cortex | July 16, 2008Olivia Judson believes that it's time to jettison "Darwinism" from our vocabulary:
Why is this [Darwinism] a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn't changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the "Origin."
He wasn't, and it has. Although several of his ideas -- natural and sexual selection among them -- remain cornerstones of modern evolutionary biology, the field as a whole has been transformed. If we were to go back in a time machine and fetch…
cortex | July 16, 2008This is a fourth culture I can believe in:
Google has a lot more on how the video was made using 64 rotating lasers (no cameras!) and some cool data visualization programs. (They also released the raw data for the point clouds, so anybody can, at least in theory, create their own visual remix of the Radiohead music video.) As people like Ben Fry demonstrate, the visualization of massive data sets - a pressing problem for modern science - is a great place for art and science to come together.
cortex | July 15, 2008What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio - they don't buy or sell a single stock - outperform the average "active" investor by nearly 10 percent.) So, instead of trying to get your broker on the phone, browse through these exquisite satellite photos, courtesy of NASA:
via kottke
cortex | July 15, 2008Hit songs are getting wordier:
Average word count of top-ten songs during the 1960s: 176
Average last year: 436
That's from the latest Harper's Index, via Marginal Revolution. I think this trend is pretty clearly a result of hip-hop and rap. Compare some Phil Spector Wall of Sound single - say, "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes - to some recent smash hit, like Umbrella or Lollipop, and it's easy to hear all those extra words. These new songs are not only faster but much, much wordier. (The slow decay of top 40 radio also means that songs can cross the three minute rubicon. Both Umbrella and…
cortex | July 14, 2008Why do poor people spend so much money on brand-name items and flashy status symbols? The answer is power. Those Calvin Klein boxers are a desperate attempt at compensation. Here's Kevin Lewis of the Globe Ideas section:
If people low on the socioeconomic ladder sometimes buy things beyond their means, it may be because of a psychological mechanism that we all share. At Northwestern University, several experiments with students tested the idea that people who feel relatively powerless have a greater desire for high-status goods. The participants were primed to feel either powerful or…
cortex | July 14, 2008I loved WALL-E. In my opinion, it's the best Pixar movie yet, and I was a huge fan of Ratatouille. While the movie has an obvious environmental subtext - we are destroying the earth with our love of disposable things - I was most taken with its subtle endorsement of Darwin. And no, I'm not talking about evolution or natural selection. As I watched WALL-E , I couldn't help but think about Darwin's last major work, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.
The Origin gets all the attention, but The Expression is Darwin at his most inventive and audacious. The title only hints at its…
cortex | July 11, 2008The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers:
The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to…
cortex | July 10, 2008Nature has a really interesting article on the sheer difficulty (impossibility?) of finding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness:
Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses are actually separate diseases with distinct underlying genetics or whether, as the DISC1 [a gene implicated in shcizophrenia] story suggests, they will dissolve under the genetic spotlight into one biological continuum. Indeed, some researchers suggest that it would be better to abandon conventional clinical…
cortex | July 10, 2008From the new experimental philosophy reader, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols:
It used to be commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people's moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn't particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general…
cortex | July 10, 2008Is it just me or are the mosquitoes extra bad this year? I have a feeling that people would care even more about climate change if, instead of talking about rising sea levels, environmentalists started talking about swarms of mosquitoes. A warmer earth will be an itchier place.
On a related note, a small experimental study conducted last night on a patio table confirmed my hypothesis: citronella candles actually attract the insects. The allure of the flickering light seems to far outweigh the benefits of the chemical repellent.
cortex | July 9, 2008I don't know how I feel about this new trend of giving household pets human anti-depressants. Here's James Vlahos in the Times Magazine:
The practice of prescribing medications designed for humans to animals has grown substantially over the past decade and a half, and pharmaceutical companies have recently begun experimenting with a more direct strategy: marketing behavior-modification and "lifestyle" drugs specifically for pets. America's animals, it seems, have very American health problems. More than 20 percent of our dogs are overweight; Pfizer's Slentrol was approved by the F.D.A. last…
cortex | July 9, 2008I've got a profile of ecologist Jianguo Liu in the latest Conservation Magazine:
When the Wolong Nature Reserve was established in Southwestern China in 1975, it was hailed as a landmark achievement of the environmental movement. The reserve, which covers more than 200,000 hectares, contains more than 10 percent of the wild giant panda population and has received extensive financial and logistical support from both the Chinese government and numerous environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund. At first glance, the Wolong reserve would appear to be a model of a protected…
cortex | July 9, 2008One of the biggest misconceptions of natural selection is that it mandates nastiness, that the pressure to survive and multiply requires a ruthless sort of amorality. In other words, we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes.
Fortunately, our psychological reality is much less bleak. We aren't fallen angels, but we also aren't depraved hominids. In fact, it's now becoming clear that evolution lavished lots of attention on what might be called the moral brain, which is really a series of neural circuits enabling social interaction. The end result is that we…
cortex | July 8, 2008Some new evidence suggesting that children aren't such bundles of joy:
Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids.
Parents "definitely experienced more depression," says Robin Simon, a sociologist at Florida State University who has studied data on parenting.
"Part of our cultural beliefs is that we derive all this joy from kids," says Simon. "It's really hard for people who don't feel this to admit it." Social pressures to view only the positive aspects…
cortex | July 8, 2008Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories - Chesterton was also a consistent antisemitic, prone to tedious defenses of Catholic orthodoxy.
To be honest, though, my favorite thing about Chesterton are his aphorisms: only Wilde is more quotable. Gopnik has found some great ones ("The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, but to make settled things strange") but he left out a few of…
cortex | July 7, 2008Steve Shapin, a historian of science at Harvard, argues that the romantic notion of scientists lusting after truth and not worldly riches is a wee bit oversimplified:
IDEAS: Are we wrong to think of scientists as academics engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge?
SHAPIN: Well, I wouldn't deny that there are scientists, just like historians or sociologists, who are interested in following their curiosity for its own sake. What I do end up disputing, and I'm not alone in this, is this picture of who the scientist is, which emerges overwhelmingly from a rather idealized picture of academic…
cortex | July 7, 2008This is a heartwarming story about the power of kindness to change behavior and rewire instinct. Michael Vick, the imprisoned QB, trained his dogs to be cruel, nasty and brutish. (The dogs that didn't take to fighting were beaten, tortured and killed.) Most animal experts assumed that Vick's pit bulls would need to be euthanized, since they would never get over their aggression. But the experts were wrong:
The court gave Vick's dogs a second chance. U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ordered each dog to be evaluated individually, not judged by the stereotype of the breed. And he ordered Vick…
cortex | July 6, 2008I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the new science of depression:
Prozac is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 54 million people around the world, and prevented untold amounts of suffering.
But the success of Prozac hasn't simply transformed the treatment of depression: it has also transformed the science of depression. For decades, researchers struggled to identify the underlying cause of depression, and patients were forced to endure a series of…
cortex | July 4, 2008You know what makes me proud to be an American? The fact that the black presidential candidate with the funny African-Muslim name is leading in the polls against the white aviator war hero married to a beer heiress. And I'm not just saying that because I want universal health care and a progressive tax policy (although I do). I think what it really illustrates is just how far this country has come within Barack Obama's lifetime.
Now, I'm not sure I agree with that recent Shelby Steele quote about how "white Americans have made more moral progress in the last forty years than any people in…
cortex | July 3, 2008The ideological swings of scientists between age-groups is striking:
What do you think explains this shift? And what other differences do you notice between young and old scientists? (I realize all such statements will be absurd over-generalizations, but that's the point.)
Update: See Razib for a bunch more figures.