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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Genetics:
Wang et al., publishing in PLoS Genetics, looked at the genetic diversity in Native American populations from Canada all the way down into South America. They wanted to see whether the genetic diversity observed in Native peoples correlated in any...
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Posted on November 28, 2007 11:56 AM • 5 Comments •
People do remember what they use to do at CSHL, right?
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Posted on October 22, 2007 9:50 AM • 7 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 • 3 Comments •
Nicholas Wade reports in the NYTimes about a UCD professor, Gregory Clark, and his theory of the Industrial Revolution. His answer is that high fertility rates in the upper classes caused them to steadily supplant lower classes. They brought productive...
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Posted on August 10, 2007 10:18 AM • 9 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 •
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 •
Two big studies on genetics came out in the past couple weeks, and I want to talk about both. One of them -- the ENCODE study -- was well covered by the media. The other seems to have slipped through....
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Posted on June 21, 2007 10:06 AM • 4 Comments •
You would think that language as a general phenomena in the human species is genetically prescribed, but the peculiarities of individual languages -- such as whether a people uses a particular phoneme or not -- is the result of historical...
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Posted on June 6, 2007 11:57 AM • 6 Comments •
Your gut reaction is probably that the question is irrelevant; what parent would choose for their child to have a genetic disease. That was my reaction. Apparently, however, some parents with genetic diseases that make them lead relatively normal lives...
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Posted on December 7, 2006 10:04 AM • 4 Comments •
I see that Simon Baron-Cohen has a piece in Seed about his theory of autism. I am really skeptical of many of his arguments related to autism, so I thought I would discuss a couple of them. Here is his...
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Posted on November 13, 2006 9:38 AM • 5 Comments •
Prosopagnosia is a rare disorder that can result from strokes where the individual is unable to recognize faces but maintains the ability to recognize other non-face objects. Disorders like prosopagnosia suggest to neuroscientists that the machinery for processing faces in...
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Posted on July 7, 2006 4:52 PM • 2 Comments •
