Looking at his photo you would find it hard to choose, he could be either. However, given that he takes to wearing a red fedora you might think he was a comedian!
Raymond Tallis by Felix Clay, Eyevine
Actually, I think 'contrarian' is his best description given that he is a former clinical neuroscientist by the name of Raymond Tallis and that he spends most of his time at war with his fellow neuroscientists. I am obliged to The Chronicle of Higher Education - and, no, don't ask what an ignoramus like me is doing in such high-falutin' company - for an interesting article on the man by Mr. Marc Parry in which he suggests that perhaps a better job description for Dr. Tallis is 'dustman' on the grounds that he describes most of the theories put forward by his fellow specialists as "neuro trash" which he is all too eager to deposit on the nearest dump!
Happily, on this occasion, given that I know nothing of the subject I do not have to offer an opinion (wadd'ya mean that never stopped me before?!) I can simply carry their coats whilst they set to. On the one side we have, according to Mr. Parry, those who support:
[...] a rash of pseudo brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing in God and falling in love.
In the other corner we have the redoubtable, and probably very irritating, Dr. Tallis, who:
In 2006, Tallis gave up hospital-ward rounds for a full-time writing life that unfolds in morning and afternoon rounds of two local pubs. In these "offices," the atheist-humanist nurses his animosity toward thinkers who reduce human beings to animals "acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces." He takes aim at their exaggerated claims in a new book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (McGill-Queen's University Press).
I like his working routine, it reminds me of the old three-martini lunches so beloved and missed of yesteryear. I think I would pay good money to attend one of his lectures:
In a cheerful voice, turned out in a magenta tie and a blue boating blazer with broad white stripes, Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two "pillars of unwisdom." The first, "neuromania," is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the "intracranial darkness" of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, "Darwinitis," is the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.
As I confessed above, I have no knowledge of the arcane details of neuroscience but I instinctively side with Dr. Tallis, not, I hasten to add, for religious reasons but simply because I am by nature a 'Bolshie bugger' and I do not care for the notion that anyone tells me what to do - whether it's God or Darwin!
It's a good article well worth reading not least because it makes you wish you knew more.
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