File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2004/bhaskar.0409, message 57


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-mail.com>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: isn't this trolling?
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 10:29:36 -0400


Shiv, my sweet sweet child, aren't you a little too young to have such
memory failures?  Not having emails from a year ago to hand (I'm not quite
that anal retentive), I nevertheless recall that I pointed out several
articles in medical journals concerning your argument that genetics
completely governs the development of all obsessive-compulsive disorders.
After noting that the very newspaper article that you had cited said no such
thing, I directed you to articles demonstrating that cognitive behavioral
and other types of talk therapy have significant effects on many psychiatric
disorders including OCD (effects that even encompassed hormonal changes),
which is quite impossible if the disorder is of an entirely genetic nature.
I do believe this is significant empirical evidence that firmly rebuts
biological determinism.  In fact you had no reply to this point.

Incidently, one of my closest friends happens to be a microbiologist
(working for a small pharmaceutical company, where one might expect
biologically determinist views to be well established), and when I mentioned
your argument on OCD just to get a biologist's view, she laughed out loud.
She doesn't know any reputable scientist doing research on the human body
who thinks any such thing.

If you truly believe in the importance of empirical evidence, then you have
to accept that sometimes evidence will prove *you* wrong.  You seem in fact
to have ignored and then forgotten the evidence I put before you, handily
(and childishly) claiming nobody has ever presented counter-evidence.  Of
course, no amount of evidence will ever convince a zealot (ion the present
context one thinks of religious fundamentalists who deny evolution).  You
also seem unable to distinguish between two different ways to reject
biological determinism: (1) the argument that no aspects (or no significant
aspects) of human behavior have a biological basis, and (2) the argument
that only some aspects of human behavior have a biological basis.  They
aren't the same, and I think the view that most people here take is #2.
Actually, the claims that "human behavior has a biological basis" and "human
behavior is biologically determined" are quite different as well.  In any
case you seem to be having a rough time grasping the nature of the
criticisms leveled against your ideas.

Meanwhile, you completely ignore the question of why you bother being on 
this list or claim that you're a critical realist.  Surely you're trying to 
gain something intellectual by being here?  Or is this just the way you get 
your jollies?

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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