Brain and Behavior

I've been talking a lot about genes lately (because I'm obsessed) and what I'm finding is that many people are alarmed by genetics. I believe there are two primary reasons for this--one quite valid. A Vast Social Engineering Project? This fear of genetics arises, in part, from the belief that we may soon find ourselves enmeshed in a vast social engineering project. Neuroscientists already have the power to tinker with human nature and this power will only increase with time. It's likely that within the next 10 years, people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder will have the option…
"It is better to tackle ten fundamental [scientific] problems and succeed in only one, than to tackle ten trivial ones and solve them all," Francis Crick once told his devoted pupil V.S. Ramachandran, director of San Diego State's Center for Brain and Cognition. Ramachandran, apparently, took this advice to heart. The man who contends that neuroscience is ushering in "the greatest [scientific] revolution of all" believes that understanding the circuitry of the brain will soon allow us to tackle the existential questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries. He is so confident, in fact…
It seems that yesterday's post with the press release was a bit dated. An actual FTC complaint has been filed and you just have to see it. I'll post the entire thing below the fold, along with the "evidence" they attached to it, which amounts to an interview where Aiken kinda sorta denies being gay. Their complaint is that the record company conspired to create a public image that was different from his private life. Why this is the least bit surprising to anyone with more than basic brain stem function is beyond my ability to understand. I hope they don't find out that all that time that…
When human infants are born, the physical structure of their brains has not fully developed: the human brain continues to grow for more than two years after birth. It's very clear that newborn infants don't have the same cognitive abilities as babies even 6 months older. For example, they can't move their heads follow along a movement with their eyes. They appear to have very little control over their limbs. Three-month-olds have difficulty reaching and grasping objects. For humans, walking or crawling isn't a remote possibility for more than six months. Contrast this to wildebeasts, for…
I've been blogging a lot about "religion" recently, but I haven't reallly spelled out what I mean by religion. The answer is many things. Religion, or religious belief and practice, are a suite of behaviors and concepts which explore a multi-dimensional space. This space is inhabited by a wide range of combinations of traits, some more common than others. One of the problems addressing this topic is that everyone has a different perception of the subject, a perception shaped by their own cognitive and social biases. Here are a few of the axes which I believe religion explores: 1) The…
Treating autism with chemical castration I thought I'd seen it all. Ever since I found myself critically examining the claim that autism and autistic spectrum disorders are caused by mercury found in the preservative(thimerosal) used until recently in childhood vaccines, I thought that I'd heard of every dubious or quack autism therapy there is out there. Indeed, it is from that concept (that "autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning,", which is not supported by epidemiological or preclinical evidence) that flows all sorts of dubious therapies to "remove" the mercury. Foremost among…
Chad is not happy with my previous post where I consider that we shouldn't expect that everyone should be able to pass algebra conditional upon a deep understanding of the subject. First, let me state that my post was in part operating outside what I will call the "Cohen narrative." Rather, I wanted to interject the opinion that variation is a contingent fact of human history (otherwise, we wouldn't have been shaped by natural selection). I was attempting to offer that the alternatives are not black and white in that everyone should learn algebra or that everyone need not learn algebra.…
The day has finally arrived. The big changes hinted at and then announced have finally come to pass. Orac has finally rebooted and plugged his (its?) essence into ScienceBlogs.com. It almost didn't come to pass, thanks to a certain overreaction by my medical school. It also didn't help that, after an unbelievably mild January in the New York area, the one time that winter would finally reassert itself would, by sheer bad luck, fall on the very day that I was scheduled to fly home from a surgical meeting in San Diego. One plane cancellation and dire speculation about the weather did produce a…
One of the first questions our son Jim asks when a new movie comes out is "what's it rated?" The more "adult" the rating, the more appealing the movie is to him: PG is the lowest rating he'll even consider, PG-13 is better, and R is best. Since he's only 14, we don't take him to many R-rated movies, which is possibly what adds to their appeal. But even PG-rated movies and TV shows still display an abundance of violence, and plenty of parents are happy to let their kids watch violent programming, especially if there isn't any sex involved. We've reported on a lot of media violence studies on…
What would you say if I told you that parasites are infesting the brains of half the human population? Or creepier still, that these little buggers have the power to control people's behavior, making some irascible, others docile, and still others certifiably insane? You'd probably say I'd watched one too many X-Files reruns--and you'd be right--but that doesn't change the fact that it could be true. It's easy to dismiss parasites out of hand. Unless your intestines are playing host to a parasitic colony, they seem fairly benign. But it turns out stomach upset is one of their lesser powers.…
From the BBC: Muhammad cartoon row intensifies: Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage. I have posted comments over at Ed Brayton's weblog on this topic, they are verbose, but they encapsulate many slivers of my thinking. I will assume you know the general outline of this story, so, from the BBC piece: Newspapers across Europe are reprinting the offensive cartoons to show solidarity with the Danish paper. An editor at a French newspaper was sacked over this by the owner, his…
As I mentioned before, you should definitely check out the Tangled Bank. This bi-week's issue is quite diverse (and all the astronomers seem to be talking about the "earth-like" planet). One entry comes from an extremely opinionated anthropologist who calls out quantitative geneticists: Chimps More Like Humans Than Apes??? What does it mean to be human? And why quantitative geneticists should stick to their jobs. Retarded Geneticists With No Understanding of the Word 'Phenotype' Mouth Off [link] More after the jump... Well, I gotta say something about this, right?? I mean, I'm a retarded…
Okay guys, if you had a choice between having a big brain or big .. er, testes .. which would you choose? A recent scientific paper reveals that as sexual selection pressures increase in promiscuous bat species, males evolve larger testes and smaller brains. But in bat species where females remain faithful, males had comparatively smaller testes and larger brains. Conversely, male sexual behavior had absolutely no effect on either brain or testes size. Because brains and testis are the most metabolically expensive tissues to grow and maintain, the balance between their relative sizes…
Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? The question emerged a few years ago, and it shows no signs of going away. I first encountered this idea while working on my book Parasite Rex. I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It's in the fluke's interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it…
A reader gave me the heads up on this hilariously ridiculous rant from Gribbit at StopTheACLU. It can be summed up quickly in the following manner: "The ACLU are evil communists who hate God and God is going to strike them down for it." Needless to say, if you're going to argue for that idiotic conclusion, you're going to have to build quite an edifice of logical fallacies and distortions to justify it. It's your typical simpleminded, Free Republic-style screed, full of those quasi-clever lines equating Democrats with commies and painting with a brush so broad that it has its own zip code. We…
Much of the research on violent video games, like a vast proportion of all psychological research, has focused on college students. This shouldn't be surprising, since most college psychology departments require students to participate in experiments as a part of the Introduction to Psychology course. It's an easy way for researchers to find human participants, and a great way for students to learn how real research is done. Research results for college students often are equivalent to the population as a whole, and even when they aren't, college students can establish a baseline to compare…
My latest book, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins is now available on Amazon.com, and I think it's getting put on the shelves at bookstores. I've only referred to the book here glancingly from time to time, and I wanted to take a minute now to give Loom readers a sense of the book (and perhaps inspire the sales of a few copies). From the start of this blog, I've dedicated a lot of space to new discoveries about where we came from. I've written about spectacular new fossils, from Sahelanthropus, the oldest known hominid to the Hobbits (a k a Homo floresiensis), which might have been…
How long can an idea stay tantalizing? Back in 2003, I blogged about an experiment that suggested, incredibly enough, that our long-term memories are encoded by prions the misfolded proteins that are generally accepted to be the cause of mad cow disease. The evidence came from studies of a protein (known as CPEB) that plays a key role in laying down memories in neurons. Scientists found that it had a structure much like prions. When a normal protein misfolds and becomes a prion, it acquires the ability to lock onto other proteins and force them to misfold in the same way. The misfolding can…
As we come to the end of the month of April, it is once again time to award the Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly known as the Idiot of the Month award) to a worthy recipient. This month's winner is Les Kinsolving, the Worldnutdaily's intrepid White House correspondent, for this screed about gays and the new pope. In this column, he lists a series of statements by gay rights organizations expressing their disappointment in the appointment of the stridently anti-gay Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope. At no point does he actually dispute the accuracy of anything in those statements, of course. The mere…
If the Gull Lake teachers do file a lawsuit claiming that it is a violation of their rights if they are not allowed to teach creationist or other anti-evolution material in their science classes, there are three primary legal precedents for such a suit. All of them have found against the teacher's assertion of a right to teach such material and all were summarily dismissed and the dismissal upheld on appeal. I have transcribed the rulings in two of those cases on the MCFS website and will provide a link to the third (which is already available on the TalkOrigins Archive site), along with a…