loom | October 9, 2003One reason that I'm so riveted by neuroscience is the way it can blow the lid off of philosophical conundrums that have dogged Western thought for centuries. Case in point: in a recent study, scientists at Dartmouth asked subjects about something that was on their mind--an exam, a girlfirend, and so on. Then, while scanning their brains with an MRI machine, they told their subjects NOT to think about that thing.
We're all pretty comfortable with the idea that thoughts are the product of neurons, electrical impluses, and neurotransmitters. But if that's all that thought is, then what (or who)…
loom | October 7, 2003Thanks again for the comments on my previous two posts about eugenics. As a novice blogger, I was surprised by their focus. I expected comments about the past--the historical significance of the eugenics movement--but instead the future dominated, with assorted speculations about the possible futures that genetic engineering could bring to our species. By coincidence, I've been thinking about the future as well, but from a different angle, thanks to a pair of papers in press at Trends In Ecology and Evolution. Instead of introduced genes, they're interested in introduced species.
Before…
loom | October 7, 2003It's never pretty to see journalism transformed into propaganda, especially when you're the one who wrote the journalism. I recently did an article for the New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. The National Right to Life web site then posted a long "News & Views" piece by one Dave Andrusko that pretended to recount my article. It was annoying enough to see careless mistakes--adding quotation marks to a passage from the article, so as to put it into the mouth of a doctor, for example. But it was really unpleasant to see my article distorted to serve a…
loom | October 6, 2003Ask and ye shall receive. In a recent post on eugenics, I claimed that the connection between early 20th century genetics and early 21st century genetic engineering was weak. I asked if anyone thought I was wrong, and in no time I got a comment from Razib at Gene Expression.
He suggests that I'm limited by conventional preconceptions, taking issue on both my points--first about the prospects of engineering intelligence and second about the prospects of a new species of engineered humans. I think he's got a stronger argument on the first point than the second.
On the first point, Razib argues…
loom | October 5, 2003The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he's shown how new plant species emerge from hybrids. When two species of plants form a hybrid, it doesn't necessarily become a sterile dead end. In fact, hybridization is an important source of entirely new species. Rieseberg does his work mainly on sunflowers, and so whenever I walk past a charming row of them, I think of the weird inter-…
loom | October 5, 2003Today Daniel Kevles, a Yale historian, has an interesting review in the New York Times of a new book about eugenics. The book in question is War against the Weak, by Edward Black. It's a cinderblock of a book, and it's got a lot of chilling material to offer on how popular eugenics was in the United States in the earlier part of the century. A lot of people sincerely believed that criminals, blind people, sick babies, social misfits, and non-Nordic immigrants had to be stopped from poisoning the American gene pool. We're not talking about a few racists here and there--we're talking about…
loom | October 2, 2003As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I've often had people say to me, "I just can't believe that evolved." Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature--the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of birds in flight. The implication was that these things were so beautiful and intricate that they had to be created for a purpose--a beautiful purpose, obviously.
But after I started writing about parasites, that underwent a fascinating change. Parasites may be deadly and gross, but they also have some mind-boggling adaptations. Most mind-boggling of all is the…
loom | September 28, 2003Over the past couple weeks an unplanned experiment has taken place that shows what sort of science makes it into the popular consciousness and what doesn't. In the past couple weeks we've had three pieces of research on the same evolutionary puzzle in the same high-profile journal (Nature). One was all over the place--I'll just link the USA Today article as one example. The other two vanished with barely a peep.
All three papers tackle the puzzle of kindness. Why do we cooperate when there are powerful evolutionary forces that would seem to work against cooperation? If I waste a lot of my…
loom | September 27, 2003I wrote an article for this Sunday's New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. Stories like this one are always hard, because there are so many crucial dimensions to the subject and so little room to do justice to them all. For example, I couldn't even begin to explain how the research I describe in the article--using PET and MRI scans to measure the brain activity in people with traumatic brain injuries--is a beautiful reverse twist on some of the most famous research ever done on the brain: the nineteenth century doctor Pierre Paul Broca's discovery of a…
loom | September 26, 2003I write about science, and in a recent overhaul of my web site, I decided it was a good time to add a blog. I'll be posting thoughts about new research in the fields that I can't get enough of--the brain and the body, how they evolved, and where they're going. I'm still getting the hang of iblog, and so the first few posts will probably be pretty clunky. And until I can figure out how to post comments, please feel free to email me. I will try to post some messages from time to time in my own posts.