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Zombies schmombies. Let's talk parasites.

We here at Zooillogix balked at the idea of 'Zombie day' on ScienceBlogs (and secretly loved it, too). What better example than the animal world to show TRUE zombie-ism at its best? Parasites. Need I even say more? We've posted and posted again and posted another time about zombies before this day of celebration. But in honor of the day, we have found a few more interesting parasite zombie stories to share with your children when they are misbehaving. Pillbugs. Potato bugs. Rolly pollies. Don't we all remember these little innocuous guys? But did you know they could be zombified?!…

Burmese Vine Snakes Feeding at the California Academy of Sciences

I find the music in this video to be completely appropriate. Below the fold is a description the nice communications lady at the CA Academy sent me...interesting stuff. By the way, if you haven't been to the California Academy of Sciences you are missing out on one of the most state of the art museums in the world. "At feeding time in the California Academy of Sciences' vine snake exhibit, one blink and you might miss the action. These pencil-thin snakes hunt fish swimming in the water below, striking with lightning speed. We recently captured a feeding on film (http://www.youtube.com/…

The ark builders

Apoplexy is such an antique disease. I'd hate to die of it, just because is so unfashionable, but every time I read one of these stories about Answers In Genesis, I feel an attack coming on. Yeah, they're working on building a replica of Noah's Ark. It's all part of their plan for defrauding the public. The author talked to people at the existing creation "museum", and hit one of those points that spike my blood pressure. When I was at the Creation Museum I got talking to Greg Duck, an industrial courier who was visiting from Texas. He said his favourite part was a video where a creationist…

What I taught today: O Cruel Taskmaster!

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ I'm out of town! Class is canceled today! But still, my cold grip extends across the Cascades, over the Palouse, the Rockies, the Dakota badlands, the old homeland of the American bison, the the great farms of the midwestern heartland, to a small town in western Minnesota,…

US Governors launch West Coast Ocean Action Plan

West Coast politics are hot. Senator Ted Stevens of the four seas of Alaska (Chukchi, Bering, Beaufort, and the Pacific) was indicted for false statements while the Governators of California, Oregon and Washington launched a historic action plan to address challenging ocean and coastal management issues along the Pacific Coast of the United States. From the Ocean Public mailing list: The action plan released today is the result of three states working side-by-side to identify problems and develop a comprehensive action plan to solve them. It commits three states to collaborate closely with…

Ladies of the Bone-Devouring Worm Prefer Their Boys Tiny and in Harems

These chicas are freaky. But if you lived on a whale vertebrae and eat through bone, perhaps you'd be a little on the kinky side too, right? Osedax, the "bone-devouring" worm is weird. Now, I know long time Deep Sea News readers will be a little used to us talking about odd critters in the ocean, maybe you've come to expect it and are no longer shocked. We have even talked quite a bit about our good friend Osedax. But this is one critter that would infuse the pope with fear and disgust. FIgure 3a from Rouse et al. 2008, whale vertebrae covered in Osedax roseus (arrows). Rouse et al. 2008…

MST3000 - Doc Bushwell Version: Reign of Fire and The Prestige

In anticipation of forking over multiple dead presidents, a healthy kidney and sacrificing a pair of white doves to enter the local googolplex cinema to see 3:10 to Yuma, I indulged in a Christian Bale-o-thon this weekend. Well, OK, two DVDs don't make a "-thon" but it's a little more focused than my typical viewing habits. The two films I watched this past weekend were Reign of Fire and The Prestige. Both qualify as Mystery Science Theatre designates. In fact, Michael Nelson of the real MST 3000 has a Riff on Reign of Fire available for the low, low, LOW price of $2.99! Some of the blurbs…

WWHD

That is the acronym imprinted on the aqua-colored bracelet, a memento which I, along with a number of others, picked up yesterday at the registration table for the Never Give Up Hope 10K held at Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg, MD. The letters represent "What Would Hope Do?" This woman possessed the fiercest tenacity, the most vociferous outrage, the warmest affection, and a marvelous sense of humor. As a follow-up to Kevin's post, here are a few photos and accompanying commentary. At the registration table, we find a portrait of Hope and the basket containing the bracelets.…

Never send in a chimp when a human will do: assays in discovery research

What a day! Between the scintillating launch of the new blogs (really, I am all aquiver) and doing my best to be irksome in my actual day job, I am more than ready to knock back a dry vodka (Grey Goose, preferably) martini at my favored watering hole in Einsteinville. Part of my job is to pass judgment on protein targets gearing up for screening campaigns. "Screening" refers to high throughput screening which is the bread and butter of discovery research in Big Bad Pharma. It's an automated process in which the general idea is to increase that needle in the haystack factor. This is…

Health Care Signs of the Times (Or, Get Your Big Plastic Jug NOW!)

In August I did some writing about health insurance, and in particular about the Pittsburgh shooting victim whose friends and family held a car wash to help raise funds to pay for her medical expenses. Change.org picked up on that post, and Robin Stelly commented on the Change.org post as follows: Every person at birth should be issued a big plastic jug. When people become ill, they should tape their most endearing photos and a brief description of their illnesses to their plastic jugs. Then all they have to do is display the official containers at a local pizza shop - or something…

The Iron As Technological Art Object

Ironing is women's work. And women's work, we know, has nothing to do with engineering or technology. Irons are not technology; they are domestic appliances. Collect a bunch of them, though, and they start looking like technological art objects. Then you can write a book about them. Which is exactly what Jay Raymond has done. For the past 25 years, he's been collecting vintage electric irons. But not just any old electric irons. Raymond had a thing for streamlined irons, whose sleek, curvy designs make them look more like an art object than a domestic appliance. Raymond, it turns out,…

Guns and Dred Scott

I'll agree with Kevin that citing the Dred Scott decision is an odd way to justify anything, let alone the claim that the 2nd Amendment grants an individual right to bear arms. That's an interpretation that is, at best, debatable, and Dred Scott is not considered the high water mark of American jurisprudence. One thing about the decision has me confused. As quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the decision states: "Although Dred Scott is as infamous as it was erroneous in holding that African-Americans are not citizens, this passage expresses the view, albeit in passing, that the Second…

Barack Obama

Via Obsidian Wings, Obama's plan for Iraq: It caps troops in Iraq at their Jan. 10 levels, requires the re-deployment of combat troops out of Iraq starting on May 1 and ending on March 31, 2008 (though "a residual U.S. presence may remain in Iraq for force protection, training of Iraqi security forces, and pursuit of international terrorists"), allows Congress to suspend these deadlines if certain benchmarks have been met, requires Congressional oversight, recommends diplomacy, and "mandates that the President submit a plan to prevent the war in Iraq from becoming a wider regional conflict."…

Sunday Sacrilege: That other thing we don't believe in

Atheists don't believe in God. We deny the Holy Spirit. Jesus was just a man, at best, as were Buddha, Mohammed, and every other prophet and religious figure in history. That much everyone seems to be able to pick up on, but I think there's something even more important that we reject. We don't believe in souls. Now that's a heresy, and should be even more distressing to people than our denial of gods. There is no immortal, constant part of any of us that will survive after death — our minds are the product of a material brain. We are literally soulless machines made of meat, honed by…

I was wondering why I so rarely get any Digg love

I remember seeing sporadic bursts of activity here when Digg, one of the big aggregator sites, would link to something here, but I haven't seen that in a while — but now I learn that there is a fanatically active group of conservative haters at work over there. They call themselves Digg Patriots ("patriots" is one of those words, like "family", that usually get appropriated by people with an extremely narrow view of what it means.) They take advantage of a feature of Digg: in order for an article to get elevated to the front page, where it will get a lot of attention, it has to be voted up;…

Even more critics pan Expelled

They just keep coming. A few hours ago I posted about a lukewarm review of Expelled that appeared on the Variety website, and rottentomatoes.com has pointed me to a few more reviews of the film. A Slant review by Nick Schager skewers the film for the hypocrisy within it; For a film about American freedom of expression and the necessity for open dialogue, it's hard to imagine Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed being more one-sided, narrow-minded, and intellectually dishonest. Co-written by and starring actor and former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, this "documentary" investigation into the…

What Would Darwin Do?

The other day I wrote quite a bit about science popularization (most of it as a result of being aggravated), but one point that I forgot to mention was how Darwin approached the problem of creationism in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Natural theology, especially of the kind popularized by Paley, was a bit of the elephant in the room; even though science was moving towards secularization and had rejected a strict Mosaic account of the formation of the world decades earlier, it was still a touchy subject. What was "the reluctant Mr. Darwin" to do? As is well-known,…

Giraffes on the brain

The evolution of giraffes has been on my mind quite frequently as of late, although it's been difficult tracking down information about the evolution of the group (it was once much more diverse than it is today, a trend also illustrated by elephants and horses). Along the way, though, I've turned up a few interesting papers involving the ever-vexing question of how the long neck of the giraffe evolved, the first being a letter to Nature by Chapman Pincher published in 1949. Criticizing Darwin's hypothesis that giraffes evolved long necks to reach higher levels of vegetation during droughts,…

The Laelaps Movie of the Week: Something is Out There (AKA Day of the Animals)

Most of my nightmares aren't rated PG, but if they involved a crazed and shirtless Leslie Neilson, they would be pretty terrifying indeed. Throw in a few cougars, birds, bears, wolves, a pack of purebred German Shepards, a motley crew of campers, and a mysterious hole in the ozone layer and you've got the 1977 film Something is Out There (also known as Day of the Animals), one of the worst revenge-of-nature films I've ever seen. For some time movie monsters were aliens as mutants produced by exposure to radiation, but during the 1970's there was a shift to "monsters" being normal animals…

Tuesday Night Notes

Things have been pretty busy lately; between schoolwork, my job, and reading I've been booked up over the past few weeks, making my blogging a little less prolific than I'd normally like. Here's a quick rundown of some recent personal news, though, that either didn't fit into anything else I wrote or might provide fodder for upcoming posts. I've been able to rip through three books since the weekend; Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Life in the Triassic, Science Talk, and Discarded Science (expect a review of Science Talk within the next 24 hours). Tonight I picked up The Red Queen, although I'm…

Shakin’ the nuts

Stay tuned for frolicsome hijinks and high hilarity. We have stirred up some kooks. Here are 3 in ascending order of lunacy. That climate fraud, Anthony Watts, has noticed Pepsigate. He's got a unique spin on it: the reason some Sciencebloggers were very upset at the inclusion of an unlabeled infomercial as a blog had nothing to do with the ethics of keeping advertising separate from content — it's because we don't like Pepsi. Then he goes off on a riff about how we're hypocrites because we probably eat Doritos and drink Mountain Dew. Wait. That's not funny. That's just stupid. This one is…

Another look at evaluating teachers

The first thing that I saw was this article from nola.com (The Times-Picayune) "New teacher evaluation method being proposed in Jefferson Parish". Let me summarize this article. Basically, one of the local School Board wants to use a learning tool (Interval Testing) as a teacher evaluation tool. The Interval Testing program gives students spaced out evaluations through out the year to help them (and teachers) assess the preparedness of the students. These are non graded assessments and have been shown to help students. Note - the purpose of the implementation of Interval Testing is to…

Notes from convocation and the LA GRAD Act

We (Southeastern Louisiana University College of Science and Technology - but it should be called Science, Technology and Math) just had our fall convocation. Normally, we would share departmental news (which we did) and introduce new faculty. There are no new faculty and haven't been any new hires for quite some time now. Anyway, there are some things to report. First, no one (not even the Dean) knows what is going to happen. No news is good gnus? The LA Grad Act: This is a Louisiana state thingy that basically says we need to increase graduation rates. Here is the official site for…

Maxima can be useful

The other day I found myself faced with six equations that needed to be solved algebraically. Just so you know, I am a big fan of paper for most of these cases - but this was out of control. I was making silly mistakes and causing all sorts of problems. What to do? My first though was to use some symbolic plugins for python. I tried sympy and it is nice. However, it was not giving correct solutions for solving 3 equations - I don't know if this is a bug or what. Maxima I think I found Maxima through Wikipedia's Computer algebra system page. It's free and free and runs on Mac OS X and…

Review of some iPhone acceleration apps

You see in my experimental determination of the location of the accelerometer in an iPod, I used two different iPhone apps. Let me briefly mention some of the free iPhone apps that give you acceleration data. AccelGraph: This is one of the apps I actually used. What do I like about it? Well, it can record x, y, and z acceleration data and then you can email it to yourself. What could make it better? How about a timed start to record (like start recording in t seconds) and a preset record time. This would allow you to set up your experiment and get your iPod set up before you start. As…

Pumped up over triangles

I meant to mention this earlier since it happened a little while ago. There is this "mini-conference" with three schools: Southeastern Louisiana University, Southern Mississippi University, and the University of South Alabama. The purpose is to give students (and some faculty) a chance to present their work at a smaller conference. I really enjoy this, mostly because it is small and I get to see lots of undergrad talks. There are two talks that stuck in my head. Dr. Jiu Ding "Dynamical Geometry: From Order to Chaos and Sierpinski Pedal Triangles" Jiu Ding is a mathematics professor at…

The Dick Delusion

I've been getting slapped upside the head with this "dick" meme that's roaring through the skeptic community lately, largely because it seems that any time someone makes a generic criticism of rude, abrasive, confrontational critics of foolishness, the audience all thinks of the life-size poster of PZ Myers they've got hanging on their bedroom door back home. It's a little annoying. Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says "Bless you!" after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they're all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don't rock…

The Cat in the Hat comes back and gets small

In the second Cat in the Hat book (I think it is the second one), the Cat reveals that he has more smaller cats under his hat. They are labeled A - Z with Z being so small you can't even see. Question: What is the sequence of sizes for successive cats? How big would Cat Z be? Here is the first picture that Cat reveals Cat A. It is not trivial to measure their relative sizes because they are in different positions. I drew two circles, one around each head and looked at the circle sizes. So, Cat has a head that is 165 px tall and Cat A has a head 61 px tall. Let me call the total length…

Kansas primary update

Phill Kline lost his bid for a full term as Johnson County DA. Having lost his re-election campaign for state AG in 2006, the county's Republican party installed him in the post, despite the fact that he did not carry the county in that statewide election. This move peeved a lot of people, and Kline pledged not to run for a full term. Then time passed and the lying scumsack filed for election. Hopefully now he'll take the hint and do something useful with his time. I'm sure that, given how he's run his campaigns, he'd have no trouble lining up a job mucking out stalls in any of the area'…

PZ fails to read the fine print

In an otherwise correct piece about the disappointing speech Obama gave about "faith-based" initiatives, PZ concludes by writing: End the faith-based initiatives. The government should only be supporting programs that work — at least, in my dreams of an efficient administration, anyway. The problem is, Obama's plan (full version in PDF) states that he will "Hold Recipients Responsible by conducting rigorous performance evaluation, researching what works well and disseminating best practices," and furthermore, groups receiving funds "Must prove their efficacy and be judged based on program…

Before the Internet

I thought this obit was rather fascinating. Not only did I learn about phone phreaks - a subculture I'm ashamed to say I didn't know existed - but Joybubbles sounds like an utterly unique person, truly an n of 1. Joybubbles (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991), a blind genius with perfect pitch who accidentally found he could make free phone calls by whistling tones and went on to play a pivotal role in the 1970s subculture of "phone phreaks," died on Aug. 8 in Minneapolis. He was 58, though he had chosen in 1988 to remain 5 forever, and had the toys and teddy bears to…

Silas Weir Mitchell

Silas Weir Mitchell was a great American neurologist. Unfortunately, he's best known now for pioneering "the rest cure," which became a common treatment for hysteria and other afflictions of the "frail female nervous system". (See, for example, "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.) But Weir Mitchell's most important contribution to neurology came from his diagnosis of phantom limbs, which he called "sensory ghosts". His discovery came during the middle of the Civil War, when he was working as a doctor at Turner's Lane hospital in Philadelphia. The battle of Gettysburg had…

Religion, Secularism and Mystery

Razib has a frighteningly smart post on religion, secularism, Korea, etc., but I thought this excerpt was worth noting: Religion adapts to the world as it is, engaging in dynamic processes of retrofitting. If supernaturalism is the cognitive default in many then the details of the religious narrative are of only proximate importance. But, I also think it is important to note that the decline of organized religion does not imply a concomitant decline in supernaturalistic or non-scientific thinking per se. An equal number of Americans and Europeans believe in reincarnation after all! The…

Investing in Preschool

A new study by economists James Heckman and Dimitriy Masterov argues that investing in the education of young children (pre-K) provides the greatest return on investment. In contrast, trying to educate the brains of adolescents, the economists say, is largely a waste of resources. Here's Joel Waldfogel: The early investment [in education] is needed, the authors argue, to supplement the role of the family. Recent developments in neuroscience have shown that the early years are vital to cognitive development, which in turn is important to subsequent success and productivity in school, life, and…

The Diesel Engine

I'm excited by Nissan's announcement that the next generation Maxima will come up with a cleaner burning diesel engine: Nissan Motor will offer its flagship Maxima sedan with a cleaner-burning diesel engine in the United States by 2010, the company's chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, said on Wednesday, offering new details of a plan intended to resonate with environmentally conscious consumers. Modern diesel technology, already widespread in Europe, is slowly making its way to the United States. The new engines are a far cry from the coughing, stinking diesel engines of the past, and have lower…

The NFL and Mental Illness

It's a shocker: getting hit in the head by enormous men running at high speed is bad for your brain. The NY Times today has a riveting article chronicling the retirement travails of Ted Johnson, a former middle lineback for the Patriots: Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the past five Super Bowls before retiring in 2005. Now, he says, he forgets people's names, misses appointments and, because of an addiction to amphetamines, can become so terrified of the outside world that he locks himself alone inside his Boston apartment in bed with the blinds drawn for days at a…

William James and Biography

There was an excellent review this past Sunday of the new William James biography, by Robert Richardson. The review was written by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. I heartily agree with this passage: James's own philosophical positions were fused with his reactions to the experiences of his life. A deeply divided man who squandered years just trying to decide which profession to pursue, he not only defined "the divided self" as a technical term in psychology, but also wrought out of his own divisions a host of philosophical positions that had as their dominant theme the importance of the…

The Pentagon and Neuroscience

DARPA, the often secretive research unit of the Pentagon devoted to sponsoring "revolutionary, high-payoff research," has recently turned its attention to neuroscience. DARPA is best known for creating the precursor of the internet, and for decades lavished its considerable resources on high-end physics. It should not be surprising that the Defense Department is now interested in the brain. As Sharon Begley recently wrote in the WSJ: Darpa has good reason to fund neuroscience. Discoveries and new technologies such as noninvasive imaging to detect what the mind is doing might help analysts,…

Sleep

As a chronic insomniac, I'm always a little disturbed when I learn about the lingering cognitive effects of a bad night sleep: In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the "recovery" sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night. In a similar study in…

Choking

I've got an article in the Observer Sports Monthly on athletes and choking, which is adapted from my book: We call such failures "choking", if only because a person frayed by pressure might as well not have oxygen. What makes choking so morbidly fascinating is that the performers are incapacitated by their own thoughts. Perry, for example, was so worried about not making a mistake on the 17th that he played a disastrous chip. His mind sabotaged itself. Scientists have begun to uncover the causes of choking, diagnosing the particular mental differences that allow some people to succeed while…

Primal Information

Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong has a great summary of a new paper trying to figure out why information (at least in primates) can be just as rewarding as primal, biological rewards, such as calories and sex. Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka trained two thirsty rhesus monkeys to choose between two targets on a screen with a flick of their eyes; in return, they randomly received either a large drink or a small one after a few seconds. Their choice of target didn't affect which drink they received, but it did affect whether they got prior information about the size of…

Stress and Sadness

Sometimes, the human brain can seem astonishingly ill-equipped for modern life. Our Pleistocene olfactory cortex craves glucose and lipids, which makes us vulnerable to high-fructose corn syrup and Egg McMuffins. We've got an impulsive set of emotions, which makes us think subprime mortgages are a good idea. And so on. If I could only fix one design flaw, however, I'd focus on our stress response. We're stuck with a mind that reacts to the mundane mundane worries of modern life - a falling stock market, a troubled marriage, taking the SAT - with a powerful set of primal chemicals that, once…

AIG and Inequality

I know, I know: everybody is sick of hearing about those AIG bonuses. But bear with me for one more blog post, because I think the swell of populist anger can actually illuminate something interesting about the human response to inequality. Consider the ultimatum game, that simple economic task where one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing. Classical economic theory makes two predictions about the…

Texas Liveblagging

Some dude who cut in line, science prof.: Keep the language unchanged. How many conformists got patents or Nobel Prizes? Key element of college readiness is crit. thinking. Quote Nietzsche, to no clear end. Campbell and Reece disparages anything but evolution. C&R is a college text. Leo: Pseudoscience? Philosophy sucks. DNA analysis has assumptions. Cory Cunningham, 17 year-old HS student. Thanks for molding our young minds. I won't push my religious beliefs, just state them. Help us reason properly. Must consider S&W. Evolutionists play politician, "violating rights of…

Liveblagging the Texas science standards hearings

I'm here in Austin, watching people speak out about the science Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Board questions are in red. Bored comments will be interspersed. As always, as a blogger I don't speak for NCSE, and have been known to work blue. 8:33: First up, Sharon Sparlin, a science playwright, who tells the Board that the folks who wrote the TEKS did a good job, and that they should listen to the good advice they were given. "They made me want to be a student again." 8:34: Kevin Fisher, a member of the science standards writing committee and veteran educator, makes it clear…

Heating up

Shorter John McCain: Barack Obama is the "biggest celebrity in the world, but I don't know "who is the real Barack Obama." John McCain is dishonest and dishonorable, and he is now crossing into truly dangerous territory. In response to McCain's own incitement, his audiences are crossing further and further into violent and eliminationist rhetoric. In response to McCain's leading and dishonest question "Who is the real Barack Obama?," an audience member shouted out "a terrorist." At a Palin rally, the audience responded to Obama's name by calling out "treason," and later called out "Kill…

Do evangelicals feel threatened by secularists?

A paper by Notre Dame's David Campbell (PDF link) finds that evangelicals are more likely to vote for a Republican when they live in a community with more people who do not identify with any religion. Building on a tradition of research in race relations which tests whether integrated communities foster greater social acceptance or stronger separation between groups. Studies in Southern communities in the 1960s had found that white voters were more likely to vote for racially conservative candidates as the fraction of African Americans in the community increased. Whether that trend…

Singing the Body Electric

Over at the Loom, Carl Zimmer reflects on 18th century science, lightning, and the nervous system. The question of when scientists first realized that our nerves used the same stuff as lightning bolts - a completely outlandish idea - has long fascinated me. It's an empirical story in which two great Italian scientists - Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta and Luigi Galvani - engaged in a bitter argument about the interpretation of a classic experiment. Volta was right about the experiment, but Galvani was right about the biology. The story begins in the early 1780's, when…

Where is William James?

It's easy to forget that science and religion weren't always at war in America. Once upon a time (the late 19th century), they managed to co-exist in a romantic synergy. Enlightened theologians tried to integrate Darwin into the Bible, and scientists freely admitted that not every question had a scientific answer. It was an age of agnostics. Books like this (and this, which is a true masterpiece) remind us of what we have lost. Instead of intellectuals like William James, who tried to reconcile experimental psychology with the mystery of conscious experience, or Ralph Waldo Emerson (a lapsed…

Pinker on the Personal Genome

Steven Pinker has a very lucid and engaging summary of personal genomics in the latest Times Magazine. Pinker got his exons sequenced and is optimistic that large-scale genetic testing will soon reveal the snippets of DNA underlying our preferences, predilections and peccadillos: Dopamine is the molecular currency in several brain circuits associated with wanting, getting satisfaction and paying attention. The gene for one kind of dopamine receptor, DRD4, comes in several versions. Some of the variants (like the one I have) have been associated with "approach related" personality traits like…