We often describe relationships by using metaphors to do with temperature - 'he's a cold fish', 'she has a warm personality.' It turns out, according to some new research, that we literally experience warmth and coldness in relationships too.

Moreover, warm and cold conditions affect the language we use to describe relationships (so it's sensible to honeymoon in Bali), and warm and cold language affect the way we experience relationships - though whether body temperature actually rises or falls wasn't tested in this work. (That's hard to do, because of all the environmental controls you'd need, and is perhaps just as well, as next, there'd be scientists in the divorce courts proving you harbored foul feelings towards your ex because your body temperature fell every time he walked into the room.)

In a way, this only goes to prove what people have suspected all along. A 'nice cup of tea' - which is to say, a warm drink - is a comfort because it changes our perception of the situation. Seasonal Affective Disorder makes people depressed in the cooler months because they feel distant, isolated. And, more generally, metaphors work because they draw on our physical experience.

It should be noted that the research was carried out mostly with young, Dutch, female participants, presumably because they're cheap to hire, at the University of Amsterdam, and prepared to answer touchy-feely questions. The results may be entirely untrue of young, British, male sociopaths.

But for the psychologists, the research plays into the battle over the role of the mental and the sensory in our interactions with the world - whether body matters as well as mind - and supports the conviction that it does, which again is not so surprising, given we're embodied creatures. The embodied nature of emotions that ground our cognition - in the words of Michael Jackson, 'Can you feel it?' - is more evidence that we're not like computers. And that's worth remembering: the authors speculate that disembodied, computer-based relationships, over the internet, might 'severely harm norms regulating social behaviour' - which I think translates as, make us not very nice to be with.

More scientistic propaganda on our screens: Michio Kaku's contribution to the mini-series, Visions of the Future. It focused on artificial intelligence, and it's true: machines smarter than humans are only a question of time. We need to prepare today.

We're on the cusp of a step-change in AI, it was said; only the discipline has been on such a cusp for half a century now. We already project emotional attachments onto machines, it was noted, which is quite true - it's called fetishism - only that does not mean machines will soon actually have emotions, as Kaku seamlessly inferred. Talking of emotions, they're the key to human intelligence, one scientist revealed, as if telling a great secret; only it's a corrective, not anything new: Plato knew as much, it's just that the machinism of modern science forgot it.

It was striking how many times Kaku talked with individuals from The Singularity Institute, which exists precisely to promote such myths. (If you want to see Eliezer Yudkowsky, a chief spinner after Ray Kurzweil, being gently demolished by the sceptical mind of Robert Wright, watch this Blogging Heads.) There wasn't a single voice calling any of it into question.

I don't doubt that machines will do more for us, and grow more 'intelligent' in that limited sense: I have a smart phone too. And maybe it's just a mistake for an uptight viewer such as myself to confuse a science programme with what it really is: an hour of entertaining science fiction. Only I think it matters.

There was a moment when Kaku stared into the camera and solemnly observed that we might have made a mistake: it's not that machines will become more human, but that humans will become more like machines. That's AI's shadow, for you, and why I suspect this is propaganda of quite a dangerous sort.

The brain looks much more like the medium through which mental activity ripples, rather than the source of that mental activity itself. Natural selection can't really account for the differences between us and our evolutionary cousins, as for all the advantages that might be gained from having, say, a big brain, the disadvantages - such as that it kills mothers and infants during labour - should have prevented it. It's often celebrated that we share 98% of our genes with those said cousins, and a remarkably large percentage with sea urchins and mice to boot, only that's a problem for genetics, as there's not enough 'code' to account for the massive, manifest differences between them and us.

These are some of the mysteries that recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have deepened, and which James Le Fanu explores in Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. Only, Le Fanu seeks to question that word 'advance'. Since, for all that a narrative of progress dominates the reporting of discoveries, the truth is that they have mostly served to highlight that we know less than we thought we did. Contemporary science is marked by an inverse relationship between knowledge and understanding - though perhaps only physicists acknowledge as much, with their talk of dark matter, energy and flow. Hence, expectations about what the complete human genome, or real-time scans of the brain, might deliver have fallen away.

It's clearly a book with an agenda, not just to celebrate the centrality of wonder in science - which many scientists would presumably retort never went away. But also to highlight the centrality of the non-material facts of human experience over which reductionist materialism stumbles. The vivid and liberating experience of consciousness also suggests, to Le Fanu, the need for the language of the soul, and of a natural sympathy not enmity between science and religion. Further, the apparently information rich operations of genes, and the syntactical nature of language, raises the possibility of a God-like intelligence, required as a kind of top-down, causative factor - he moots, sensibly towards the end.

As I've argued before, I don't think divine allusions serve scientific explanations well. And more generally, I did wonder whether Le Fanu overstates his case in his desire to score against his opponents. For example, the inexplicable nature of gravity, as it was to Newton - the force that bizarrely acts at a distance - is cited on a number of occasions as a paradigmatic case of the mystery of natural things. Only, General Relativity doesn't see gravity as such, but rather as an implicit feature of spacetime. You could say that just replaces one mystery with another, but I think it's important to say so. Alternatively, Le Fanu lambasts neo-Darwinism for the simplicity of its big idea - Dennett's 'universal acid' - because it is actually woefully inadequate when it comes to describing how, say, we shifted from walking on all fours to two: there are too many intermediary steps required with no obvious adaptive advantage. But then he also mocks the complexity of evolutionary mathematics as obscurantist. I felt you can't have it both ways.

What's exciting about the book, though, is the sense it leaves that we might be on the verge of a paradigm change in the biological sciences. To my mind, reductionist materialism has pretty clearly almost exhausted its explanatory powers in these fields, though it's had a great run. (That's something physicists have long had to contemplate.) We might live to see a new science emerge.

If you want to hear what conservative evangelical Christians sound like when they talk amongst themselves - praising their own luck for knowing Jesus; lamenting the fate of their unsaved fellows - then listen to this conversation amongst self-congratulatory scientists, on The Infinite Monkey Cage. It's billed as witty and irreverent. Bar a few measured comments from Claudia Hammond, it was self-satisfied, uncurious, and overflowing with rationalist piety.

I should confess to only having heard that episode. But I worry what this kind of programming is doing to the public perception of science. It's so obviously propagandist, against half-named enemies - and so patronising about the unscientific masses - that it will surely only succeed in putting people off.

A piece I've written at Religion Dispatches. A taster:

But is that story right? Might the selfish account of evolution itself be a misfiring of Darwin’s theory? And if so, could evolutionary theory lead not to opposition, but to a renewed interest in religion—perhaps even respect for it? It’s a possibility suggested by the work of David Sloan Wilson, the champion of a different account of morality. The selfish story, he says, is a product of the “age of individualism” in evolutionary theory, an age that is both aberrant and, he believes, will prove to be short-lived.

George Monbiot has a typically robust piece in the paper today, lamenting that people don't believe the science on climate change, that there is no simple solution to reverse that disbelief, and that science itself predicts this might happen because psychology shows we tend not to be fact-following creatures and are bad at assessing risks.

There's no doubt much in what he says, though I can't help but feel his slightly sniffy attitude towards those who doubt the science means he misses other possibly quite good reasons why people do so. Here's two I can think of.

First, Monbiot notes that modern science is highly specialised; many scientists work in silos of expertise. And I suspect that ordinary folk think that's risky, for we're very alert to the dangers of silo-thinking. You only have to think of the computer-says-no phenomenon (the scientific way of life that can't think out of the box), or proffered dietary advice (specialist science that apparently quite routinely contradicts itself), or the mathematically brilliant economists who failed to predict the financial crisis. If that's people's everyday experience of science in their lives, little wonder they don't trust it.

Second, science has a poor record at predicting calamity. The most recent case in point was swine flu. More confusingly still, when one arm of science predicts we're all falling off the edge of a cliff, another arm of science predicts tomorrow's technological utopia. Who to believe: Gaia doomsters or transhumanist dreamsters?

Let me stress, I'm not a climate change denier! But there are good reasons, alongside the bad, for people doubting science. Monbiot might do well to factor that into his lament.

The storm is brewing around What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's essay debunking neo-Darwinism. It pulls no punches and has already made enemies. Which is a shame. So far, I've only found two responses that weren't mostly ad hominen counterattacks. (That's religiosity for you.) The first broadly agreed. The second didn't actually refute the argument. It merely said neo-Darwinism can embrace Fodor's critique - though as Mary Midgley nicely remarks in her review, that extension is done at the cost of adding epicycles.

Fodor's argument, in short, is that whilst there is certainly evolution in nature, there is no coherent theory of evolution by natural selection in science. The theory doesn't add up because it can't shed its intentionality: natural selection must always be selection for something, but only minds can select for, and nature doesn't have mind. That's the reduced version of the logical refutation. Then there's the mounting evidence that all kinds of processes are involved in the evolution of species, and that natural selection, even if it could be coherently formulated, would be just one amongst very many, and possibly not a very important one at that. Hence, Fodor concludes that evolution is like history. There are no laws, beyond the constraints imposed by the physical world itself. Evolution is just one damn thing after another.

I'd be interested in serious engagements with the book. So do leave links if you find any. But since it inevitably plays into the politics of evolution, it's interesting to ask who are the winners and losers if their argument is right.

Evolutionary psychology is the big loser. If evolution is not shaped by biological laws, then there's no universal adaptionism, which means that evolutionary psychology's accounts of how friendship, disgust, religion and so on got going are as Stephen Jay Gould always said they were: just so stories. There just isn't the evidence to piece together a prehistoric genealogy of these things, and it's hardly likely there ever will be. Evolutionary theory's 'universal acid', as Dennett put it, is neutralized in the slime if Fodor is right.

The book's a challenge to religious believers too. For those who don't accept evolution, the end of the theory does not mean the end of the processes of evolution. It still happens, just piecemeal. The natural world is not designed, and it never was. Fodor cites Gould again when he said that if you ran the tape of evolution twice, everything would turn out different. That's a result of there being no laws once more.

For those who accept evolution, and say that it's just God's way of shaping the natural world, the end of neo-Darwinism will be tricky too. If things could have turned out differently, then there's no necessity in evolution, which implies that humanity, say, might not have been. That somewhat scuppers divine purposefulness in creation: God is forced to play dice, as it were.

That said, the work of individuals like Simon Conway Morris, a 'wet' biologist who spots repeated convergences in evolution, is not really discussed by Fodor. Convergences imply that evolution 'seeks out' solutions to ecological problems, something Fodor strongly denies. If convergences follow multiple and different evolutionary paths - and it doesn't matter whether by natural selection or not - that would seem to be a problem for him.

The big winner is evolution itself. It'd become a subject that never ends, like history. They'll always be variations in the way the past can be reconstructed, always new details to add, always unseen factors at play. In her review, Midgley says Darwin would have welcomed that. Whatever the story of terrestrial evolution turns out to be, the story of evolutionary science now looks radically incomplete.

UPDATE Michael Ruse, whose even-handed views on matters Darwinian I value, has reviewed the book in the Boston Globe and he finds the book 'intensely irritating' and 'very odd'. That said, I imagine that Ruse's review will irritate some neo-Darwinians too. 'The Darwinian is using a metaphor to understand the material nonthinking world,' he writes. 'We treat that world as if it were an object of design, because doing so is tremendously valuable heuristically. And the use of metaphor is a commonplace in science.'

At last! A book on neuroscience that is a thrilling read, philosophically astute and with wonderful science: Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

The running metaphor is the division between one worldview that is detail-attending, mechanistically-minded and self-interested; and another that is other-interested, whole-perceiving and expectant-of-newness. Both are invaluable, but they work as a dialectic, so one can come to dominate - the emissary can become the master, as the book title reflects.

The first half of the book is the brain science, exploring the workings of the two hemispheres, and the discovery that each appears to reflect a different worldview. The second half is a history of culture, examining in art and ideas how that might have played out in the world. And with potentially disastrous results, McGilchrist concludes...

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Do quantum computers offer proof of the multiverse? Might we live in the one in which Jesus spontaneously rose from the dead? Could our world be but the invention of a civilisation infinitely superior to ours? Is the multiverse craziness squared? John Gribbin has written a new book about it. I've penned a piece for The Guardian's Comment is free.

An earlier version of a review of Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life, a later version of which is in the TLS.

Science has always had its mavericks. Newton wiled away the small hours wondering about the dimensions of Solomon’s temple and the number of the beast, though he was also interested in the action of forces on bodies with mass. In our own times, James Lovelock is now celebrated for pursuing his Gaia hypothesis, though it was vehemently mocked until recently. Whether or not the theories of others such as the Nobel prize winning physicist Brian Josephson, who contemplates the unification of mind and matter, will bear fruit can be hotly contested.

The biologist Rupert Sheldrake explores scientifically heretic terrain too. In this third edition of his book, originally published in 1981, he postulates his theory of ‘morphic fields’ – elusive forces that bathe nature and influence the development of form. They are imagined as somewhat like electromagnetic fields, only instead of transmitting energy, they store information. Hence, Sheldrake argues, morphic fields act as a kind of memory bank. When a snowflake forms, the details of its shape is recorded by morphic resonance. When birds flock in vast numbers, and shift like dark clouds across the sky, they act as if one because they effectively are one, Sheldrake suggests: they can access another morphic field. When laboratory rats learn how to navigate a maze, the solution is morphically imprinted too; other rats can then access the memory, navigating the same maze more quickly, or so he contends.

He has been accused of peddling magic, and worse. But then, the same was said of Newton and his theory of gravitation: it was a spooky force that acted at a distance, and seemed to many to illuminate astrology as much as astronomy. So the question is how can you tell the difference between a Sheldrake and a Newton? Time will be the ultimate arbiter. And since it is almost thirty years since this book was first published, and Sheldrake’s ideas have not yet been verified by repeatable experiments to the satisfaction of peers in the scientific community, it seems that time is making its choice. That said, science should be glad of its mavericks. One might be a Newton.