Culture
razib | March 18, 2007If there is one thing that casts a pall over the rise of genomic technology and its applications, it is the eugenics movement. This article highlights a new exhibit which surveys the historical development of this movement. Of course we all know about the abominations of the Nazi regime, but eugenics was a mainstream movement at one point. Consider:
For over 40 years, young socially marginalised working class women in Sweden faced the danger of forced sterilisation. This was carried out under laws intended to purify the Swedish race, prevent the mentally ill from reproducing and stamp out…
cortex | March 14, 2007Chris Shays (R-CT) has introduced an important piece of legislation. It's called The Farm Animal Stewardship Purchasing Act, and it would set basic humanitarian standards for any farm trying to sell meat to the federal government.
Humane treatment would be defined as:
Adequate shelter that allows animals to stand up, lie down and extend their limbs without touching any part of their enclosure. Daily access to food and water sufficient to maintain the animal's health. Adequate veterinary care, including prompt treatment of injuries or euthanasia for a sick or injured animal.
These modest…
cortex | March 14, 2007Here are some choice quotes from Will Wright's recent speech at SXSW. Is it odd that one of the most insightful thinkers in our culture designs computer games?
[When designing a game], we're trying to generate the largest rulespace in a game. This is the opposite of science, where we try to find simple rules to describe all this data. There's this topological difference...
So in some sense the entire planet is a toy. One of the really nice things with a toy like this is you can give people long term dynamics over short term sense. It's so hard for us to think over the long term, longer than…
cortex | March 14, 2007What's the biggest philosophical difference between neuroscientists and physicists?* I think neuroscientists are more averse to discussions of mystery and the limits of knowledge. They've spent so much time convincing the public that there is no soul - the ghost is just a side-effect of our vibrating machinery - that they are unwilling to let some immaterial presence back in.
Physicists, on the other hand, strike me as much more willing to confess their ignorance. Perhaps this epistemic modesty is just a result of time: physics is a much older field than neuroscience. Perhaps it's just a…
cortex | March 13, 2007I'm pleased with my generation:
Young Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage. Given that 18- to 25-year-olds are the le ast Republican generation (35 percent) and less religious than their elders (with 20 percent of them professing no religion or atheism or agnosticism), it is curious that on abortion they are slightly to the right of the general public. Roughly a third of Gen Nexters endorse making abortion generally available, half support limits and 15 percent favor an outright ban. By contrast, 35 percent of 50- to 64-year-…
cortex | March 13, 2007Experiments like this demonstrate why Puritanism is so psychologically unrealistic:
A paper in The Journal of Consumer Research looks at the effects of self-restraint on subsequent impulse purchases.
In one experiment, college students spent a few minutes free-associating and writing down their thoughts, under instructions not to think of a white bear. Given $10 afterward to save or spend on a small assortment of products, they spent much more money than students who had free-associated without having to avoid thoughts of bears.
This isn't the first time people have explored the impact of…
cortex | March 12, 2007Now that the NCAA basketball tournament brackets have been announced, it's worth reminding ourselves not to bet too much money on our (overconfident) predictions. Why not? Because the tournament is impossible to predict. That, at least, was the conclusion of a 2001 paper by the economists Edward Kaplan and Stanley Garstka. They mined every statistical tool they could think of in an attempt to crack the office pool. They searched for secret algorithms in past NCAA tournaments, and used Markov models to see if regular season performance affected post-season performance. They ran endless…
cortex | March 8, 2007
Somehow, magnification makes the grossness disappear. The insect almost looks like a religious icon, an angel nailed to a cross. See more entomological splatterings here.
cortex | March 8, 2007Everybody wants to cure cancer and pioneer gene therapy. This sort of scientific discovery, especially when the discovery could have profound consequences, is a worthy ambition. But does this ambition distract us from less appealing but even more important endeavors? Does searching for the miracle cure come at a cost?
Atul Gawande, in his new book Better, argues that medical research should search for low-tech improvements (like making doctors more diligent about hand-washing) with the same zeal it lavishes on potential drugs and surgical techniques. He uses the treatment of cystic fibrosis…
cortex | March 7, 2007I'm a junkie for medical stories. You give me a good narrative description of a mysterious set of symptoms, and I'm hooked. If you share my obsession with patient histories and diagnostic case-studies, then I highly recommend Complications, by Atul Gawande (2003). It's easily the best medical book I've ever read. Gawande writes with the clarity of Chekhov (another writerly doctor) and the analytical rigor of Bertrand Russell. He simultaneously humanizes surgeons - they also make mistakes - while leaving you in awe of their talents. (What kind of person can hold a heart in their hands?) The…
cortex | March 7, 2007This is getting ridiculous:
Matthew Reich is a baker dedicated to natural ingredients. He prefers butter in the cookies and brioche he turns out at Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City, Queens, and like many professional cooks he applauds the public health effort to get artificial trans fat out of food.
But, in a twist of science, the law and what some call trans-fat hysteria, Mr. Reich and other wholesale bakers are being forced to substitute processed fats like palm oil and margarine for good old-fashioned butter because of the small amounts of natural trans fat butter contains.
Some…
ksharpe | March 6, 2007"When I was in high school, I remember friends who were jealous that my parents knew math and science," writes Janet Stemwedel of ScienceBlogs' Adventures in Ethics and Science, over at the current issue of the Science Creative Quarterly,
since obviously that meant I could ask them for help with my homework. What my friends didn't know was that my parents treated the most straightforward question as an invitation to a freewheeling Socratic dialogue of no less than 30 minutes. While I would have been happy just to finish my assignment with time to watch some TV, my parents wanted me to…
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…
razib | March 4, 2007Over at my other blog I have a long post where I comment on the recent piece in The New York Times which highlights the debate around the evolutionary origins of religion.
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…
sb admin | March 1, 2007Check this out: National ID Card Regulations Issued (27B Stroke 6 Blog, via BoingBoing).
Would somebody please remind me again when it will no longer be considered unhinged paranoid raving to sound the alarm that the US is rapidly degenerating into an authoritarian police state, and that we'd all better become very worried very fast or be prepared to sacrifice most of the freedoms we hold dear?
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, 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-…