A recent post from the Daily Mail focuses on the story of Sonny Graham, a 69 year old man who committed suicide after receiving a transplant from someone who had performed a similar act.
The theory the author presents is that the transplant was somehow responsible for the tragic events, somehow having transfered the personality and/or memories from the donor to Mr. Graham. Not only does this terribly marginalize the tragic death of an individual, transferring the event to the donor, but it glamorizes bad science.
For a few brave scientists have started claiming that our memories and characters are encoded not just in our brain, but throughout our entire body.
Consciousness, they claim, is created by every living cell in the body acting in concert.
They argue, in effect, that our hearts, livers and every single organ in the body stores our memories, drives our emotions and imbues us with our own individual characters. Our whole body, they believe, is the seat of the soul; not just the brain.
Of course, there is no reason to believe this is true at all, especially once the word “soul” starts getting thrown around. The author paints the “scientists” who believe this as “brave”, hoping that readers will see them as mavericks, instead of individuals who are essentially religious apologists.
These “brave scientists” are willing to accept about 70 documented cases of transplant recipients taking on personal attributes of donors, out of tens of thousands of transplants. This means that their theory is based on less than 1% of potential cases.
It seems much more likely that these 70 or so individuals changed in reflection of the stress put onto them by the necessity of such traumatic lifesaving procedures?
I for one, hear a duck.
Filed under: Pseudo-Science | Tagged: Quacks, Sonny Graham, Soul, Transplant
It’s exasperating when something like this catches the eye of the media. With any type of experience of which there are tens of thousands of instances, coincidences are inevitable. But many among the media and the religious don’t seem to be mentally sophisticated enough to grasp the concept of “coincidence”.
[...] Archaeoporn covers the story in fine detail, and I’m not going to rehash their material here. But I did notice in the course of my reading that the density of baloney in this story is very high – maybe even degenerate. Let’s count how many unproven concepts and faulty conclusions exist in this story, shall we? Here’s some material from the Daily Mail story: For a few brave scientists have started claiming that our memories and characters are encoded not just in our brain, but throughout our entire body. [...]
Heh….check the byline on the story….This guy has the audacity to pass himself off as a Doctor??
[...] “The media loves bad science,” complains Archaeologyknits, referring to a sensationlised organ transplant case with some absurd conclusions drawn from it. [...]
So if these people believe that part of your soul is transfered from the donor to the recipient, does that mean the soul is not atomic? Does that mean that part of your soul can go to heaven, but part may stay on earth? Or worse, that part may go to heaven, and part may go to hell?
How can people write stuff like this and not end up with more questions?