Kelsey McMillen's blog

Written by Mary Roach in 2005, Spook tackles the afterlife from the point of a scientific scholar. She examines the concept of death in relation to what people believe to be true and how people react to certain phenomena. Yet it can be applied to biology because one must have a strong idea of life to recognize death.

Roach tackles many of the concepts that we hold as faith and supernatural such as reincarnation, ethereal beings, and the idea of the soul. The soul is part of life because it is so closely related to how we continue in our world. Without a soul many people believe that we would not be able to go on living, yet it is not something that can be physically seen.
Covering the topic of what is not physically seen, Roach explores the theories of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Rene Descartes and Duncan MacDougall. Leeuwenhoek was responsible for a theory that believed that the soul came from a preformed human inside the male sex cell and Descartes studied the anatomy looking for the soul. He was able to find what he believed to be a soul in the pineal gland, which he chose mainly because of its location. MacDougall was the first scientist to spend research time measuring a person before and after death to look for a soul. What he found was the difference of 21 grams between a living and a dead person and this number has become synonymous with a soul's correct ‘mass'.

Dissociative Identity Disorder, or more commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, is a mental dysfunction where the brain breaks down the person's personality into several different ones. Dissociation, part of the disorder, is part of the brain's natural defense against unpleasantness and one of Freud's five defense mechanisms (3). The person has learned to connect unrelated things in order to cope with their emotional pain. Not curable with drugs or without therapy, this mental disorder has been highly publicized and has a controversy over whether or not it truly exists.

As a young child, many of us have seen if not read comic books and seen the heroes of that world of Marvel and their amazing abilities that seem so beyond our own capacity, but each character seems to have their own biological reasoning for why they are the way they are. Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider (Spiderman), Matt Murdoch becomes blind but develops heightened senses (Daredevil), Reed Richards and his closest friends are hit by cosmic rays that their experimental rocket ship travels through (Fantastic Four) etc. Charles Xavier and his X-men are the most biologically explainable creation and yet the most common explanation cannot account for what is possible; if one puts aside the fact that these works are fictional of the creator.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Evolution has been reformed and recreated to further the biological evidence of life’s creation. Yet the ideas were not created by Charles Darwin or Aleksandr Oparin; they originated from the ancient Greek philosophers. As the people of Greece did not have the modern methods that we have today, they had to use their own observations of the World and were able to hypothesize the creation of life without modern technology. Evolution is said to have begun with the creation of inorganic molecules such as methane, water vapor, ammonia, and hydrogen (1).