cortex | January 15, 2007Having children is bad for your health:
A pair of researchers, drawing on the experience of nearly 22,000 couples in the 19th century -- has measured the "fitness cost" of human reproduction. This is the price that parents pay in their own health and longevity for the privilege of having their genes live on in future generations. The findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, manage to be both predictable and surprising.
Not surprisingly, women paid a bigger price than men. Older mothers were four times as likely to die in the year after having a…
cortex | January 15, 2007Agricultural subsidies are bad policy on so many different levels. They artificially lower food prices, thus making it harder for farmers from developing nations to compete. (Cutting subsidies would do a tremendous amount of good for the third world.) They encourage the growth of monoculture farming, in which vast tracts of land are devoted to a single, genetically modified crop. (70 percent of subsidies go to just four different crops: corn, rice, soybeans and wheat. And the vast majority of subsidies go to large corporations, not family farmers.) They help make us fatter, since all that…
cortex | January 13, 2007Is the mathematical avant-garde getting so abstruse that it stretches the limits of the human mind? Is it dangerous when a science becomes entirely dependent upon the calculations of computers? Here's Sharon Begley in the WSJ:
Mathematicians have become increasingly vexed that some statements about numbers cannot be proved by humans. Worse, the proofs that computers do are so long and complicated that no one can say for sure that the statement being proved really is true, says Prof. Davies.
Two recent computer-aided proofs have this problem. One proved that to color any assembly of shapes,…
cortex | January 11, 2007So I was talking to a friend of mine, currently working towards his Ph.D in neuroscience, and we got into an interesting discussion about the most influential neuroscience book published in the last 25 years. We defined "influence" as broadly as possible, so that it refers to both working scientists and the lay public. I'm traveling today, and won't have much time to blog, but I thought I'd throw out my nominees in the hope of sparking a spirited discussion. (I'm also not convinced that my nominees are very good.)
The Mind's New Science, by Howard Gardner
Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio…
cortex | January 10, 2007PZ has a great post on a recent Nature Genetics paper that explores the startling connection between longevity and luck. (Or, as scientists like to stay, stochasticity). It turns out that genetically identical worms survive for very different amounts of time. The length of their life depends upon random cellular processes, which arise from "fundamental thermodynamic and statistical mechanical considerations."* Here's PZ:
The fascinating thing to me is that they [the scientists] are finding so much significant (I think a 50% increase in average life span is certainly significant!) variation in…
cortex | January 10, 2007I'm curious how animal rights activists feel about this:
They are the new "Prozac Nation": cats, dogs, birds, horses and an assortment of zoo animals whose behavior has been changed, whose anxieties and fears have been quelled and whose owners' furniture has been spared by the use of antidepressants. Over the last decade, Prozac, Buspar, Amitriptyline, Clomicalm -- clomipromine that is marketed expressly for dogs -- and other drugs have been used to treat inappropriate, destructive and self-injuring behavior in animals.
It's not a big nation yet. But "over the past five years, use has gone…
cortex | January 9, 2007Last week, gay-rights activists led a protest against research being done on sheep at Oregon State University. Andrew Sullivan reports:
The researchers have been adjusting various hormones in the brains of gay rams to try to see if they can get them to be interested in the opposite sex. The indifference of many rams to otherwise attractive and fertile ewes is a drag on sheep-breeding, it seems. We don't have any peer-reviewed studies yet, but reports of success in manipulating the sexual behaviour of some rams have led to an outcry.
Sullivan is worried that this research will lead parents to…
cortex | January 9, 2007According to a new study published in the BMJ, the Danish are happier than people in other developed nations because they have low expectations. That's the dismal secret of happiness: not expecting very much from life in the first place.
"It's a David and Goliath thing," said the lead author, Kaare Christensen, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. "If you're a big guy, you expect to be on the top all the time and you're disappointed when things don't go well. But when you're down at the bottom like us, you hang on, you don't expect much, and once in a…
cortex | January 8, 2007In his latest New Yorker article (an otherwise problematic discussion of Enron), Malcolm Gladwell makes an interesting distinction between "puzzles" and "mysteries":
Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bi Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.
The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn't a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require…
cortex | January 8, 2007I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the news show Primetime Live, along with social psychologist Jerry Burger, recreated the infamous Milgram experiment.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram used an authoritarian figure, dressed in a white lab coat, to coerce people into committing evil acts. The "scientist" instructed people to shock a screaming subject sitting in the next room. Although no…
cortex | January 5, 2007According to The Washington Post, public libraries are tossing little-read classics so that they can make more room on their shelves for popular best-sellers. I think this is a good thing. Public libraries exist so that people can read books for free. Their purpose is not to force-feed the public a canon of Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, and Woolf.
Of course, I still wish more people read To the Lighthouse. But shelf-space is a scarce resource, and a book that isn't being read is just a haven for dust. Given that there is no easy way to distinguish between novels that are "educational" (i.e., "…
cortex | January 5, 2007Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up:
Foreshadowing potential climate chaos to come, early global warming caused unexpectedly severe and erratic temperature swings as rising levels of greenhouse gases helped transform Earth, a team led by researchers at UC Davis said Thursday.
The global transition from ice age to greenhouse 300 million years ago was marked by repeated dips and rises in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and wild swings in temperature, with drastic effects on forests and vegetation, the researchers reported in the journal Science.
The provocative…
cortex | January 3, 2007Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon have a great article in the new Foreign Policy magazine on "Why Hawks Win." They describe some of the mental biases discovered by Prospect Theory, and explain how these biases affect our foreign policy decisions. (Last week, I speculated on the influences of loss aversion on Bush's decision to escalate the Iraq war.)
PS. For a contrarian perspective, check this out. I agree that loss aversion isn't always a negative trait. Sometimes, it provides us with the sort of stubborness that victory requires. But it does become a dangerous bias when we refuse to…
cortex | January 3, 2007From Dan Neil, the wittiest writer in the newspaper business:
Desire, the Buddha informs us, is the root of all suffering -- also, a leading cause of alimony, but let's move on.
The craving for comfort, luxury, prestige and me-first acceleration drives us to buy more car than we absolutely need to go from point A to point B. And do these cars -- the Maserati Quattroportes, the Porsche Caymans, the Range Rover Sports -- make us happy? Well, yes. Yes, they do.
But at what cost, karmically speaking? And for how long? I would point people to a common experience: Call it "rental car phenomenology…
cortex | January 2, 2007Since I spend most of my disposable income on Amazon, I found this article on their pricing strategy somewhat disturbing:
Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don't want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday, when you'll come back to buy them.
When you return, the bookseller hands you the items but advises you that he's raised the prices. "I knew you were hot to buy them," the clerk says, "so I figured I could make a few extra bucks."
That's what it feels like online bookseller Amazon.com Inc. has been…
cortex | January 2, 2007There was a nice article in The Times on Sunday about the research of Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill (and former record producer) who studies the neural substrate of music:
Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain's sense of reward.
The cerebellum, an area normally…
cortex | December 29, 2006The annual list from the BBC. Here's a semi-random sampling:
More than 90% of plane crashes have survivors.
The Mona Lisa used to hang on the wall of Napoleon's bedroom.
Eating a packet of crisps a day is equivalent to drinking five litres of cooking oil a year.
A common American poplar has twice as many genes as a human being.
The medical name for the part of the brain associated with teenage sulking is "superior temporal sulcus".
While 53% of households have access to a garage, only 24% use them for parking cars.
The egg came first.
cortex | December 29, 2006It sounds as if Bush has decided to "escalate" the war in Iraq by sending a "surge" of 20,000 more troops. I'm no military expert, but this certainly seems like a terrible idea, especially considering that the previous attempts to pacify Baghdad earlier this summer were so ineffective.
So what is Bush thinking? Why is he refusing to listen to the advice of his generals and the Joint Chiefs, who are against a troop surge? I think part of the answer is that admitting defeat and de-escalating the war (i.e., bringing the troops home) would simply be too painful a decision for Bush to make.…
cortex | December 28, 2006Wait, I thought the war on drugs was supposed to make heroin more expensive:
Grams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA. That's about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the "French Connection" days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin is a hefty dose, so your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar.
That's from Mark Kleiman. As far as I can tell, the only good reason for continuing our futile drug policy, and locking up millions of addicts and dealers (not to mention our military aid to…
cortex | December 28, 2006Ever since 1994, when universities were no longer allowed to require professors to retire at a certain age, the average age of academics has been steadily rising. Here's the Boston Globe:
This year, 9.2 percent of tenured professors in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences are 70 or older, compared with none in 1992. Other universities have seen jumps in the percentage of older professors, although the actual number remains small on many campuses.
"The aging of the faculty, caused in large part by the absence of mandatory retirement, is one of the profound problems facing the American…