This article is an excellent demolition of Ms Coulter’s fundamentalist musings.

The Twitter version of my question goes, “Do you know if any researchers are looking into the links between dopamine/addiction and all of Abraham Maslow’s d-needs? (Food, sex, safety, approval, esteem.)”

I even called in to a radio show to pose the question to David Linden, the author of “Compass of Pleasure.”

The responses have been fairly consistent and ranged from “Wow!” to “That makes a lot of sense.” All ended with “No, I don’t know anyone looking into it.”

And that’s where the conversations invariable end.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) recently announced that there is only one addiction and it’s to the the chemical highs triggered in the brain by substances (drugs, food) and obsessive behaviors (sex, gambling). In other words, heroin, nicotine, food, and gambling are only triggers that addicts use to score the real drug they’re after, which is dopamine.

Getting back to Ann Coulter. I believe she’s an esteem addict. More specifically, she’s an attention addict who feeds here dopamine-induced addiction by making absurd comments that get her noticed.

Ann cares less about science, facts, honesty, truth, accuracy, hypothesis, or being exposed as a charlatan than heroin addicts care about the morality of stealing from family and friends or being exposed as liars and thieves. Like the heroin addicts, Ann is obsessed by a need to score dopamine.

When it comes to attention/esteem addicts and heroin addicts we’re talking about the same neurotransmitter, psychopathology, and symptoms — self-deception, lying, denial, a marked decrease in reason, and reluctance/inability to admit to their addictions.

Getting back to scientists. I believe we’re all, to varying degrees, safety, approval, esteem addicts. And just like Ann (and every heroin, nicotine, and gambling addict) we’re talking about the same neurotransmitter, psychopathology, and symptoms — self-deception, lying, denial, a marked decrease in reason, and reluctance/inability to admit to the addictions.

So here’s my second hypothesis. Researchers aren’t looking into the links between dopamine and (new list) money, fear/safety/power, peer-approval, and attention/esteem addictions because addicts are not interested in proving that they are addicts.

One reason is that there’s no dopamine in it. The other is that there’s a lot of potential dopamine withdrawal associated with the fear or being rejected by peers and having their esteem significantly reduced, if not entirely eliminated.

Wayne Dyer has a great quote: “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.”

I’m finding that the highest form of ignorance is the ability to ignore what can’t be disproved, dismissed, or denied.

A rabbit?

saying that the old diarrhea diseases would flush the gut lining, and the appendix was there to re-seed the digestive tract with all the necessary bugs.

read about it at the human biome project. nih has a feeder too…..

as for the last comment about pissing off the left, my conservative friends always end their messages they are forwarding to each other with the exact statement. Seems like a political policy decision for them.

As for Coulter, she is a self-proclaimed satirist and well known for ruffling feathers. I believe her statements to be intentional. She LOVES to piss off the left <— her own words. She'll do it any chance she gets.

God, on the other hand, I’m told, is omniscient. All-knowing. And presumably knowledgeable on the inner-workings of efficient human eyes. So creationists, why didn’t God give us more efficient eyes? Or, better yet, why did God give us apparently useless organs like the appendix? Is it so that God can strike us dead with appendicitis whenever He chooses? Have our bodies been ‘designed’ with internal ticking time bombs?

It makes sense that we’d be left with inefficient eyes and useless organs if they didn’t prevent us from reproducing. Evolution explains that. But why would a perfection-knowing God ‘design’ us to have these things? Creation hasn’t explained that.

And don’t try to tell me that evolution explains why insects develop immunity to pesticides. That is not evolution.

Yes it is. You need to learn more about what evolution is before even thinking about criticizing it.

I asked him once if he uses the theory of evolution in his work. He laughed and said no. I asked him if he knew any medical researcher who used it. He thought for a while and said no again.

And I’ve worked with medical researchers who used it all the time. So there you go.

I couldn’t help myself

[CZ: I'm going to let this one through because I'm *so* distracted with hurricane preparations.]

Now in that older sense, it is perfectly correct to state ‘the law of biological evolution’ although Theory of Evolution is more common.

But these fine distinctions are (i) tedious (ii) not universally accepted by scientists and (iii) largely irrelevant. Use whatever term best communicates to your audience.

You may not need such drugs, and you may have no children who might go into such a important profession. But, Please, step aside and do no harm to others. Vote responsibly, at least.

She’s just written an op-ed in the wake of Rick Perry’s recent statement that Texas teaches evolution and creationism [his word] because evolution is “just a theory out there.”

Rick Perry actually said, “It’s a theory that’s out there.” It’s a small difference, but for accuracy, it ought to be corrected (unless you’re quoting him from a different incident, but then the way it’s worded is misleading).

Other than that, great post.

Carl…you neglected to mention the Coulter Hoax hypothesis wherein Coulter isn’t really a strawman building, science-ignorant, logically deficient polemist, but instead is just spoofing those types of people to highlight how silly their arguments are. See

richarddawkins.net/articles/851

Coulter has very cleverly written a fake criticism of evolution, much like the way NYU physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 published a fake physics article in a literary journal, an affair that has become known as the “Sokal hoax.” A self-proclaimed “old unabashed leftist,” Sokal was disturbed by the sloppily antiscientific, postmodernistic mentality that had started to replace reason and rationality within the academic left and ingeniously made his point by managing to get his nonsense article published by the very people he wished to expose.

Coulter’s aim at antiscience is at the other end of the political spectrum. An equally unabashed rightist, she is apparently disturbed by how factions within the political right abandon their normally rational standards when it comes to the issue of evolution. However, whereas Sokal revealed his hoax in a separate article, Coulter challenges her readers to find out the truth for themselves. Without claiming to do justice to Coulter’s multifaceted and sometimes subtle satire, I will attempt to outline some of her most amusing and salient points.

A great article.