cortex | March 5, 2007Here's your crazy factoid of the day. It's from the recent article on spider hunters in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger (not online):
Spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
cortex | March 5, 2007First of all, I apologize for the most grandiose blog title of all time. I was going to add Love and War to the title too, but I ran out of space.
My subject is yesterday's Times Magazine synopsis of the current scientific explanations for the universal human craving for some sort of God. The article neatly (perhaps too neatly) divides the scientists into dueling camps: the adaptionists and the non-adaptionists (spandrelists?).
The non-adaptationists hold that religious belief is a side-effect of our cortical evolution. God emerges naturally from the constellation of tricks and tools that…
cortex | March 2, 2007If you like spicy food - and I love spicy food - then you'll find this report from Harold McGee's blog rather interesting. It concerns the evolution of capsaicin, the pungent chemical that makes chilis so spicy:
Levey, Tewksbury and colleagues tested the theory that capsaicin selectively repels rodents and other grain-eating mammals, which would chew up the chilli's seeds along with the surrounding fruit, while having no deterrent effect on birds, which have no teeth, swallow the fruits whole and defecate the seeds intact. They monitored wild chilli plants in Bolivia and in Arizona with video…
cortex | March 2, 2007It's easy to deride our irrational bias against losses. From the perspective of economics, there is no good reason to weight gains and losses so differently. (Losses feel twice as bad as gains feel good. We demand a $40 payoff for a $20 bet.) Opportunity costs should be treated just like "out-of-pocket costs". But they aren't: losses carry a particular emotional sting. Take this imaginary scenario:
The U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact…
cortex | March 1, 2007This is a totally frightening poll:
Yes, you read that right: 42 percent of Christian Americans are Christians before they are Americans. In general, Christians in America are about as conflicted in their identities as Muslims in France. And they call atheists un-American...
I'd be curious if there's any historical data on this poll question. Have Americans become more likely to self-identify as Christians over time? My sense is that one of the side-effects of globalization is to minimize the perceptions of difference between the citizens of different nation-states. Everybody drinks the…
cortex | March 1, 2007Some people are really, really rich:
Take Oracle's founder, Lawrence J. Ellison. Mr. Ellison's net worth last year was around $16 billion. And it will probably be much bigger when the list comes out in a few weeks. With $16 billion and a 10 percent rate of return, Mr. Ellison would need to spend more than $30 million a week simply to keep from accumulating more money than he already has, to say nothing of trying to spend down the $16 billion itself.
He spent something like $100 million on his Japanese-style mansion in Woodside, Calif., making it among the more expensive private residences…
cortex | March 1, 2007Since it's easy to get angry at drug companies - they profit from sickness and market inefficiencies - it's also worth noting when they go out of their way to do good:
A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity.
The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with amodiaquine, an older drug that still works in many malarial areas.
Sanofi-Aventis, the world's fourth-…
cortex | March 1, 2007Last week, I criticized David Brooks for his conservative interpretations of modern neuroscience. This week, I'm happy to report that Brooks' policy recommendations are much more interesting (and scientifically accurate, at least in my opinion):
If we want to have successful human capital policies, we have to get over the definition of education as something that takes place in schools between the hours of 8 and 3, between the months of September and June, and between the ages of 5 and 18.
As Bob Marvin of the University of Virginia points out, there is a mountain of evidence demonstrating…
cortex | February 28, 2007Here at Scienceblogs, we spent a lot of time debunking various types of unscientific falsehoods (aka "woo," religious believers, and the conservapedia.) As far as I'm concerned, that's just great. The world always is always suffering from a shortage of skepticism. We need more empiricism and less certainty.
But it's worth reminding ourselves of the obvious: peer-reviewed science is also vulnerable to bad biases, false suppositions and sloppy interpretations. Data doesn't generate itself. Over at Overcoming Bias, they've compiled a short list of recent examples. Here are the most damning:
A…
cortex | February 28, 2007It's the latest bourgeois battle: a bunch of angry supermarket shoppers, led by Michael Pollan, are criticizing Whole Foods for not living up to their organic values. While the stores are filled with billboards extolling the virtues of small farms and local produce, Whole Foods gets most of its provisions from big agribusiness, albeit with an organic label. From the Times:
While many shoppers find the new stores exhilarating places to shop, the company also faces critics who feel it has strayed from its original vision. In angry postings on blogs, they charge that the store is not living up…
cortex | February 27, 2007Last year, a Cornell University economist named Michael Waldman noticed a strange correlation: the more precipitation a region received, the more likely children were to be diagnosed with autism.
[This] soon led Prof. Waldman to conclude that something children do more during rain or snow -- perhaps watching television -- must influence autism. Last October, Cornell announced the resulting paper in a news release headlined, "Early childhood TV viewing may trigger autism, data analysis suggests.
The resulting paper was a nifty trove of complicated statistics and unexpected correlations. But…
cortex | February 27, 2007Over at Mixing Memory, Chris has an excellent post complicating the recent psychological study which demonstrated that reading selected passages from the Bible about retributive violence makes people more aggressive. He reminds us that other studies have found the opposite effect. Chris' sobering conclusion is exactly right:
Religion, like any other social institution, can cause good and bad behavior, depending on the context and the ways in which it is used. Overall, religion and similar secular institutions may serve to promote prosocial behavior, but when individuals focus on certain parts…
cortex | February 26, 2007I'm glad Al Gore won the Oscar. Personally, I found his film a little dry and pedantic, but it has clearly played an essential role in shifting the public debate on global warming. (Or are we now supposed to call global warming "the climate crisis," pace Gore?)
But it's worth remembering that our scientific models of global warming, although they seem accurate and are backed by an iron clad scientific consensus, will no doubt turn out to be wrong, at least in the details. This is just the nature of scientific models. As the respected scientific authors of Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental…
cortex | February 23, 2007My last post on David Brooks, conservatism and neuroscience inspired a spirited debate. I argued that the discoveries of modern neuroscience seem to support liberal public policies focused on reducing levels of inequality:
While conservatives tend to regard poverty as primarily a cultural issue, solvable by increasing marriage rates and transitioning people to minimum wage jobs, this research suggests that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. The truth of the matter is that our neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise…
cortex | February 23, 2007I like Paul Krugman's column today for two reasons.
1) He works in a nice allusion to Chomsky. His headline is "Colorless Green Ideas".
2) He makes an important point about California and energy conservation:
Let me tell you about a real-world example of an advanced economy that has managed to combine rising living standards with a substantial decline in per capita energy consumption, and managed to keep total carbon dioxide emissions more or less flat for two decades, even as both its economy and its population grew rapidly. And it achieved all this without fundamentally changing a lifestyle…
cortex | February 22, 2007Jane Galt mocks liberal interpretations of behavioral economics:
[This] also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:
1) People are often stupid
2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.
Pithy, yes. Accurate, not so much. Behavioral economists and neuroeconomists haven't discovered that people are "stupid." Instead, they've discovered that the…
cortex | February 22, 2007From Der Spiegel:
The football World Cup from June 9 to July 9 last year appears to have sparked a baby boom in the host country Germany, where hospitals are reporting a marked rise in imminent births nine months after the tournament, remembered here as a month-long fairy-tale of sunshine, parties and soccer success.
The head of the largest birth clinic in the city of Kassel, Rolf Kliche, estimates that births at his hospital will be up by 10 to 15 percent, which he described as a "minor sensation" given the usually stable birth statistics.
Kliche said he wasn't surprised because happiness…
cortex | February 22, 2007It's a gripping video, a youtube window into the autistic mind:
And now Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the telegenic brain surgeon on CNN, has spent time with Amanda, the "low-functioning" autistic woman produced and starred in the video:
She taught me a lot over the day that I spent with her. She told me that looking into someone's eyes felt threatening, which is why she looked at me through the corner of her eye. Amanda also told me that, like many people with autism, she wanted to interact with the entire world around her. While she could read Homer, she also wanted to rub the papers across her face…
cortex | February 21, 2007I spent a year studying theology at Oxford. I focused on the relationship between religion and science (lots of Galileo and Darwin and William James), but couldn't help learning a lot about the Bible along the way. I went in pretty unimpressed by Jesus (I'm a Jew who doesn't believe in God), but left the program convinced that Bush is essentially right*: Jesus is a fantastic philosopher, like Buddha if the Buddha had been influenced by Neo-Platonism. (In other words, worldly wealth is vanity and the secret to life is compassion.)
So I tend to ignore those atheist voices who bemoan the obvious…
cortex | February 21, 2007Needless to say, this is ridiculous:
Settled in the well-groomed Los Angeles suburb of San Marino, Derek O'Gorman worked as an insurance broker. His wife, Mary Ann, took care of their two girls, both stellar students at top-ranked local schools. But in 2005, when the family visited a nearby private high school they expected the girls to attend, they came away disappointed. After an extensive search, the O'Gormans found the perfect fit: the Winsor School. Winsor, famed for its academic rigor and participatory classes, is also known for the academic success of its 420 students: About a third of…