Friday, May 27, 2005
Law professor Phillip Johnson just wants to make scientists think
chicagotribune.com
Intelligent designer
By Michael Powell
The Washington Post
May 27, 2005
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Phillip Johnson pulls out a dog-eared copy of a newspaper editorial and reads aloud:
"With their slick Web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of 'intelligent design' -- a 'theory' that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution -- are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. ... They succeed by casting doubt on evolution."
The 65-year-old Johnson swivels his formidable and balding head -- with that even more formidable brain inside -- and gazes over his glasses.
"I suppose you think creation is all about unguided material processes, don't you? Well, I don't have the slightest trouble accepting microevolution as the cause behind the adaptation of the peppered moth and the growth of finches' beaks. But I don't see that evolutionists have any cause for jubilation there.
"It doesn't tell you how the moths and birds and trees got there in the first place. The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."
He's not big on small talk, this professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley's law school.
For centuries, scriptural literalists have insisted that God created heaven and Earth in seven days, that the world is about 6,000 years old and that fossils are figments of the paleontological imagination. Their grasp on popular opinion was strong, but they have suffered a half-century's worth of defeats in the courts and lampooning by the intelligentsia.
Now comes Johnson, a devout Presbyterian and accomplished legal theorist, and he doesn't dance on the head of biblical pins. He agrees the world is billions of years old and dinosaurs walked the Earth. Evolution is the bridge he won't cross.
This man, whose life has touched every station of the rationalist cross from Harvard to the University of Chicago to clerk at the Supreme Court, is the founding father of the "intelligent design" movement, which holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require an intelligent creator.
"Evolution is the most plausible explanation for life if you're using naturalistic terms, I'll agree with that." Johnson folds his hands over his belly, a professorial Buddha.
"That's only," he continues, "because science puts forward evolution and says any other logical explanation is outside of reality."
Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture. They point to the complexity of the human cell, with its natural motors and miles of coding. They document the scant physical evidence for the large-scale mutations needed to make the long journey from primitive prokaryote to modern man.
They've inspired a political movement: At least 19 states are considering challenges to the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution.
None of which amuses evolutionary biologists, for whom intelligent-design theory inhabits the remotest exurb of polite scientific discourse. Darwin's theory explains the proliferation of species and the interaction of DNA and RNA, not to mention the evolution of humankind.
The evidence, they insist, is all around: Fruit flies branch into new species; bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics; studies of the mouse genome reveal that 99 percent of its 30,000 genes have counterparts in humans.
Johnson and William Provine, a prominent evolutionary biology professor at Cornell University, love the rhetorical thrust and parry. Provine, an atheist, dismisses his friend as a Christian creationist and intelligent design as discredited science.
As for the aspects of evolution that baffle scientists?
"Phillip is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformations in evolution are not there in the fossil record," Provine says. "It's difficult to explore a billion-year-old fossil record. Be patient!"
Faith in Darwinism
Provine's faith, if one may call it that, rests on Darwinism, which he describes as the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. The English scientist's insights registered as a powerful blow in the long run of battles, from Copernicus to Descartes, that removed God from the center of the Western world.
At which point a cautionary flag should be waved.
Scientists tend to be a secular lot. But science and religion are not invariable antagonists. More than a few theoretical physicists and astronomers note that their research into the cosmos deposits them at God's doorstep. And evolution's path remains littered with mysteries.
Is it irrational to inquire if intelligent life is seeded with inevitabilities?
"Give Johnson and the intelligent-design movement their due: They are asking terribly important questions," says Stuart Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity at the University of Calgary. "To question whether patterns and complexity, at the level of the cell or the universe, bespeak intelligent design is not stupid in the least.
"I simply believe they've come up with the wrong answers."
"I attended church in high school, but it was just part of the culture, like the Boy Scouts," says Johnson, who grew up in Aurora, Ill.
The Harvard graduate was first in his law school class at the University of Chicago and became a clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren. In 1967, with a wife and two children, he went to Berkeley, where he would gain international renown as a teacher of criminal law and legal theory.
"My motives were shallow," Johnson says. "I was a typical half-educated careerist intellectual with conventional liberal politics."
In the 1970s, Berkeley was roiling. Johnson and his wife followed different paths. "I had been very happy for a long time," he says. "I was shaken to my core."
The night his wife decided to leave in 1977, he attended a church supper. The pastor spoke passionately of Christ and the Gospels. Johnson doesn't remember a Lord-sundered-the-heavens moment. He just heard the words, perhaps for the first time in his life.
"I wasn't convinced," Johnson says, "but I said to myself, `The minister's presenting me with a real option."'
That night, Johnson pulled out his law and philosophy books. "I was concerned that I could be just throwing my brain away," he says. "I needed to know if I was adopting a myth to satisfy my personal hunger."
He was nudged along by his interest in "critical legal studies," a left-wing movement that holds that the law is prejudice masquerading as objective truth. "I disliked intensely their infantile politics," he says. "But their critique of liberal rationalism and the sham neutrality of rationalism helped me become a Christian. I became the entire right wing of critical legal studies."
In time, he converted and married his present wife, Kathie, also an adult convert.
In 1987, Johnson took a sabbatical in London, and one day in a bookstore picked up "The Blind Watchmaker," by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins argued that life was governed by blind physics, that free will was illusion, that religion was a virus.
Johnson devoured dozens more evolutionary texts. He found extraordinary minds and polemics, but the evidence didn't impress him.
"I was struck by the breadth of Darwin's claims as opposed to how scanty were the observable changes." He peers at you with that unwavering gaze. "I said to my wife that I shouldn't take this up. I will be ridiculed and it will consume my life.
"Of course, it was irresistible."
Johnson discerned in Darwinism a profound challenge to the faith he had embraced so passionately.
"I realized," he says, "that if the pure Darwinist account was accurate and life is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy. Here was a chance to make a great contribution."
Stephen Meyer, then a Cambridge graduate student who harbored his own doubts, walked to a tavern with Johnson and they talked for hours.
"Phillip understood that the language of science cut off choices: Evolution had to be an undirected process or it wasn't science," says Meyer, who today directs an intelligent-design think tank affiliated with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. "He knew the rhetorical tricks. By the end of that day I knew we could challenge Darwin."
Challenging Darwin
So what does that mean, "to challenge Charles Darwin"?
Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species" in 1859. In the broadest terms, Darwin had three insights: Evolution is responsible for the vast profusion of life, as all living organisms descend from common ancestors. Species are not immutable -- new species appear gradually through micro-mutations known as speciation. Natural selection guides all this.
But evolutionary theory trails behind it no small number of unanswered questions.
Darwin, for instance, noted that different species tend to have similar body features, and attributed this "convergence" to a common ancestor. But that often isn't the case. The complex eye of a squid and a human are nearly identical yet lack a common genetic inheritance. Too, most species evolve little during the span of their existence, leaving the mystery of how to account for evolutionary leaps.
Darwinian theory also presupposes an "inconceivably great" number of links between living and extinct species, but paleontologists have discovered only a relative handful of such fossils. And scientists still puzzle at the great explosion of life known as the "Cambrian explosion," when thousands of multicellular animals appeared over 10 million or 20 million years (a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms).
Johnson composed a sort of prosecutor's brief. Natural selection? It strengthens existing species, but there's "no persuasive reason for believing that natural selection can produce new species and organs." Mutations as a driver of new species? Much too slow to account for grand changes.
Johnson wrote his 1991 book, "Darwin on Trial," and was convinced he had peppered Darwinian theory with intellectual buckshot. It did not change the world. The scientific reviews weren't so hot. But Meyer, director of the Center for Science & Culture, remembers reading it and feeling a sense of relief.
"A lot of creationists are unctuous and earnest and begging for a place at the scientific table," says Meyer. "Not Phil. He was a star academic, he conceded nothing, and he's got rhino hide for skin."
The building blocks of the intelligent-design movement slowly took form. A few like-minded souls in academia e-mailed Johnson, who replied.
"I found a lot of people ready to challenge the culturally dominant orthodoxy, but they didn't know how," Johnson recalls. "They thought if they just dutifully presented evidence, the Darwinists might listen. I said we have to think more strategically. I evolved -- if I may use that word -- as a leader of that group."
Once he debated the famed biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was learned and merciless, but most critics say Johnson held his own. "It was like playing Jack Nicklaus and losing in a playoff," Johnson says.
As Johnson explained to Touchstone magazine, a Christian journal: "I do not want my audience to go away thinking: `That's one clever lawyer who can make you look like a fool.' ... I want them to go home saying ... `There's more to intelligent design than I thought.' "
Johnson finds precious few fans in the scientific establishment, who see conservative money spent on academic conferences and publicity and public debates. Johnson thrives, they say, by the law professor's tactic of attacking soft targets and then raising his hands in victory.
The best scientific theories, scientists say, offer overarching explanations for natural phenomena even while acknowledging that many details remain to be worked out. If Einstein supplants Newton, that's the joy of science.
"Any time the intelligent-designers find a mystery that scientists can't yet explain, they shout: `See!? See!?' " says Provine, the Cornell biologist. "I like having Phil come to Cornell to debate. He turns a lot of my students into evolutionists."
Maybe mysteries aren't so mysterious. Intelligent life, Provine says, is understandable as adaptations accrued over hundreds of millions of years. And the cell falls short of miraculous.
"A lot of the DNA in there is not needed -- it's junk," says Phillip Kitcher, the Columbia University philosopher of science. "If it's intelligently designed, then God needs to go back to school."
No way to test theory
Owen Gingerich is senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a devout Christian. He enjoys talking to Johnson and doesn't care for the insistent secularism of many Darwinists. But he doesn't buy intelligent design's utility as a scientific theory, not least because he sees no way to test its ideas.
"Johnson tends to avoid questions he doesn't want to answer -- such as what accounts for mankind if not evolution?" Gingerich says. "If he says that the first man literally came out of the mud like Minerva from the brow of Zeus, he knows he would be ridiculed.
"Looking for God's direct hand is a very fuzzy business."
So what of God?
Isn't there, Johnson is asked, a risk inherent in trying to toss out Darwin and discern God's footprints? Why would He use his hand to create the tyrannosaurus and the Cro-Magnon, only to discard them in great extinctions? If science proves that the wonders of the cell and the machinery of the eye are the result of a material process, what becomes of faith?
"One answer is that it's hard to evaluate unless you know what the Designer was trying to create," he says. "I suppose the Creator could have made it so that we would live forever and be bulletproof. Flawless design may not be his point."
Johnson isn't content with a Creator so deferential to natural processes as to fade into the cosmic woodwork. Johnson is convinced that His hands have shaped human life -- and the evidence likely is there if only science will look for it.
"I think it's very possible that God left some fingerprints on the evidence," Johnson says. "Once you open science to that possibility, we're poised for a metaphysical reversal."
He smiles and catches himself. "I'm content just to open science up to an intellectual world that's been closed to it for two centuries."
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
Intelligent designer
By Michael Powell
The Washington Post
May 27, 2005
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Phillip Johnson pulls out a dog-eared copy of a newspaper editorial and reads aloud:
"With their slick Web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of 'intelligent design' -- a 'theory' that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution -- are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. ... They succeed by casting doubt on evolution."
The 65-year-old Johnson swivels his formidable and balding head -- with that even more formidable brain inside -- and gazes over his glasses.
"I suppose you think creation is all about unguided material processes, don't you? Well, I don't have the slightest trouble accepting microevolution as the cause behind the adaptation of the peppered moth and the growth of finches' beaks. But I don't see that evolutionists have any cause for jubilation there.
"It doesn't tell you how the moths and birds and trees got there in the first place. The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."
He's not big on small talk, this professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley's law school.
For centuries, scriptural literalists have insisted that God created heaven and Earth in seven days, that the world is about 6,000 years old and that fossils are figments of the paleontological imagination. Their grasp on popular opinion was strong, but they have suffered a half-century's worth of defeats in the courts and lampooning by the intelligentsia.
Now comes Johnson, a devout Presbyterian and accomplished legal theorist, and he doesn't dance on the head of biblical pins. He agrees the world is billions of years old and dinosaurs walked the Earth. Evolution is the bridge he won't cross.
This man, whose life has touched every station of the rationalist cross from Harvard to the University of Chicago to clerk at the Supreme Court, is the founding father of the "intelligent design" movement, which holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require an intelligent creator.
"Evolution is the most plausible explanation for life if you're using naturalistic terms, I'll agree with that." Johnson folds his hands over his belly, a professorial Buddha.
"That's only," he continues, "because science puts forward evolution and says any other logical explanation is outside of reality."
Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture. They point to the complexity of the human cell, with its natural motors and miles of coding. They document the scant physical evidence for the large-scale mutations needed to make the long journey from primitive prokaryote to modern man.
They've inspired a political movement: At least 19 states are considering challenges to the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution.
None of which amuses evolutionary biologists, for whom intelligent-design theory inhabits the remotest exurb of polite scientific discourse. Darwin's theory explains the proliferation of species and the interaction of DNA and RNA, not to mention the evolution of humankind.
The evidence, they insist, is all around: Fruit flies branch into new species; bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics; studies of the mouse genome reveal that 99 percent of its 30,000 genes have counterparts in humans.
Johnson and William Provine, a prominent evolutionary biology professor at Cornell University, love the rhetorical thrust and parry. Provine, an atheist, dismisses his friend as a Christian creationist and intelligent design as discredited science.
As for the aspects of evolution that baffle scientists?
"Phillip is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformations in evolution are not there in the fossil record," Provine says. "It's difficult to explore a billion-year-old fossil record. Be patient!"
Faith in Darwinism
Provine's faith, if one may call it that, rests on Darwinism, which he describes as the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. The English scientist's insights registered as a powerful blow in the long run of battles, from Copernicus to Descartes, that removed God from the center of the Western world.
At which point a cautionary flag should be waved.
Scientists tend to be a secular lot. But science and religion are not invariable antagonists. More than a few theoretical physicists and astronomers note that their research into the cosmos deposits them at God's doorstep. And evolution's path remains littered with mysteries.
Is it irrational to inquire if intelligent life is seeded with inevitabilities?
"Give Johnson and the intelligent-design movement their due: They are asking terribly important questions," says Stuart Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity at the University of Calgary. "To question whether patterns and complexity, at the level of the cell or the universe, bespeak intelligent design is not stupid in the least.
"I simply believe they've come up with the wrong answers."
"I attended church in high school, but it was just part of the culture, like the Boy Scouts," says Johnson, who grew up in Aurora, Ill.
The Harvard graduate was first in his law school class at the University of Chicago and became a clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren. In 1967, with a wife and two children, he went to Berkeley, where he would gain international renown as a teacher of criminal law and legal theory.
"My motives were shallow," Johnson says. "I was a typical half-educated careerist intellectual with conventional liberal politics."
In the 1970s, Berkeley was roiling. Johnson and his wife followed different paths. "I had been very happy for a long time," he says. "I was shaken to my core."
The night his wife decided to leave in 1977, he attended a church supper. The pastor spoke passionately of Christ and the Gospels. Johnson doesn't remember a Lord-sundered-the-heavens moment. He just heard the words, perhaps for the first time in his life.
"I wasn't convinced," Johnson says, "but I said to myself, `The minister's presenting me with a real option."'
That night, Johnson pulled out his law and philosophy books. "I was concerned that I could be just throwing my brain away," he says. "I needed to know if I was adopting a myth to satisfy my personal hunger."
He was nudged along by his interest in "critical legal studies," a left-wing movement that holds that the law is prejudice masquerading as objective truth. "I disliked intensely their infantile politics," he says. "But their critique of liberal rationalism and the sham neutrality of rationalism helped me become a Christian. I became the entire right wing of critical legal studies."
In time, he converted and married his present wife, Kathie, also an adult convert.
In 1987, Johnson took a sabbatical in London, and one day in a bookstore picked up "The Blind Watchmaker," by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins argued that life was governed by blind physics, that free will was illusion, that religion was a virus.
Johnson devoured dozens more evolutionary texts. He found extraordinary minds and polemics, but the evidence didn't impress him.
"I was struck by the breadth of Darwin's claims as opposed to how scanty were the observable changes." He peers at you with that unwavering gaze. "I said to my wife that I shouldn't take this up. I will be ridiculed and it will consume my life.
"Of course, it was irresistible."
Johnson discerned in Darwinism a profound challenge to the faith he had embraced so passionately.
"I realized," he says, "that if the pure Darwinist account was accurate and life is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy. Here was a chance to make a great contribution."
Stephen Meyer, then a Cambridge graduate student who harbored his own doubts, walked to a tavern with Johnson and they talked for hours.
"Phillip understood that the language of science cut off choices: Evolution had to be an undirected process or it wasn't science," says Meyer, who today directs an intelligent-design think tank affiliated with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. "He knew the rhetorical tricks. By the end of that day I knew we could challenge Darwin."
Challenging Darwin
So what does that mean, "to challenge Charles Darwin"?
Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species" in 1859. In the broadest terms, Darwin had three insights: Evolution is responsible for the vast profusion of life, as all living organisms descend from common ancestors. Species are not immutable -- new species appear gradually through micro-mutations known as speciation. Natural selection guides all this.
But evolutionary theory trails behind it no small number of unanswered questions.
Darwin, for instance, noted that different species tend to have similar body features, and attributed this "convergence" to a common ancestor. But that often isn't the case. The complex eye of a squid and a human are nearly identical yet lack a common genetic inheritance. Too, most species evolve little during the span of their existence, leaving the mystery of how to account for evolutionary leaps.
Darwinian theory also presupposes an "inconceivably great" number of links between living and extinct species, but paleontologists have discovered only a relative handful of such fossils. And scientists still puzzle at the great explosion of life known as the "Cambrian explosion," when thousands of multicellular animals appeared over 10 million or 20 million years (a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms).
Johnson composed a sort of prosecutor's brief. Natural selection? It strengthens existing species, but there's "no persuasive reason for believing that natural selection can produce new species and organs." Mutations as a driver of new species? Much too slow to account for grand changes.
Johnson wrote his 1991 book, "Darwin on Trial," and was convinced he had peppered Darwinian theory with intellectual buckshot. It did not change the world. The scientific reviews weren't so hot. But Meyer, director of the Center for Science & Culture, remembers reading it and feeling a sense of relief.
"A lot of creationists are unctuous and earnest and begging for a place at the scientific table," says Meyer. "Not Phil. He was a star academic, he conceded nothing, and he's got rhino hide for skin."
The building blocks of the intelligent-design movement slowly took form. A few like-minded souls in academia e-mailed Johnson, who replied.
"I found a lot of people ready to challenge the culturally dominant orthodoxy, but they didn't know how," Johnson recalls. "They thought if they just dutifully presented evidence, the Darwinists might listen. I said we have to think more strategically. I evolved -- if I may use that word -- as a leader of that group."
Once he debated the famed biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was learned and merciless, but most critics say Johnson held his own. "It was like playing Jack Nicklaus and losing in a playoff," Johnson says.
As Johnson explained to Touchstone magazine, a Christian journal: "I do not want my audience to go away thinking: `That's one clever lawyer who can make you look like a fool.' ... I want them to go home saying ... `There's more to intelligent design than I thought.' "
Johnson finds precious few fans in the scientific establishment, who see conservative money spent on academic conferences and publicity and public debates. Johnson thrives, they say, by the law professor's tactic of attacking soft targets and then raising his hands in victory.
The best scientific theories, scientists say, offer overarching explanations for natural phenomena even while acknowledging that many details remain to be worked out. If Einstein supplants Newton, that's the joy of science.
"Any time the intelligent-designers find a mystery that scientists can't yet explain, they shout: `See!? See!?' " says Provine, the Cornell biologist. "I like having Phil come to Cornell to debate. He turns a lot of my students into evolutionists."
Maybe mysteries aren't so mysterious. Intelligent life, Provine says, is understandable as adaptations accrued over hundreds of millions of years. And the cell falls short of miraculous.
"A lot of the DNA in there is not needed -- it's junk," says Phillip Kitcher, the Columbia University philosopher of science. "If it's intelligently designed, then God needs to go back to school."
No way to test theory
Owen Gingerich is senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a devout Christian. He enjoys talking to Johnson and doesn't care for the insistent secularism of many Darwinists. But he doesn't buy intelligent design's utility as a scientific theory, not least because he sees no way to test its ideas.
"Johnson tends to avoid questions he doesn't want to answer -- such as what accounts for mankind if not evolution?" Gingerich says. "If he says that the first man literally came out of the mud like Minerva from the brow of Zeus, he knows he would be ridiculed.
"Looking for God's direct hand is a very fuzzy business."
So what of God?
Isn't there, Johnson is asked, a risk inherent in trying to toss out Darwin and discern God's footprints? Why would He use his hand to create the tyrannosaurus and the Cro-Magnon, only to discard them in great extinctions? If science proves that the wonders of the cell and the machinery of the eye are the result of a material process, what becomes of faith?
"One answer is that it's hard to evaluate unless you know what the Designer was trying to create," he says. "I suppose the Creator could have made it so that we would live forever and be bulletproof. Flawless design may not be his point."
Johnson isn't content with a Creator so deferential to natural processes as to fade into the cosmic woodwork. Johnson is convinced that His hands have shaped human life -- and the evidence likely is there if only science will look for it.
"I think it's very possible that God left some fingerprints on the evidence," Johnson says. "Once you open science to that possibility, we're poised for a metaphysical reversal."
He smiles and catches himself. "I'm content just to open science up to an intellectual world that's been closed to it for two centuries."
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
Thursday, May 26, 2005
t's a right lobe thing. No, really
chicagotribune.com >> Leisure
It's a right lobe thing. No, really
Study: Ability to get sarcasm is biological
By Jamie Talan
Tribune Newspapers: Newsday
Published May 25, 2005
Scientists have discovered comedy central in the brain--specific tissue regulating the ability to understand sarcasm.
People with damage to the right frontal lobe, right behind the eyes, are unable to appreciate this kind of humor.
In sarcasm, "the literal meaning is different from the true meaning, and some people just don't understand that difference," said Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a psychologist at the Rambam Medical Center and the University of Haifa in Israel. Her study appears in the May issue of the journal Neuropsychology.
The study tested 25 people with damage to the frontal lobe, 16 with damage in the region to the back of the brain and 17 normal volunteers. Rigged to scanning devices, the subjects were presented with a series of sarcastic comments.
For instance: Joe came to work and fell asleep. His boss walks by. "Don't work too hard, Joe," he says. Both normal volunteers and people with damage to the back of the brain understood that the boss was being sarcastic.
But Shamay-Tsoory said people with damage to the right frontal lobe didn't get the irony of the comment. In fact, they failed to understand that the boss was not happy with his lethargic employee.
Shamay-Tsoory thinks that apart from brain injury, perhaps even subtle differences in the "wiring" of this region can leave people unable to empathize with others, and it is this lack of ascertaining another's emotional state that may be responsible for the inability to understand sarcasm.
The network that regulates one's ability to appreciate sarcasm begins with an understanding of the meaning of the sentence, which is carried out by the left frontal lobe. Then, the right frontal lobe helps the person put it into a social context. Finally, the right frontal lobe must be able to tell the difference between the literal meaning and what is really meant.
"This region makes the ultimate decision on whether something is sarcastic or not," the scientist said. "People won't get what is going on in a social situation without this network doing its job."
Dr. Antonio Damasio, head of the neurology department at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, said this finding makes perfect sense. "People with damage on the right side of their brain ... have major problems with social cognition, or thinking," said Damasio, author of "The Feeling of What Happens," a book about emotion and the brain.
Shamay-Tsoory said the ability to understand sarcasm doesn't normally manifest itself until the sixth year of life. That's when the Jon Stewart in most people begins to emerge.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
It's a right lobe thing. No, really
Study: Ability to get sarcasm is biological
By Jamie Talan
Tribune Newspapers: Newsday
Published May 25, 2005
Scientists have discovered comedy central in the brain--specific tissue regulating the ability to understand sarcasm.
People with damage to the right frontal lobe, right behind the eyes, are unable to appreciate this kind of humor.
In sarcasm, "the literal meaning is different from the true meaning, and some people just don't understand that difference," said Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a psychologist at the Rambam Medical Center and the University of Haifa in Israel. Her study appears in the May issue of the journal Neuropsychology.
The study tested 25 people with damage to the frontal lobe, 16 with damage in the region to the back of the brain and 17 normal volunteers. Rigged to scanning devices, the subjects were presented with a series of sarcastic comments.
For instance: Joe came to work and fell asleep. His boss walks by. "Don't work too hard, Joe," he says. Both normal volunteers and people with damage to the back of the brain understood that the boss was being sarcastic.
But Shamay-Tsoory said people with damage to the right frontal lobe didn't get the irony of the comment. In fact, they failed to understand that the boss was not happy with his lethargic employee.
Shamay-Tsoory thinks that apart from brain injury, perhaps even subtle differences in the "wiring" of this region can leave people unable to empathize with others, and it is this lack of ascertaining another's emotional state that may be responsible for the inability to understand sarcasm.
The network that regulates one's ability to appreciate sarcasm begins with an understanding of the meaning of the sentence, which is carried out by the left frontal lobe. Then, the right frontal lobe helps the person put it into a social context. Finally, the right frontal lobe must be able to tell the difference between the literal meaning and what is really meant.
"This region makes the ultimate decision on whether something is sarcastic or not," the scientist said. "People won't get what is going on in a social situation without this network doing its job."
Dr. Antonio Damasio, head of the neurology department at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, said this finding makes perfect sense. "People with damage on the right side of their brain ... have major problems with social cognition, or thinking," said Damasio, author of "The Feeling of What Happens," a book about emotion and the brain.
Shamay-Tsoory said the ability to understand sarcasm doesn't normally manifest itself until the sixth year of life. That's when the Jon Stewart in most people begins to emerge.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
