Mark Signorelli reviews Raymond Tallis’s Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity:
Considerable portions of Aping Mankind are devoted to explaining the empirical shortcomings of recent neurological “research.” Tallis describes the significant limitations of fMRI scans, the favorite evidentiary talisman of the neuromaniac. He also points out the absurdly reductionist nature of some widely trumpeted experiments, in which a subject is asked to answer a simple yes or no question, or perform some simple gesture, while their brain activity is being measured. Such experiments are interpreted in a way that isolates the results from the remainder of the subject’s life, that takes no account of the subject’s history or beliefs. But as Tallis notes, such actions bear no resemblance to the sorts of actions we routinely carry out in our day to day lives, which are all emerge from a vast context of intentions, experience, and aspirations. Omit that context, and it is quite easy to construe behavior as materially caused: “their crude experimental design…treats individuals as passive respondents to stimuli and then discovers that they are passive respondents to stimuli.” The experiments, devised on materialist presuppositions, are guaranteed to render materialist conclusions.
Reminds me a lot of Barbara Herrnstein-Smith. See here for a more even-handed review.
