Category: Science
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The Mind’s Eye
In the Telegraph, Simon Ings reviews The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks:
Oliver Sacks’s neurological case histories make exemplary short stories. Even without their documentary spice, their frisson of ‘there, but for the grace of God, goes the reader’, they would rank amongst the finer output of the New Yorker. They sport that publication’s motley – the careful closure, the circumspect reassurance of the fireside ‘weird tale’.This time, however, and deliberately, Sacks has allowed the cracks to show. One of his subjects – hidden away until page 82, and then cast ever-more centrally as the book progresses – is Oliver Sacks himself: a man who remembers faces very poorly and is more than capable of walking past his apartment without recognising it – not once, but three times in a row.
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Geoengineering to the Rescue?
An article in the Economist on the ambitious new field of geoengineering:
Geoengineering is shorthand for the idea of fixing the problem of man-made climate change once the greenhouse gases that cause it have already been emitted into the atmosphere, rather than trying to stop those emissions happening in the first place. Ideas for such fixes include smogging up the air to reflect more sunlight back into space, sucking in excess carbon dioxide using plants or chemistry, and locking up the glaciers of the world’s ice caps so that they cannot fall into the ocean and cause sea levels to rise.Many people think such ideas immoral, or a distraction from the business of haranguing people to produce less carbon dioxide, or both—and certain to provoke unintended consequences, to boot. It was the strength of that opposition which drove the subject onto the agenda at Nagoya. But that strength is also a reflection of the fact that many scientists now take the idea of geoengineering seriously. Over the past few years research in the field has boomed. What is sometimes called Plan B seems to be taking shape on the laboratory bench—and seeking to escape outside.
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Becoming Human
In Nov 2009, NOVA aired a 3-part documentary series on human evolution, focusing on the last few million years of our story. It’s a great primer for anyone interested in a thorough overview that incorporates some of the latest findings from various fields of anthropology. The series aired, however, before the latest and most surprising genetic findings came out, early in 2010, showing that non-African humans do carry some Neandertal DNA. Click below to see parts 1 through 3.
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The Scale of the Universe
A wonderful, interactive, educational, hubris-deflating application.
Category: Science -
Are Genes Left Wing?
“The right loves genetic explanations for poverty or mental illness,” claims Oliver James. The problem, he says, is that a decade of scientific research does not support their views, and that genes may never explain most psychiatric disorders and mental illnesses:
When the map of the human genome was presented to the world in 2001, psychiatrists had high hopes for it. Itemising all our genes would surely provide molecular evidence that the main cause of mental illness was genetic – something psychiatrists had long believed. Drug companies were wetting their lips at the prospect of massive profits from unique potions for every idiosyncrasy.But a decade later, unnoticed by the media, the human genome project has not delivered what the psychiatrists hoped: we now know that genes play little part in why one sibling, social class or ethnic group is more likely to suffer mental health problems than another. … Another theory was that genes create vulnerabilities. For example, it was thought that people with a particular gene variant were more likely to become depressed if they were maltreated as children. This also now looks unlikely.
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Morals Without God?
Excerpts from a fine essay by Frans de Waal (via 3QD):
We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than having developed morality from scratch, we received a huge helping hand from our background as social animals. … At this point, religion comes in … While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.
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On Language and Cognition
According to Lera Boroditsky, “the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.” As one familiar with multiple languages, I am quite sympathetic to this viewpoint. This is largely why every vanishing language feels like a great loss to me. In an exchange with Joshua Knobe, Ms. Boroditsky sheds more light on the topic (via Cognition and Culture).
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You Think, Therefore, You Can
Neurobiology tells us that when we think or feel, a host of neurons in our brains fire electrical signals. It turns out that certain thoughts—like wishing an object to move spatially—and certain emotions, have electrical signatures that can be identified by external sensors attached to our heads. This discovery is not new. What is new is an inexpensive headset from Emotiv Systems that can “read our minds” and issue commands to machines. Check out the video below and ponder both the positive and negative possibilities of this technology.
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Sex at Dawn
Eric Michael Johnson reviews “Sex at Dawn” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá over at SEED:
But why should a species often described as monogamous be so hypersexual? Monogamous animals by definition don’t have to compete for reproduction and, as a result, are generally characterized by a low level of sexual activity. But according to Ryan and Jethá humans top a very short list of species that engage in sex for pleasure. “No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens,” they write. In fact, the animal world is filled with species who confine their sexual behavior to just a few periods each year, the only times when conception is possible. Among apes the only monogamous species are the gibbons whose infrequent, reproduction-only copulations make them much better adherents of the Vatican’s guidelines than we are. In this way, Ryan and Jethá argue, repressing our sexuality should not be confused with reining in an “animal” nature; rather, it is denying one of the most unique aspects of what it means to be human. ….
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The Discreet Charm of the Chimpanzee
Here are three interesting articles on the social life of chimpanzees,
on how they learn, fight, and console.Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees
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Between Heaven and Earth
A most excellent article by Ronald Aronson on the false choice between god and science:
It is as subjects, indeed social subjects, that we know, we decide on truth, and we judge right and wrong. As social subjects we decide on the rules of “communicative action” in which these activities take place. And these rules include the existence of such a thing as objective truth, and the active belief that people are capable of arriving at it. If we are truth-seeking animals, we might of course ask how we got that way, but we must also ask what our truths are and what are the rules for arriving there.
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Mathematics in India
David Mumford reviews Kim Plofker’s Mathematics in India:
Did you know that Vedic priests were using the so-called Pythagorean theorem to construct their fire altars in 800 BCE?; that the differential equation for the sine function, in finite difference form, was described by Indian mathematician-astronomers in the fifth century CE?; and that “Gregory’s” series … was proven using the power series for arctangent and, with ingenious summation methods, used to accurately compute π in southwest India in the fourteenth century? If any of this surprises you, Plofker’s book is for you.
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The Discreet Charm of Pollen
It’s that time of the year again, you folks with pollen allergies. In this video you come face to face with your allergens. Achoo!
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Frans de Waal on Primatology
Here is a wonderful essay by primatologist Frans de Waal that illustrates how cultural presuppositions are inseparable from our investigations of nature, that ontology (in this case our a priori view of ‘animal nature’) underlies the questions we ask, the answers we get, and what we make of them. Even categories like “reason” and “logic” are inseparable from culture (or metaphysics, more specifically), a point so often missed, including by so many self-avowed rationalists.
In 1952, when European ethologists still worked on instinct theories and American behaviorists still trained rats to press levers, Imanishi [the founder of Japanese primatology] wrote a little book that criticized the view of animals as mindless automatons. He inserted an imaginary debate between a wasp, a monkey, an evolutionist and a layman, in which the possibility was raised that animals other than ourselves might have culture. The proposed definition of culture was simple: if individuals learn from one another, their behavior may, over time, become different from that in other groups, thus creating a characteristic culture. Soon thereafter, his students demonstrated that the potato washing started by a juvenile female monkey on Koshima Island spread to other members of her troop. The troop had developed a potato washing culture. [Photo, taken by the author, shows Japanese macaques on Koshima Island are still washing potatoes half a century later.]Imanishi was also the first to insist that observers give their animals names and follow them for years so that they understand their kinship relations. His concepts are now all around us: every self-respecting field worker conducts long-term studies based on individual identification, and the idea of cultural transmission in animals is one of the hottest topics of today. But that is now: at the time, all Imanishi got was ridicule.
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Seafaring Hominids?
Archaeology seems to be undergoing an explosion of new finds in the past decade or so. More and more, new information is completely scrambling old assumptions about human evolution and early modern human and hominid culture.The latest amazing find was written up yesterday in the New York Times:
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
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Do Medications Really Expire?
I came across this 2002 article by Richard Altschuler that answers the following questions I’ve had for a while: Does the expiration date on a bottle of a medication mean anything? If a bottle of Tylenol, for example, says something like “Do not use after June 1998,” and it is August 2002, should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it? Can you get hurt if you take it? Will it simply have lost its potency and do you no good?
In other words, are drug manufacturers being honest with us when they put an expiration date on their medications, or is the practice of dating just another drug industry scam, to get us to buy new medications when the old ones that purportedly have “expired” are still perfectly good?
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Early Islam, Part 5: Epilogue
Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
Part 3: The Path of Reason / Part 4: The Mystic Tide(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who eventually domesticated it. Why did the reverse not happen? Why did the golden age of Islam (approx. 9th-12th centuries)—led by luminaries such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Alhazen, al-Beruni, Omar Khayyam, Avicenna, and Averroës—wither away? Despite a terrific start, why did Greek rationalism fail to ignite more widely in Islam? In this epilogue, I’ll survey some answers that have been offered by historians and highlight one that I hold the most significant. -
Queerer Than We Suppose
Here is an insightful lecture from 2006 by Prof. Richard Dawkins on the kind of world evolution has prepared us for, how it limits what we are capable of imagining, and why the universe will likely remain queerer than we suppose. This is from his days shortly before he gained notoriety for his brand of militant atheism (via Chris Schoen on 3QD):
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Science and Religion in the US
A recent survey of public attitudes to science in the US challenges the persistent idea in parts of the scientific community that science is under siege in the US, that a large and growing religious minority distrusts science, and that scientists get a bad rap among the public and in pop culture. The results suggest the opposite—the vast majority of even evangelical Christians respect science and scientists.
“The United States is the most religious industrial democracy in the world. At the same time, the U.S. is a science superpower, leading the world in many key areas of scientific research and in most fields of technological development. While this combination of widespread religious commitment and leadership in science and technology could be a potential source of conflict, evidence from a May 2009 survey of public attitudes toward science conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that most Americans, including most religious Americans, hold scientific research and scientists themselves in high regard…. 70% of U.S. adults think scientists contribute “a lot” to society” [placing them beneath only members of the military and teachers]. “Indeed, while there are a few areas of conflict between science and religion in the United States, particularly regarding questions of life’s origins, more than eight-in-ten Americans (84% in the recent Pew Research Center survey) say they view science as having a mostly positive impact on society. Among those who attend religious services at least once a week, the number is roughly the same (80%).”
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A Universe From Nothing
A really great primer by physicist Lawrence Krauss on what we have recently learned about the universe, how it is utterly dominated by “nothing”, aka dark matter and dark energy, and why the emergent picture is so incomprehensibly bizarre.
