I may have been forced to post this.

As I sat in Neuroanatomy class, trying desperately to pay attention to the corticobulbar pathway, I began to wonder at what level we gain the ability to choose. From a Christian standpoint, God gave us free will and the part of us that is not flesh and bones makes decisions. From an atheist or naturalistic viewpoint, I need help coming up with the answer.

I will start with a proposition. "Humans are able to make choices." If you believe me, read on. If not, the dilemma is taken care of.

As far as I have learned, our individual cells are incapable of making decisions. They respond to chemical and electrical stimuli. If they receive glucose, they don't choose whether or not to go through glycolysis, it is an equilibrium issue in its most basic form. Given that individual cells are incapable of making decisions, and more explicitly are bound to respond to environmental stimuli, why are humans and even animals able to make decisions? If all of the cells in our brains are simply reacting to their environment, did I have any choice but to write this? And the typing errors, really? No way to avoid those?

When Math Left Medicine

I'm now in my second year of medical school at Indiana University and I attend every class every day. The professors are certainly some of the top-educated humans in the world, and yet simple mathematical concepts have completely left them.

For example, Suppose you have a patient with Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP) and on his colon there are 1000 polyps. Given that the chance any one of those polyps will become malignant is 1/1000 what is the chance that this patient will develop a malignancy?

The class says 100% and the professor agrees. I shamefully said nothing because I unfortunately couldn't do the math in my head to give the correct answer. But it breaks down like this:

The chance of developing malignancy(P(m)) is equal to one minus the chance of it not becoming malignant (~P(m)) so that is:
1 - ~P(m)

We use (~P(m) because it is easy to calculate and is equal to the chance the first polyp remains benign times the chance the second polyp remains benign times the third, fourth, fifth, ... , nine hundred ninetyninth times the One thousanth polyp.

So:

P(m) = 999/1000 * 999/1000 * 999/1000 ... = (999/1000)^1000 ~= .3677

The chance this patient develops a malignancy is then (1-.3677) = .6323 or 63.23%



Another professor had a line graph with 4 sets of data points graphed. All of them were more or less parallel, but two of them were translated up several units on the graph. The statement was made that while these lines (on the bottom of the graph) were increasing, the lines up here (points to top of graph with the parallel lines) were increasing exponentially.

Um...wrong. They are increasing linearly and the R^2 value of the graph with respect to a straight line through the datapoints would have been extremely close to 1. The data points were merely greater than the other ones. Exponentially doesn't mean larger.

Oh well, someone once said that grad students go to school to learn more and more about less and less until they know everything there is about nothing at all.
MDs go to school to learn less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything.