cortex | June 23, 2006The murmurs are growing louder...Will Al Gore be the first presidential candidate to launch a campaign based on a scientific issue? Here is Marty Peretz:
The issues Gore has tended to are issues on which he is truly expert...He is not afraid of science and technology because he knows science and technology.
It seems to me that scientific issues (global warming, R&D, energy policy, etc.) are the best issues for Democrats to draw a clear distinction between themselves and Republicans. Iraq is a miasma, and there are no good alternatives. Closing budget defits requires tax hikes. Apparently…
cortex | June 23, 2006Considering that I've eaten my fair share of British beef (I lived in England for a few years, and had a soft spot for the hamburgers at my local gastropub), this study was not welcome news. Here is the NY Times nut graf:
The long lives that some former cannibals enjoy before succumbing to a brain-wasting disease suggest that many more humans will eventually die of mad cow disease, scientists said Thursday.
The scientists arrived at their unsettling conclusion by studying the Fore tribe, who used to honor their dead by butchering them, eating their flesh, and smearing themselves with their…
cortex | June 22, 2006The National Bureau of Economic Resarch just released a new study on peer effects in the classroom:
The marginal effect of a one percent increase in the quality of peers on student achievement is equivalent to between 8â15% of a one percent increase in one's own earlier achievement...We find that peer effects operate in a heterogeneous manner. High ability students benefit more from having higher achieving schoolmates and from having less variation in peer quality than students of lower ability.
If I understand the paper correctly, there were three separate findings. 1) Kids achieve more…
cortex | June 22, 2006Please forgive this post, but as the proud parent of a cockatiel with an inverted beak (a common birth defect), it has long upset me that there is very little information available on the web about birds with this "problem". What little information Google provides generally consists of advice telling people to avoid purchasing cockatiels with beak defects. The advice is all wrong. Our cockatiel - his name is Leo - is a perfectly healthy three year old. Although the pet store was going to sacrifice him (he was deemed unsellable), I actually think his underbite is advantageous. For one thing,…
cortex | June 22, 2006In my post on Blink, I argued that Gladwell's book was a wee bit incoherent, and that this incoherence stemmed from his reliance on spiffy anecdotes instead of nitty-gritty scientific details. Katherine made an excellent comment:
I thought the problem with Blink was that he never really made a point. He basically said our first impressions are always right, so we should trust them ... except when they aren't right. His style of anecdotal evidence is indeed what makes him so readable, but he has a common problem of either not making a point, or citing anecdotes for both sides of the argument.…
cortex | June 21, 2006The Wall Street Journal just posted a very interesting list which analyzes all the known bird flu deaths so far. It makes for strangely engrossing reading.
cortex | June 21, 2006In the new The New Republic, Steven Pinker does a fair and thorough assesment of the recent study asserting that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence. According to the researchers (Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending), this selection took place from about 800 A.D. to 1600 A.D, when Jews in Northern Europe were relegated to being moneylenders and estate managers. Of course, rapid selection produces unintended side-effects, and Cochran, et.al. argue that the price of a higher IQ was Tay Sachs and Gaucher's disease, which are highly prevalent among Ashkenazi…
cortex | June 19, 2006PZ Myers dissects Ann Coulter's ridiculous claim that "There is no physical evidence for evolution" with his usual panache and wit. Of course, he is entirely right: Darwinian evolution is a sacrosant biological fact. Without the theory of evolution, life makes no sense.
But I do think that Myers misinterprets Coulter's claim. While Coulter says many foolish things, I'm sure she is well aware that thousands upon thousands of science papers have documented the abundance of evidence for evolution. (As Myers notes, PubMed currrently lists 150,000 peer-reviewed articles on evolution.) But Coulter…
cortex | June 16, 2006The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article on Bruce Lahn today. Last September, Lahn announced in Science that he had isolated two brain genes in humans which had undergone recent evolution, but only in certain populations. His paper contained maps which showed that the genetic changes had taken hold and spread widely in Europe, Asia and the Americas, but weren't common in sub-Saharan Africa. Needless to say, the data sparked an uproar. Now, nine months later, Lahn is leaving the field. "It's getting too controversial," he told the Journal.
This is a tough issue. On the one hand,…
cortex | June 15, 2006As a writer, there are few nicer things than reading a lucid and thought provoking response to an article you've written. PZ Myers, in responding to my article on the controversial theories of Joan Roughgarden, has written a gem of a blog post. Much of his post is devoted to scrutinizing and criticizing Roughgarden's theories. I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I think Myers makes some excellent points. (He is a skeptical voice in my article as well.) Although he discusses several possible explanations for the evolutionary origins of homosexuality, he settles on a favorite:
Homosexuality…
cortex | June 15, 2006These kinds of articles annoy me, especially when they appear on the front page of The New York Times.
Where to begin? Well, there is the utterly banal thesis, neatly summarized by Steven Pinker (in case you didn't want to wade through The Blank Slate):
"We now have real evidence that some of the variation in personality is inherited," Dr. Pinker said, "and I think it may be affecting people's everyday choices."
This is front page news? Has any serious neuroscientist or geneticist in the last decade really denied that our genes affect, in some dialectical way, our daily decisions? Of course…
cortex | June 14, 2006As the proud owner of an African Grey Timneh who is preening herself on my shoulder right now, I thought my bird was adept at impersonations. Her name is Junebug (June to her friends), and she does a spot on imitation of the percolator, Windows startup jingle, blender (not so pleasant), and our cockatiel's morning call. (She's only six months old, and is still learning English. She's very into babbling "Yeah" right now.) But June doesn't compare to this native Australian bird...
cortex | June 14, 2006One of my best friends just had his first kid. I'm almost 25, and there's something strange about seeing a person you usually associate with beer and baseball cradling his infant. It sets of all sorts of hormonal switches. Instead of thinking about Deadwood, Proust and the Red Sox (my usual stream of consciousness), I've been inundated with thoughts of babies. I think I've suddenly realized that, biologically speaking at least, I'm capable of becoming a parent. Weird.
That said, this post isn't about my twentysomething angst. It's about abortion, because my friend had a baby, Hillary Clinton…
cortex | June 12, 2006I got a very thoughtful email from a former colleague of mine (he's still a neuroscientist), who wondered why I would invest in scientific research for drug addicts over those with mental illness. After all, schizophrenics didn't commit a crime; they just inherited a flawed cortex. Why not first invest in cures for patients who 1) have an illness through no fault of their own and 2) can't already be cured by a combination of willpower, therapy and methadone.
This is an excellent point, and my priorities were certainly morally skewed. But I still won't change my answer. The reason I find…
cortex | June 10, 2006Sharon Begley of The Wall Street Journal is one of the finest science reporters around. Her Friday column was typically interesting. It's about how global warming might lead to increased tectonic and volcanic activity:
One cubic meter of ice weighs just over a ton, and glaciers can be hundreds of meters thick. When they melt and the water runs off, it is literally a weight off Earth's crust. The crust and mantle therefore bounce back, immediately as well as over thousands of years. That "isostatic rebound," according to studies of prehistoric and recent earthquakes and volcanoes, can make the…
cortex | June 10, 2006This week's question is what scientific field I would study, "if time and money were not obstacles." Since I'm not a real scientist - just a science writer - I'm not quite sure how to answer this. I worked for several years in a neuroscience lab, and if I hadn't studied neuroscience I probably would have ended up trying to understand RNA. (Why RNA? Because it does so many inscrutable things, and has been second fiddle to DNA for way too long...In fact, the whole field of epi-genetics strikes me as ripe with promise.)
But I'm going to interpret this question a little differently. I'm going to…
cortex | June 8, 2006Apparently, homosexuality is a sensitive subject. Ever since Seed posted my article on Joan Roughgarden earlier this week, I've gotten numerous emails informing of all the reasons why I'm "scientifically wrong" and "morally repugnant." I've even been accused of furthering the interests of Sodom.
But one email piqued my interest. Mr. X informed me that he raises sheep, and that his male sheep never, ever engage in genital licking or anal sex. (They sometimes hump each other, Mr. X confesses, but that's just an expression of "dominance".) Although I probably disagree with his politics, Mr. X…
cortex | June 8, 2006Writing the first line of your first blog is even harder than starting to write a book. Blogging is an instantaneous conversation, and nobody wants to begin a conversation with a bad beginning. (Plus, you can always change the first line of your book, at least until it's published, and that takes forever.) So I'm nervous right now, and probably too self-conscious. Hopefully, that will fade with time and verbosity.
I'll begin by introducing myself. If you're on scienceblogs.com, you've probably heard of Seed Magazine. I'm a staff writer. Over the last few years, I've had the pleasure of…