2008, the percentage of adult Latinos who used the Internet grew by 10 percentage points from 54 to 64 percent. The percentage of adult whites who used the internet also grew during this same time period, from 72 to 76 percent. Interestingly, the percentage of blacks using the Internet during this time only grew by two percentage points, from 61 to 63 percent. The authors of this study suggest that these numbers may be underestimated, because of the fact that cell-phone-only homes have grown dramatically, particularly amongst Latinos and blacks, and this survey was conducted across telephone land-lines.

While this overall view is good news, it shows that we still have a long way to to before we achieve true equality in access to Internet resources, and the details of the Pew study bear this out. Latinos born in the US were just as likely as whites to use the internet in 2008, 77 percent to 76 percent, respectively. However, only 52 percent of foreign-born Latinos used the Internet in 2008 (up from 40 percent in 2006). Even more interesting is the fact that this difference persisted when controlling for education levels, household income, and English proficiency. Thus, while young Latinos and US-born Latinos are using the Internet, there is still much to be done to be able to reach foreign-born Latinos.

Another area of concern is access to the Internet by poor Latinos and those with less education. Only 56 percent of Latinos earning less than $30K/yr in household income used the Internet in 2008, up from a meager 39 percent in 2006. By comparison, eighty-eight percent of Latinos earning more than $50k/yr used the Internet in 2008, a number that did not change from 2006. These numbers compare favorably to those of whites and blacks, suggesting that the effects of poverty and lower educational attainment on Internet usage cut across race.

The Pew report also looked at the use of broadband internet connections by Latinos, blacks, and whites. It is important to look at broadband adoption as a population variable because many of today’s web-based applications (e.g. online banking, government services) are bandwidth-intensive and unable to run well on slower, dialup Internet connections. As it turns out, the broadband adoption numbers are similar to those for overall Internet usage. Latinos have gone from 63 percent broadband usage in 2006, up to 76 percent in 2008. These numbers are similar to those for whites and blacks, though Latinos trail slightly behind both groups. As with overall Internet usage, the poor, under-educated, and foreign-born Latinos trailed all other groups in terms of broadband usage.

Overall, there was good news in the Pew report, but there are also a lot of challenges which lay ahead. These challenges are important, because Latinos are the fastest-growing minority population in the US, and we cannot afford to have such a large percentage of our population. But what to do?

From the results of the Pew report, it is clear that foreign-born Latinos, poor Latinos, and under-educated Latinos are the primary groups that should be targeted in any plan to promote Internet usage. There is likely much overlap between these three groups, but there is also an opportunity to craft interventions aimed specifically at getting more members of each of these 3 groups to use the Internet, and to connect via broadband connections from home. Granted, dealing with these issues entails dealing with a complex universe of interrelated issues, from racism to immigration reform to unemployment. But there are likely many interventions and policy actions which may help alleviate some of the most obvious differences between Latinos and whites.

In spite of high levels of education and income, many foreign-born Latinos are not using the Internet. This may be due to a lack of awareness of the utility and value of Internet resources. Awareness may be positively influenced by advertising aimed at getting more foreign-born Latinos interested in using the Internet, as well as education. As more and more children of foreign-born Latinos attend colleges and universities, it would be incumbent on organizations such as the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) to work with federal and state lawmakers to make sure that these schools can provide the resources necessary to enable these students to learn about the resources available on the Internet, and understand the benefits of broadband access. Similarly, under-educated Latinos are in desperate need of these types of resources, particularly at the K-12 levels.

Poor Latinos are likely beset with the problem of limited access to the Internet in areas where they live, and especially limited access to broadband. The federal government has plans in place to extend broadband access to underserved areas but such plans are dependent upon accurate maps of broadband usage. The creation of these maps has been a political and technical challenge. From the political side, there are many who are opposed to the idea of broadband mapping, claiming it to be a waste of time and resources. Technically, broadband maps require the cooperation of numerous private and public sector entities, and getting all of these entities to agree on common terminology and common standards is problematic.

In sum, Latinos have greater access to the Internet and to broadband than they ever have. If they can just work on building up awareness and education regarding Internet resources, perhaps policy makers can meet them in the middle with better and better plans to extend the technical infrastructure to those who are newly aware of the vast world of cyberspace.

1. Maintain a positive attitude

I wish I would have known this bit of advice when I was in grad school. Being a poor graduate student is, for the most part, a miserable existence. But, you get to share it with others going through the same thing. Bond with these folks, and make it a point to be positive in the face of adversity. Combine this with hard work, and you’ll make a great impression on the graduate faculty.

2. Don’t get married or be married

Being a full time grad student in science is a very self-absorbed undertaking. You’ll be eating, breathing, thinking nothing but graduate school for at least 3 or 4 years. Unless your spouse is another graduate student, or VERY, VERY patient and understanding, you’ll end up with a ruined marriage at about the same time you receive your doctorate. You also won’t be earning a lot of money, and that can stress out some couples as well.

3. Expand your horizons

Take time in graduate school to explore other areas of knowledge, to get to know faculty members in areas outside of your own. This extra knowledge and experience may come in handy to differentiate you from other job applicants when trying to land that tenure track job.

4. Maintain professional relationships with your mentor and graduate faculty at all times.

If you have a very good mentor, like I did, he or she will keep your relationship professional and will make sure your relationship with other faculty members is professional as well. Why is this important? Because of academic politics. The graduate faculty at your department likely has a nasty, ugly history of bloody politics. They all do. The last thing you want is to get involved in these politics, such that you hurt your chances of successfully jumping through all the hoops of the hazing ritual known as graduate school. Keep professional relationships with everyone, document EVERYTHING you say and that is said to you, and treat everyone with respect.

5. Cherish the friendships

Graduate school is an ordeal, an ordeal that you suffer through along with others. If you’re lucky, this group suffering will cause a strong bonding experience, and you’ll make a lifetime of friends. There are only two good things about graduate school: 1) finishing it, and 2) the friends you make. Cherish especially those friends with whom you can share your feelings with. You’ll have a lot of ups and downs in grad school.

6. Learn to write and to speak well

Do everything you can to get better at writing and speaking. Ask your mentor and other profs for writing feedback. Write as many papers as you can, and take the feedback seriously. Do a teaching assistantship and learn how to deliver good lectures and explain difficult concepts to others. Ask others for feedback on your speaking or teaching. Videotape yourself giving a talk or lecture, and find ways to improve. You might be the most brilliant scientist since Einstein, but if you can’t communicate your ideas well, no one will pay attention to you or want to hire you.

7. Develop a routine

Develop a routine that will allow you to study, teach, conduct your research, and take care of yourself every day. This is why it it important to be unmarried and unattached. You need to develop a routine that depends as little as possible on the routines and actions of others.

8. Take it one task at a time.

If you sit down and look at the sum total of work you have to accomplish to earn a doctorate, you’ll get discouraged. Don’t think about it. Just take things one exam at a time, one paper at a time, one experiment at a time. Trudge through it with a positive attitude and you’ll be done before you realize it.

9. Just get it done!

There are going to be many, many times in the course of your graduate education when you are just going to want to quit. At the very least, you’re going to hit a wall, and will be unable to bring yourself to write your thesis, run that experiment, analyze those data, etc. This is where you just have to pull yourself up and just do it. There’s just no other advice that I can offer, it just boils down to sucking it up and forcing yourself to complete those aversive tasks. Just realize you’re going to have these moments, and mentally prepare yourself for them.

10. Read phdcomics.com

No one has captured graduate life the way Jorge Cham has in his webcomic, Piled Higher and Deeper. The comics don’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t suffered through graduate school. But after your first semester you’ll appreciate how hilarious these comics are, and they’ll make you feel a little better, knowing that you’re not alone!

But is there any scientific evidence for the whole concept of “learning styles?” Sure, there is a lot of money spent in developing learning tools suited to different learning styles, and people will swear up and down that they are this type or that type. But have learning styles ever been demonstrated empirically?

In the most recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork address this very question, and their answer is quite startling. As it turns out, there is virtually NO empirical evidence to support the idea that people with a certain “style” of learning will benefit from teaching suited to their “style”.

The authors reviewed a lot of literature, looking for properly-done studies that demonstrated this effect. They found none. The few studies they did come across showed that there was no effect. More precisely, they found that there was no interaction effect between a person’s learning style and a matching teaching style. If there was such an effect, you would expect that people who are of learning style “A” would only benefit from teaching if that teaching was designed for learning style “A”. Learning style and teaching design should interact, but in fact there’s no evidence to suggest that they do.

This is a huge finding, but not surprising. I can recall some 20 or so years ago, when experimental psychologists blew up the whole myth of “left brain” versus “right brain” thinkers. It used to be thought that “left brain” thinkers were more concrete and analytical, and “right brain” thinkers were more abstract and creative. As it turns out, there’s no basis for this idea. That’s not to say that there aren’t differences between, say, concrete and abstract thinking styles. Rather, there is simply no evidence to suggest that these types of thinking styles are determined by lateralization of brain functions.

Similarly, just because there are not yet any empirical findings supporting the idea of distinct learning styles, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork make a point of saying that studies looking at this issue need to be conducted, and conducted well. Valid and reliable criteria and tests need to be developed to determine an individual’s learning style. Then teaching methodologies need to be developed for each type of learning style. Finally, it needs to be demonstrated that individuals identified with a particular learning style benefit the most from teaching that fits their particular style. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork have described this well in their paper, and it should serve as a useful framework for anyone wishing to do research in this area.

In the meantime, I wonder about all of the other teaching fads that have influenced education over the last few generations. Why is it that we in the United States spend more per child on education than any other nation in the world, and yet produce such mediocre results? I suppose everyone has ideas on why this is, and it is probably the case that everyone is at least a little bit correct. I think some of the blame may be placed on the training and education of teachers in the U.S. Most of the education departments in the U.S. have been heavily influenced by post-modern thinking. Post-modernism tells us there are no universal truths, no differences between the sexes, and that one moral system is just as good as any other. The only successful accomplishment of post-modernism has been to utterly drain the arts and humanities of any significance, of any meaning. For hundreds of years, the arts and humanities were the most important components of any advanced education. Now they are nothing more than punchlines to jokes told by college graduates who can barely put two sentences together.

Fortunately, there is a movement afoot to bring back more traditional forms of education, the so-called “classical education” movement. This movement seeks to bring back into the fold the study of Greek and Latin, and of all the classical works of western thought, from Homer to Einstein. Most of the K-12 classical education movement is taken up by home schoolers, and I suspect that it will remain that way for a very long time. But in the post-secondary realm there are a few colleges that have launched degree programs focused entirely on the study of the western canon, and which employ the Socratic method in the educational process.

Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Clara Paula, CA is one such school. Since their founding in the early 1970s, they’ve established a reputation for being one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation. Critics of this type of education typically argue that students are being prepared for great careers… in the past. I vehemently disagree with this. By being exposed to a classical education, students are being prepared for life in at least 3 ways:

1. The “great books” curriculum at places like Thomas Aquinas exposes students to the sum total of knowledge upon which our civilization is based. Anyone with a deep understanding of these basics will be prepared to understand and learn about anything.

2. The great works are presented in a unified manner, such that a student learns of the connections between different fields of knowledge. These connections occur as regular patterns across time, and a student who can recognize them has a distinct advantage.

3. The Socratic method teaches students to think on their feet, and to learn to think fast and work well with others. Combined with mandatory essays, this type of education will equip a student to be prepared for any type of work requiring the communication and understanding of sophisticated knowledge.

I doubt very much that such an approach to education would ever catch on with even a small minority of folks. Still, I feel that the fads and post-modern influences that the educational field has suffered over the last few generations has been extremely harmful. At some point, we may be able to jettison such nonsense, and go back to the search for truth and meaning. I think the only useful thing that postmodernism has taught us is that we can and will get ourselves into a meaningless mess when left to our own “rational” devices To successfully pursue the search for truth and knowledge, we need to look outside of ourselves.

Individuals with a low socioeconomic status (SES) are at increased risk for mental and physical health problems, and the relationship may be mediated by the stress hormone cortisol. Over a 2-year period, children from low-SES backgrounds had higher levels of cortisol than did those from higher-SES backgrounds. Children from lower-SES backgrounds reported greater perceptions of threat and more family chaos, both of which may raise cortisol levels.

This is a fascinating finding, and something I was expecting. We know that chronic exposure to stress hormones like cortisol can cause damage to key areas of the brain associated with learning and memory, most notably the hippocampus. We also know that children who come from low SES families tend to do poorly with regard to academic performance.

Given all of this, the next set of studies to focus on would be to examine the effects of current stressors on academic performance, as well as the role of chronic stressors. I would imagine one study where you had at least four groups:

Group 1: Low current stress and low chronic stress history
Group 2: Low current stress and high chronic stress history
Group 3: High current stress and low chronic stress history
Group 4: High current stress and high chronic stress history

The obvious hypothesis to test would be that Group 1 would perform best academically, and Group 4 would perform the worst. But the real interesting results would be in comparing and contrasting Groups 2 and 3. At the very least, I would think that these groups might perform equally bad academically, and fall somewhere between the performance measures of Groups 1 and 4. But it is also possible that Group 2 may have enough cortisol-related brain anomalies that their performance would be worse than that of Group 3.

At any rate, if the results of such a study were able to demonstrate clear effects of current stress and chronic stress, the next step would be to see if we could relate the detrimental effects of chronic stress to specific brain damage. Behaviorally, we could test hippocampal functioning with spatial navigation tasks. It might also be possible to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study hippocampal activity in non-stressed and chronically stressed students. There are also a number of pharmacological manipulations that involve the enhancement or blockage of certain hippocampus-related functions. If chronically stressed and non-stressed students responded differently to these pharmacological manipulations, that would provide further evidence of hippocampal damage due to chronic stress.

Once a relationship is established, of course, we’d need to see if we could start coming up with interventions to help the children exposed to chronic stressors. At a minimum, I would think that families would need to be educated on what constitutes “stress”, and how stress can affect the lives of their kids.

First up, was the news from IBM Research. Last month they reported that they had constructed a cortical simulator built upon the IBM Blue Gene supercomputing architecture. According to IBM, this cortical simulation is able to run at near-real-time, and possesses the power to simulate the activity in a cat cortex. Exciting news, to be sure.

However, a few weeks later Henry Markam, an IBM Blue Brain project director, publicly issued a nasty letter calling the whole cat-brain achievement a “PR stunt”. The choicest quote from Markham’s letter is this one:

This is light years away from a cat brain, not even close to an ants brain in complexity. It is highly unethical of (Dharmendra) Modha to mislead the public in making people believe they have actually simulated a cat’s brain. Absolutely shocking.

Wow. For their part, IBM has stood by their original announcement. But it’s important to note that this little family quarrel amongst IBM researchers is indicative of a much deeper level of discord that goes way beyond IBM. Markham was originally trained as a neuroscientist, while the team leader who is taking much credit for this work, Dharmendra Modha, is a computer scientist. Neuroscientists and computer scientists are going to have different approaches and different expectations for working on the problem of brain simulations. Computer scientists like Modha are going to look at their estimates of the raw computing power of a mammalian brain, and use those estimates to decide how much horsepower they need to simulate that raw computing power in silico. Once they’re able to hit those horsepower numbers, they can declare a sort of victory. Meanwhile, neuroscientists such as Markham are used to studying, in minute detail, the complex underpinnings of relatively simple functions and behaviors. To them, it is impossible to assert that a cat cortex has been “simulated”, because such a statement implies a very deep level of understanding of what it is the cortex does and how it works, something we currently don’t know.

As a result, both Modha and Markham are right: Modha can declare victory from his perspective because of the fact that, by his own standards, he has managed to “simulate” a cat cortex. But Markham is also correct, in that we haven’t even begun to simulate the real underpinnings of neural activity that give rise to even the simplest forms of behavior.

I’ve met Dr. Modha and have chatted with him a few times regarding his work. He’s a nice guy, and very sharp. What was clear to me, though, is that he definitely sees neuroscience as nothing more than a support tool for his work. We neuroscientists should simply provide data to the computer scientists, and not worry about how those data are being used. I think that most neuroscientists would prefer to see this work proceed in a much different fashion. Rather than work on simulating a mammalian brain, we should have begun by completely simulating the nervous systems of invertebrates, including planaria, cockroaches, and flies. Understanding the way these simpler organisms behave would go a long way toward helping to understand how more complex animals behave.

Maybe we should go down even further: Why not start by simulating the entire activity of a single neuron? We know much now about how neurons work, how they control and regulate their electrical charges, activation pathways, neurotransmitter production, gate control mechanisms, and much more. Neurons are enormously complex cells, and there’s reason to believe that at least some core behaviors (e.g. Pavlovian conditioning) may be found at the neural or molecular layer. We may not be able to fully understand how our brains work until we understand exactly how the complexity of a neuron contributes to those inner workings.

Meanwhile, in another story, it was recently reported that MIT is launching what they’re calling the Mind Machine Project (MMP). MMP is to be a $5 million effort aimed at “fixing” the mistakes of some 40 years of AI work. A collection of experts will be working together to create new, intelligent machines that they hope will live up to the dream and hype of AI that existed back when it was first born. Back then (the 1960s), there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that there would indeed be a HAL 9000 computer by the year 2001. I fear that the MIT workers will be committing the same sins as their brethren at IBM. They’ll likely focus on top-down approaches to various problems such as “cognition”.

What they should be doing is working first on building a framework where simple machines can be augmented by more and more complex “layers” or components. This would be much more like the evolution of brains and behaviors on earth. In addition they should start with components of simple behaviors, such as sensation and perception, then move on to simple behaviors such as avoidance, sensitization, and habituation. Any machine that can do behaviors at the level of a worm or cockroach is ready to be used to support more and more complex behaviors.

I hope that the folks at MIT realize this go forth in such a manner. The folks at IBM are much to enamored of their splendid hardware to change course now. But there are a lot of smart folks over there, and I hope that some of them realize that they need to take a different approach with brain and behavior simulation, and listen to a few neuroscientists. Whatever happens, all of this promises to be very exciting to watch, and I continue to wish that I could be part of it.