He’s being called “a living miracle” and “a true Christmas miracle” that has “changed so many lives”.

Nickolas Coke, born without a brain (a condition called Anencephaly,) has managed to survive for a year without heavy medical intervention.

His mother, Sheena Coke, claims that the child shows signs of emotion, “He’s smiling. He’s laughed for the first time. It was wonderful to hear him laugh.” Though she is being honest with herself, knowing that Nicholas’ continued survival is unlikely. The longest any baby born in Anencephalic condition has lived, was two and half years.

I can understand her futile hopefulness, as he is her child after all and the emotional toil must be horrific.  However, I find the situation itself to be extremely unsettling.

Let’s start with the basics: Nicholas was born without a brain, nothing more than a brain stem is in his skull.  He is completely unable to perceive anything, in any of the five senses and never will be able to.  He will never be able to feel anything emotionally. He will never be able to have a thought of any kind. The nerve tissue needed for all these things, does not exist in his skull. In blunt terms, Nicholas is a slab of meat, kept alive by the most basic, less-than-reptilian portion of the brain – a section that can do no more than control digestion, respiration and heart beat. He cannot even determine at the most rudimentary level if he is being fed, or expelling waste, or even breathing. Plants have an infinitely more sophisticated sensory experience than his!

How is this a miracle?

Nicholas is a freak occurrence of nature, which gave him enough nerve tissue at the end of a spinal cord to keep rudimentary autonomic functions working.  That he has survived this long is disturbing, not miraculous and that he is being coddled and propped up as a miracle of any kind, is far more disturbing yet.

It is understandable that his mother would anthropomorphize Nicholas’ random nerve firings as emotional reaction, but basic biology tells us that this is a pipe dream with absolutely no possibility of being real reactions of any kind from Nicholas.  He simply does not have the brain tissue necessary to be able to generate emotional responses to anything. A random firing of nerve signals is not an emotional response. Since he cannot perceive anything through any physical sense, he likewise cannot possibly react to anything in any fashion at all.

Though this writeup of the story at News First 5 is particularly rife with absurd emotionalism, the comments are cloying. Post after post of infantile, ludicrous claims of miraculous nature, centered around the “gifts from God” simply prove to me all the more, how utterly delusional religious people are! Furthermore, these comments prove another point I had suspected, but hadn’t seen such a complete display of: most religious minded people are utterly clueless about the very basic facts of biology and science in general. Their delusional mindset allows them to discount empirical evidence at a whim.

Nickolas Coke may be brainless, but at least it took an act of nature to do that to him.