Magicians, Psuedo-Racist brain theory, Prayer

Header: Brrr! Magician to Be Encased in Ice Trailer: CIS:NEW-95

Brrr! Magician to Be Encased in Ice

David Blaine is way cool. Actually, he's so cool he's cold. Starting next Monday, the magician will be encased in a 6-ton block of ice for 58 hours in New York City (specifically Broadway at West 44th Street, which is near Times Square). A tube will provide air and water. Think this sounds crazy? Crazy is Blaine's middle name. Last year, he was buried in a clear plastic coffin for a week--and lived to tell about it. He credits his coffin survival to the help of thousands of people who visited his grave. "I ask well-wishers to lend me their warmth and support by visiting and touching the block of ice in which I will be frozen." This latest stunt is called "Frozen in Time." Two halves of an ice block will be cut with Blaine's body contour and then welded together--with him inside. He will wear only pants and boots. His vital signs will be monitored by doctors, and he has created eye signals to communicate an emergency. "The biggest dangers are loss of circulation and frostbite in his fingers and toes, and the threat of falling asleep in which case his head could slump, bringing his face into contact with the ice, damaging his skin," said Dr. Ronald Rudin, Blaine's medical consultant. "There is also the danger of blood clots which could break loose and move to the brain or other vital organs as David is being broken out of the ice." ABC will host a live TV special on November 29 as Blaine is removed from the ice. --Cathryn Conroy

REVERSE- PARA- META- PSEUDO-RACIST BRAIN THEORY
Copyright 2000 The Telegraph Group Limited
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
November 19, 2000, Sunday

THE DIFFERENCE, a three-part series on genetics, begins on Channel 4 tonight at 8pm.

He's got a better memory than us. New research suggests that one part of an aborigine's brain is 25 per cent bigger than a European's - but the academic community refuses to take it seriously, for fear of being branded 'racist'. ALASDAIR PALMER reports.

Sherilee is an eight year old who lives in Australia. She seems just like any other ordinary schoolgirl of her age, but she could help to resolve one of the most controversial topics in science: the relationship between genes and intelligence.

The question of how much of our brain power is fixed by what we inherit from our parents, and how much is a product of upbringing and education, is one that appears to fascinate and frighten everyone - scientists included.

It is not just the American Constitution that is framed around the conviction that we are all created equal. Practically the whole of contemporary politics is based on the idea that the differences between individuals are not fixed at birth.

The suggestion that there are inherent differences, not just between individuals, but between races, is even less acceptable. There is now evidence, however, that one group of people may indeed have a superior mental capacity, in at least one respect, to everyone else - and some of it comes from the eight-year-old Sherilee.

Sherilee has an astonishingly accurate visual memory. She scores 100 per cent on tests designed to measure how much individuals can remember of what they see. The only clue to the cause of her remarkable ability is her race: she is an aborigine, and aborigines have a proven ability to remember the exact location of objects that far exceeds that of other ethnic groups. They can find their way across deserts, locate water holes and identify animal lairs with an uncanny accuracy. They also perform about 50 per cent better on visual memory tests than, for instance, Caucasians.

What is the aborigines' secret? To some evolutionary psychologists, the answer is relatively straightforward. The aborigines were, for about 4,000 generations, or 80,000 years, hunter-gatherers in the deserts of Australia.

That is enough time for natural selection to have worked on increasing the accuracy of aborigines' memory, because if you could not find your way through the desert, or to the waterhole, you would starve, and so would your children. In the competition to stay alive, an accurate memory would - to put it mildly - have been an advantage.

Are today's aborigine children the inheritors of that process? It has certainly been speculated that their extraordinary visual memories are the result of genes selected over thousands of years by evolution.

But Clive Harper, a professor of pathology in Sydney, may have discovered evidence that it is more than just a theoretical possibility. He found that the visual cortex - the part of the brain used in processing and interpreting visual information - was about 25 per cent larger in aborigines than in Caucasians. He also found that they had many more nerve cells. That pronounced physical difference was almost certainly the result of different evolutionary pressures.

It is, as Prof Harper says, "difficult to prove that the greater number of nerve cells in the visual cortex is the secret of the aboriginals' phenomenal memories, especially when we know almost nothing about how the mechanism of memory works - other than that it involves the activation of nerve cells. Still, it is suggestive". It is "suggestive" enough to mean that Prof Harper could not get his findings published in any academic journal. His work, which he completed five years ago, was turned down because it was thought to be "racist".

Science journal editors "were anxious", Prof Harper explains, "that this was going to be seen as some form of discrimination - which I was very disappointed about". Prof Harper was even refused permission to outline his findings at a conference in the United States. Even the original research that demonstrated the aborigine's superior memory skills has been buried.

The cause of the anxiety was - and is - simple: the fear that the detection of any physical difference in the brains of different racial groups leads straight to Auschwitz. The idea that there are inherent, genetic differences between the different racial groups' mental abilities has about as bad a pedigree as it is possible to imagine. Hitler and the Nazis were obsessed by the idea, leading them to exterminate millions of Jews, gipsies and Russians on the grounds that they were "racially inferior".

That fear is understandable in the light of the history of the 20th century, but it is chronically exaggerated. As scientists such as Prof Harper point out, an awareness that some groups have different capacities to others does not have to lead to a latter-day version of the extermination camps. It could, and should, produce education methods that are better targeted at exploiting and developing the different abilities of different racial groups, helping to erode - rather than reinforce - their differing results within the education system.

The anxiety that the mere mention of racial differences in capacities is a first step that can lead only to the death camps has meant that many scientists prefer to turn away from evidence that mental abilities have been shaped by evolution rather than investigate it.

One result has been that the field has been left to writers whose work has created a furore, leading to accusations that prejudice, not only science, played a role in determining their conclusions.

Nearly eight years ago, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve. The book pointed out that Jews and Asians do significantly better on IQ tests than Caucasians. It highlighted the 10-15 point gap between the average score that whites achieve on IQ tests and that achieved by blacks. The authors insisted that much of that gap was genetic: white people were generally inherently more intelligent than blacks.

The Bell Curve generated a barrage of criticism, the most effective of which targeted the reliability of statistical methods that its authors used to reach their conclusions.

Still, The Bell Curve is mild in comparison with Race, Evolution and Behaviour. That book, published by J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, argues, among other things, that it required greater intelligence to survive in the cold climates of Europe and Asia than in the tropical cornucopia of Africa, and also that there is an inverse correlation between penis size and brain power.

Prof Rushton cites what he claims is a battery of statistics to prove that blacks have larger genitals and smaller brains than whites or Asians, and has summed up his thesis thus: "It's a trade-off. More brain or more penis. You can't have both." Against that background, it may not be surprising that most geneticists would rather work on something less controversial than the genetics of intelligence. But the work is, nevertheless, going on. Robert Plomin and Peter McGuffin, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, are two scientists who are trying to locate the genes for intelligence.

Their investigation is not an easy task. About half of the 100,000 genes in the human body affect the brain, and scores, possibly hundreds, are involved in intelligence. Despite this, the researchers believe they are making progress. "We have one very serious candidate for one of the genes involved in intelligence," says Dr McGuffin. "It's on chromosome six, and its called IGF 2R."

Plomin and McGuffin, however, are not interested in the question of racial differences. Prof Plomin has said. "We have to look at the differences between individuals in intelligence to isolate genes for it, not between groups." Even if they are right about IGF 2R, it will, according to Dr McGuffin, "probably be responsible for only about two per cent of the variations between individuals in intelligence. Our work is, for the forseeable future, more of theoretical than practical interest," he said. "I don't see it as having any practical consequences."

The hope that everyone is created equal is safe - for the moment. Protecting that hope appears to have become one of the central goals of scientific inquiry. The extraordinary abilities of Sherilee and other aborigines will remain tantalisingly "suggestive", but there are no plans to investigate further her, or anyone else's, unusual visual memory skills.

"In terms of pursuing the studies of aborigines' brains," says Prof Harper, "I think that it is very unlikely that any work will be done in the future."

PRAYER AND HEALING

X-From_: kevin32@earthlink.net Tue Nov 21 17:39:28 2000
From: "Kevin Courcey" <kevin32@earthlink.net>
To: "Linda Rosa RN" <rosa@ezlink.com>
Subject: you asked for it

BOULDER, CO. (AP)- A new study has dramatically shown that Daffy Duck is more effective in treating certain types of cancer than trained, praying, healers. "Needless to say, this was somewhat unexpected," states lead researcher Ima Healer RN. "I'm sure if we had compared our trained healers to the Roadrunner, or even Porky Pig, we would have shown better results. But it's tough to beat the duck," admitted Healer.

One hundred patients at the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center, all with a similar type of colon cancer, were divided into three groups and followed for six months. All received the standard follow-up care for their cancers following surgery. However, one-third of them watched Daffy Duck cartoons three times a day for a half hour; another third had healers, who were trained in the art of assessing and treating patient energy fields at a distance, both pray for them and send healing intentionality to them; and the final third served as a control. The Daffy Duck group had 78% less subsequent tumor growth, and 48% fewer reactions to the chemotherapy. "The only notable side effect was that patients in the Daffy group started speaking with a slight lisp. But they actually seemed to enjoy it," said
Linda Rosa RN, who monitored the research to insure accuracy. "By the time the study was in its third month, you could tell who was in the Daffy group," Rosa observed, "because they would suddenly say something like 'Thuffering thuccotash!' and then start laughing hysterically. They generally seemed to be in a better mood than the other patients."

Healer had hoped that this study would finally show conclusively that remote prayer and healing were effective. "While previous studies on remote prayer
suffered from researcher bias and poor methodology, we designed our study very carefully. I fully expected our healers to be vindicated," stated Healer. Much to her chagrin, however, the results of the study showed the praying healers to be equally as effective as no intervention at all. "Skeptics are so quick to judge," said Healer. "But based on the results of this study, one can unequivocally say that at least they're not doing any harm. So why not use them?"

Healer also noted that a majority of the patients said they would be willing to pay for such treatments. "At least then the patients feel like they are doing something to treat their illness, even if we have conclusively shown that they are not. Sometimes you just need to give people hope."

When asked if she had any plans to incorporate the results of this research into her practice or teaching, Healer said her team had discussed this at some length. "I don't think we have to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. I think we're on the right track. We will still have them pray, for example. But instead of having them project an image of healing white light, we are thinking of having them project an image of Daffy Duck onto their patient's auras next time. We're confident that their patient outcome scores will improve if they add that to their healing," noted Healer. She said she has already received a two million dollar National Institutes of Health grant to fund the next round of research, which will compare the results of healers infusing patient energy fields with images of either Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, or Homer Simpson.