John Hawks has a good critique of the conservatives-are-fearful study.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, have a look at Carl Zimmer's post on the subject. He provides a lot of the scientific specifics:
But that's not what has emerged from the new study. The Broad Institute scientists lined up millions of bases of DNA in humans and chimps and measured their…
*From Deltoid archives for 2004, a [repost](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/09/zywicki.php)*
In my previous post I mentioned Daniel Davies' demolition of yet another dodgy Steve Milloy article. Milloy attacked a recent JAMA study that found:
Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages…
In my previous post I mentioned Daniel Davies' demolition of yet another dodgy Steve Milloy article. Milloy attacked a recent JAMA study that found:
Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a greater magnitude of weight gain and an increased risk for…
We often think of music as expressing emotions, and research has backed this notion up. But typically the research has focused on melodic instruments: sweet, sorrowful violins; bright, happy guitars; melancholy, wailing oboes. So what about percussion instruments: drums, cymbals, tympani—can they…
I agree that the study has too many opportunities for error, but it is a first look at a too long understudied topic.
Consider how biological theory has been brought fully into every other topic besides how our species struggles for power. We don't have genes for immigration reform, but we have genes for territoriality and fear of strangers. We don't have genes for birth control policy but we have genes that govern birth rates. Books such as "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps" or "The God Gene" proliferate; yet nary a peep about the origins of our two politcal natures that have been similarly described since ancient Greece.
Brack has an interesting site on politcal neurology:
www.neuropolitics.org
I'm finishing a politcal equivalent to "Why Men Don't Listen" - "The Origin of Political Species" Hibbbing wrote my foreword. My big name publisher backed out, so I just have the electronic version available for now. You can read a huge excerpt at www.politicalspecies.com
My job is to ask the questions that scientists are effectively banned from bringing up themsleves, such as how did our evolution across the cultural explosion the last 60,000 years affect our social instincts?
Having read Hawks' critique, I'm not sure what the big deal is. Hawks, being a good Scientist, is a natural skeptic. He then trots out a list of standard caveats, applicable to all research, and applies them to this paper. Good. And now what?
Until further research is done, the original paper is a suggestive datum, no more. The critique, however, is nearly non-informative.