Reality is always more complicated than you think.
Profile
Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.
Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.
Jake is joined periodically by two wonderful guest bloggers: Kara Contreary and Kate Seip. See the About Page.
DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own or those of my co-bloggers. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments we currently attend.
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Evolution:
This is a cool story, but not for the reason the authors are attributing. Researchers at Princeton showed that bacteria can evolve to anticipate future environmental changes. Here is the coverage in Science: Researchers already know that microbes can mount...
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Posted on May 16, 2008 11:40 AM • 4 Comments •
Wow. I just saw the Expelled TV ads start on CNN of all places....
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Posted on April 16, 2008 11:16 AM • 5 Comments •
As a research studying maternal behavior, I come across a lot of sex & reproduction research. As a (very) general rule of thumb, most small mammals are either sexually receptive or parentally responsive - your sex circuits remain on until...
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Posted on April 9, 2008 11:10 AM • 2 Comments •
Don't believe in evolution? Just look to the weeds in the sidewalk: Like other members of its family, Crepis sancta produces two types of seeds. Heavy seeds fall into the grass below the plant, whereas lighter seeds with feathery tails...
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Posted on March 4, 2008 11:46 AM • 2 Comments •
I was distressed to read this at Wired because usually I feel like they are more on top of things. This is by Thomas Hayden: Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can't really embrace it. Science describes the...
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Posted on January 30, 2008 9:18 AM • 6 Comments •
There is a really cool paper in Current Biology about the how even an animal's sensory apparatus adapt to their particular evolutionary niche. Greiner et al. looked at four closely-related species of ants from the genus Myrmecia. (As you can...
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Posted on October 31, 2007 1:55 PM • 0 Comments •
Erez Lieberman et al. at Harvard are looking at the rate of change in words to see if words evolve: Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do,...
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Posted on October 11, 2007 1:29 PM • 1 Comments •
In 1922, John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and champion of Progressive education, wrote an article in The New Republic entitled "The American Intellectual Frontier." The subject was William Jennings Bryan's attack on evolution that would later culminate in the Scopes...
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Posted on September 12, 2007 3:34 PM • 69 Comments •
The issue of sympatric speciation -- or how to separate species emerge from a single species without geographic isolation -- is a contentious issue in evolutionary biology. How can two species emerge without reproductive isolation of two separate groups? Wouldn't...
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Posted on September 4, 2007 9:19 AM • 4 Comments •
It's mad, I tell you, madddd! Mad scientists these days. Always going around saying, "Hey, you know how that animal could be better? If it had another head. Muahahaha!" Anyway, the (possibly mad) scientists Wolfgang Jakob and Bernd Schierwater wanted...
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Posted on August 6, 2007 9:50 AM • 0 Comments •
Scientists have just documented (another) inheritable change in a species that occurred in response to a change in the environment -- in this case a parasite. Hence they have observed the process of natural selection. In the latest issue of...
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Posted on July 13, 2007 10:22 AM • 3 Comments •
Actually that isn't fair. It isn't wrong. The percentage of difference just depends heavily on what you define as a difference. So argues an editorial by Jon Cohen in the latest issue of Science: Using novel yardsticks and the flood...
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Posted on July 5, 2007 8:56 AM • 2 Comments •
Rats show a type of "generalized" altruism: Rats that benefit from the charity of others are more likely to help strangers get a free meal, researchers have found. This phenomenon, known as 'generalized reciprocity', has only ever been seen before...
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Posted on July 3, 2007 9:47 AM • 4 Comments •
Science has a fascinating review about the history of cooking and its relation to human evolution. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, has been pushing the idea that the expansion in Homo erectus' skull size was the result of additional energy...
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Posted on June 25, 2007 11:06 AM • 20 Comments •
Thorpe and colleagues, publishing in the journal Science, have performed a study of orangutan movement that is turning the traditional view of the evolution of walking on its head. The traditional view is that walking upright on the ground --...
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Posted on June 4, 2007 12:08 PM • 2 Comments •
The latest issue of Science magazine (May 18) has several reviews devoted to the coming of age of behavioral neuroscience. However, one by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg caught my eye. The review is entitled "Childhood Origins of Adult...
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Posted on May 23, 2007 11:07 AM • 9 Comments •
Paul Rubin has an editorial in the Washington Post about how evolution may result in a proclivity towards economic and social conflict: Conflict was common in the environment in which humans evolved. As primates, which are a very social order,...
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Posted on May 15, 2007 9:45 AM • 3 Comments •
The Economist has a great article summarizing all the ways in which the debate between evolution and religion has gone global. It also does a good job of analyzing the different strains within the American debate, depicting it as much...
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Posted on April 26, 2007 1:31 PM • 16 Comments •
The NYTimes magazine has an excellent article on the controversy within science as to the meaning of God. This is different from the cultural controversy as to the validity of Revelation because it is concerned with why religion may have...
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Posted on March 5, 2007 10:36 AM • 1 Comments •
I know that a bunch of other people covered this story, but I managed to find a video of it so I thought I would post it anyway. Researchers working in Ivory Coast have found remnants of a chimpanzee habitation...
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Posted on February 16, 2007 9:38 AM • 2 Comments •
From the NY Times: An international team of researchers reported yesterday that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of the skulls of humans then living in Europe...
Posted on January 12, 2007 9:29 AM • 2 Comments •
The famous skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed Lucy is going on a field trip: After 4 years of an on-again, off-again courtship, Ethiopian officials have promised the hand--and partial skeleton--of the famous fossil Lucy to museum officials in Houston,...
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Posted on October 30, 2006 8:28 AM • 1 Comments •
Scientists have discovered a bacteria the survives with an incredibly small number of genes: The tiniest genomes ever found belong to two types of bacteria that live inside insects, researchers have announced. One of these types of bacteria, Carsonella ruddii,...
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Posted on October 13, 2006 12:10 PM • 3 Comments •
Here is your YouTube fun of the day. It is compilation of the Daily Show series Evolution Schmevolution from about a year ago I think. Hilarious....
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Posted on October 6, 2006 2:47 PM • 0 Comments •
LTP activated genes are clustered on chromosomes -- or so says some work by Park et al in JBC. LTP -- or long-term potentiation -- is a process by which synaptic strength -- the ability of one neuron to talk...
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Posted on August 18, 2006 1:37 AM • 0 Comments •
The traditional Darwinian view of evolution holds that evolution occurs through the selection of the most successful members of a group. Each member of the group is stable over its lifetime. This view was later modified to include the idea...
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Posted on August 7, 2006 10:49 PM • 3 Comments •
The Economist has an article about an economist using evolutionary ideas. To wit: ...Eric Beinhocker, of the McKinsey Global Institute, has undertaken his own 500-page haj, entitled "The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics". In...
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Posted on July 24, 2006 10:07 AM • 3 Comments •
Fanged killer kangaroo fossils discovered: Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom". A University of New...
Posted on July 24, 2006 12:21 AM • 1 Comments •
God is so tricky. New research reveals that the structure of a DNA replication molecule is similar across all three domains of life: In two papers that will be concurrently published in the August edition of the journal Nature Structural...
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Posted on July 18, 2006 12:01 AM • 1 Comments •
Apparently today will be poetry day. I found this poem in a book I was reading. It is by a man named Mortimer Collins (1860): Life and the Universe show spontaneity: Down with ridiculous notions of Deity! Churches and creeds...
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Posted on July 14, 2006 1:34 PM • 4 Comments •
This paper in Proceedings of Royal Society Biology purports to show that there is an investment trade-off between immunocompetence and animal growth. In cases where parasitism is high, the trade-off tends to tilt towards investment in immunocompetence....
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Posted on July 9, 2006 11:05 PM • 2 Comments •
The Family Guy has a great spoof on the religious interpretation of evolution....
Posted on July 3, 2006 3:06 AM • 0 Comments •
Carl Zimmer at The Loom has a simply must read post on three species of butterflies. Scientists believed that one species might be a hybrid of the other two, so they set out to test it by making the species...
Posted on June 14, 2006 6:02 PM • 0 Comments •
