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Neuron Culture

David Dobbs on science, nature, and culture.

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dobbspic I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find clips here.) I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years. Oliver Sacks found Reef Madness "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant." Check it out.

If you'd like, you can subscribe to Neuron Culture by email. You might also want to see more of my work at my main website or check out my Tumblr log.
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History/philosophy of science:

Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands

Category: Culture of science

It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong.

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Poison King, Golden Pen -- Mayor's bio of Mithradates wins National Book Award nomination

Category: Books

Adrienne Mayor's riveting (if queasy-making) biography of Mitradates, "Poison King," is a finalist for the National Book Award. It's wonderful to see a skillfully executed and absorbing account of an obscure bit of history get this sort of well-deserved attention.

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On the reading table lately

Category: Brains and minds

Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco , a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear: The surge was not about more soldiers, but soldiers doing different things -- protecting the populace rather than hunting the enemy. ... First-rate history of science here, and a fascinating look at Harry Harlow, a monkey researcher whose powerful but sometimes disturbing experiments in the middle decades of last century helped replace a cold behavioralist view of infancy and childhood with the theories of attachment and bonding that still rule today.

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Quick dip: Bonobo teeth, flu vaccines, death-of-midlist 3.0, death of the uninsured, and gory films

Category: Brains and minds

Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates, while -- no fault of Eric's -- the flu, the end of publishing, and the death of the uninsured march on. Plus some great old surgery footage.

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Missing from healthcare reform: the autopsy

Category: Culture of science

Amid the talk on improving such knowledge as part of healthcare reform, a vital and fairly cheap way to generate some of it -- the autopsy -- is going ignored.

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Creationists v empiricists! Reefs! Family drama! My bloggingheads talk with Greg Laden

Category: Books

The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.

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PZ Myers, Chris Mooney, Asa Gray, and the religion-science divide

Category: Culture of science

The turf between science and religion is -- well, it's a gray area. And it seems perfectly fine to me to treat it the way Gray did: as a region not to tread in your day job. Science was empirical, and if it wasn't empirical, it wasn't science. Religion was belief -- a domain beyond proof. That's why they call it faith.

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Round-up: Dinos on display, soldiers at play, stereotypes at work, pharma ghosts, Iraqi snakes

Category: Brains and minds

Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables:

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The Kew's growing seed & pollen collection

Category: Art

Kew Gardens is trying to collect and bank the seeds and pollen from 10% of the world's plants -- a nice 21st-century continuation of a stunning collecting effort that started in the 1700s. The Guardian has put up a nice photo gallery of some of the seeds they've collected so far.

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The combat veteran as sheepdog-turned-wolf: PTSD & medicalization

Category: Culture of science

"A bunch of sheep dogs are sent away to another land to protect the sheep from wolves. While there they essentially become wolves in order to survive. They return to the herd of sheep as wolves but are expected to live as sheep dogs again -- or in the case of National Guardsmen, they are expected to become sheep."

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