Darwin Skeptics Separate Mind From Gray Matter

To undermine Darwinian theories about the emergence of life, skeptics have a new weapon in mind: the brain, NPR reports. They’re challenging the notion that a cluster of cells could produce such high-level mental processes as consciousness and free will. “It doesn’t hang together,” says one neurosurgeon, who argues that an intelligent designer created the brain and molded the universe.

But a Yale neurologist insists that the mind evolves along with the brain, which “can do things that can plausibly cause consciousness and self-awareness, so the argument really just falls on its face,” he explains. Not so, says the neurosurgeon, who argues that near-death experiences point to a mind that functions independent of the physical brain.