Brain and Behavior
drorzel | November 1, 2010In last weekend's post about arguments from innate differences, I suggested that I might be willing to illustrate my position with adorable toddler pictures. On thinking more about it, I'm a little hesitant to write about this at length, because it could easily topple over into arrogant-physicist territory. But then, it's an excuse to post adorable toddler pictures, so...
So, let me put a short disclaimer up front: I'm not attempting to claim that I have suddenly uncovered a unique and obvious flaw in innate-difference arguments, by virtue of my Big Physicist Brain. I am well aware that the…
drorzel | October 23, 2010Some time back, I took issue with an article about "masculine" and "feminine" approaches to science that struck me as a little off. The author of the original post, Alexandra Jellicoe, has a new post on the same topic that she pointed out in comments to my original post.
I have two major problems with this article. One of them is a problem I have with the whole genre (as it were), and I'll save that for another time, because it will be difficult to write. The bigger and more immediate problem that I have, though, is that I don't recognize Jellicoe's description of science. She writes:
The…
kcollins | October 17, 2010Thanks Howard Hughes for helping us get the word out about the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Main Article here
Two scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus, Roian Egnor and Lou Scheffer, will speak at the USA Science and Engineering Festival Expo, which will take place on and around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on October 23-24, 2010. Egnor and Scheffer, both fellows at Janelia Farm, will discuss the latest research on how the brain works, considering the question from two very different perspectives: one as a neuroscientist who…
pharyngula | October 13, 2010I have been challenged by Jerry Coyne, who is unconvinced by my argument that there is no evidence that could convince me of the existence of god. Fair enough, I shall repeat it and expand upon it.
The question "Is there a god?" is a bad question. It's incoherent and undefined; "god" is a perpetually plastic concept that promoters twist to evade evaluation. If the whole question is nebulous noise, how can any answer be acceptable? The only way to win is by not playing the game.
There's a certain unfairness in the evidence postulated for god. I used the example of a 900 foot tall Jesus…
gregladen | October 12, 2010Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other's shoes (the gals)?
This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the "evolutionary psychology" argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today's behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by "sound" you mean "sounds good unless you listen really hard."
I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument…
oracknows | October 10, 2010Over the weekend, I saw a rather fascinating post by Sullivan entitled A Sense of Civil Discourse. The reason I found it so fascinating is because what was quoted in it utterly destroyed my irony meter yet again, leaving it nothing but a molten, gooey mess still bubbling and hissing in my office. Apparently last week, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, authors of the distillation of all the craziness that is the blog Age of Autism into book form under the same title, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, did a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. During the…
oracknows | September 29, 2010It's grant crunch time, which almost always means that a lot of stuff happens that I don't have time to write about and that the week after I submit it (i.e., next week) usually nothing interesting happens to write about and I'm left posting LOL Cats or something like that. Be that as it may, sometimes something happens that goads me to the point where I have to comment, although reality keeps me from my usual logorrhea. Who knows, maybe that's a good thing.
In any case, yesterday Brandon Thorp (who also works for the JREF) teamed up with Penn Bullock to write a disturbing report on just how…
jgoldman | September 28, 2010Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week:
American family values: where even the dull can dream! "One of the issues when talking about the effect of environment and genes on behavioral and social outcomes is that the entanglements are so complicated. That is why cross-cultural studies are essential," writes Razib Khan.
If you ask Rift of the Psycasm blog, We should be music testing athletes! "Wherein our hero examines the positive effects of Music on Workouts, even though he thinks music is cheating."
Negative Evidence: Still Missing After All These Years. A killer post…
tfk | September 23, 2010Not to reopen raw wounds, but reposting my talk from Netroots Nation reminded me of two other sessions I attended, both on the theme of snark and satire. Unfortunately, video from the one I want to talk about today is not yet online.
As you'll recall, sciencebloggers and skeptics were really bored over the summer, and to pass the time they got into a fight over whether it was good or bad to be dickish. Those who said "no," generally argued that there's no particular evidence that such behavior is effective at convincing people to join your cause and the peer reviewed literature found dickish…
oracknows | September 22, 2010I've expounded on the principle of crank magnetism. Basically, crank magnetism is the tendency of cranks not to mind the crankery of other cranks, even if the two forms of crankery are mutually exclusive. But it's more than that. It's the tendency of a single crank to be attracted to several forms of crankery. We've seen it in creationists who are also attracted to "alternative medicine," in anti-vaccine loons who are also attracted to alternative medicine and various conspiracy theories, including "9/11 Truth." I've seen it in Holocaust deniers who are also attracted to both "alternative"…
cwilcox | September 17, 2010Scientists worry way too much about the impacts of our work. We want our papers to mean something, for people to really want to read them. Of course, the true test of whether your paper is important is that future papers cite you as a reference.
What makes one paper cited by everyone and another fall into obscurity? Well, there are all kinds of theories. Maybe it's how high-impact the journal is - after all, a Science paper is better than obscure journal, right? Some have even suggested it's a matter of size - of your reference list, that is.
But now, John Parker, a post-doc at the National…
pharyngula | September 17, 2010
(I thought this was a perfect time to repost this list.)
Douglas Theobald passed along an interesting collection of quotes from that atheist evolutionist, Adolf Hitler. It's particularly interesting that he outlawed atheist and freethought groups in 1933.
It's a long list of quotes, so I'll tuck it below the fold.
"The anti-Semitism of the new movement (Christian Social movement)
was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty
Creator. By warding off the Jews I am…
jdupuis | September 14, 2010Yet another science blogging community: Wired Science Blogs.
From Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers:
At Wired Science we are always looking for new ways to deliver you more science and more awesome. Starting today, we are bringing on a group of hand-picked, superstar science bloggers to help us do just that.
*snip*
We hope Wired will give these bloggers the platform and attention they deserve and help bring quality science blogging to the forefront of science discussion across the web. In recent weeks, several science blogging networks have sprung up, including PLoS blogs,…
developingintelligence | September 14, 2010Yesterday's introduction to paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation elicited an insightful comment from reader "Kix":
As you mention, TMS can be used in order to disrupt or to read out some areas of the brain. I don't see why these functions should be mutually exclusive. For instance, delivering single pulse TMS over the primary motor cortex during movement preparation allows one to guess the direction of the future movement from the size of the motor evoked potential. However, the fact of reading out the prepared response might also disrupt it (Michelet et al. 2010).
I think we…
developingintelligence | September 13, 2010There's a ton of super-interesting transcranial magnetic stimulation work coming out these days (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here) and much of it pertains to a very particular "paired-pulse" form of TMS (ppTMS). Before diving into the new work, I wanted a basic crash course on what we know (and what we don't) about how and why ppTMS works.
If you're not familiar with the basic behavioral effects of TMS, check out this video.
Unfortunately, the crash course I was looking for doesn't exist. So I've made one. Except where noted, the crash course below is largely derived from a…
oracknows | September 12, 2010THE PAST IS PROLOGUE
Location: Central New Jersey, deep within the brick and steel of a secret pharma base.
Year: 1999.
A shadowy figure dressed in gray, bald, and stroking a white cat enters a nondescript room in the middle of which sits a massive conference table. More than a dozen men and women leap to their feet at attention and wait until the man pauses at the head of the table and then very deliberately sits in high-backed leather chair.
Shadowy figure: Have they arrived?
Lackey #1: Yes, Leader.
Shadowy figure: Let them wait a few minutes. First, we have pressing business. You have…
jgoldman | September 12, 2010
There was A LOT of stuff this week. Was this week particularly good for blogging or am I just aware of more blogs and blog posts in recent weeks? Am I paying more attention because of the new networks? Am I just filtering less, and including more in the round-up? Anyway, lots of awesome.
Science
I've really been enjoying the Replicated Typo blog lately. I particularly liked a recent post on the social sensitivity hypothesis: "Given findings that certain genetic variants will make a person more sensitive to social contact and more reliant on social contact under stress, it proposes that…
oracknows | September 8, 2010I must admit that, after having taken it easy over the last few days, when the time came to sit down and get back into the swing of things, I had a bit of a hard time. No, it's not just blogging. That's actually a rather minor component of the whole malaise that descended upon me like a shroud. Rather, it's the simple fact that the Labor Day weekend in the U.S. represents the unofficial end of the summer season. After that, it's all back to school, back to work, back to the grind.
Back to real life after summer.
This reluctance, not surprisingly, seeped out of real life and started to permeat…
gregladen | September 7, 2010 Published by Yale University Press A Portrait of the Brain by Adam Zeman is a new book describing how the brain works (and does not work) in something of an Oliver Sack's experiential manner, but with a twist.
Zeman is a Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology at the Peninsula Medical School. A Portrait of The Brain describes the brain with reference to a sort of hierarchical scale (mainly of size) ranging from the atom to the soul, and running through such constructs as the organelle, the cell, the brain region, and the individual.
Each of these levels is a stopping point…
sastyk | September 6, 2010There's an interesting article in the National Post emergent from a recent study in _Brain and Behavioral Sciences_
The article, titled "The weirdest people in the world?", appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic -- people who are WEIRD -- see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not…