neurobiology
pharyngula | July 31, 2006The carnivals du jour:
Circus of the Spineless XI
Encephalon #3
Again, this is also an open thread. I got a comment on the last one that more open threads are needed. Is that true? I don't need to go to Atrios-level open-threadery, of course, but if you'd like these a little more often, let me know.
pharyngula | July 26, 2006
People, scientists included, are always looking for simple, comprehensible explanations for complex phenomena. It's so satisfying to be able to easily explain something in a sound bite, and sound bites are so much more easily accepted by an audience than some elaborate, difficult collection of details. For example, we often hear homosexual behavior reduced to being a "choice," the product of a "gay gene," a "sin," or something similarly absolute and irreducible…suggesting that it is part of a diverse spectrum of sexual behaviors with multiple causes and that different individuals are…
pharyngula | July 23, 2006Two more carnivals on this fine Sunday afternoon:
Carnival of the Godless #45
The Synapse #3
You know the drill.
pharyngula | July 11, 2006It's July in Minnesota, and you know what that means: bugs. Clouds of bugs. Some people complain, but I generally rationalize a large population of fecund invertebrates as simply a sign of a healthy ecosystem, so yeah, we've got bugs, but it's good for us.
Except for those mosquitoes. It's hard to think charitably of some invertebrates when you're lying in bed at night and you hear…that…high-pitched whine rising as the nearly invisible little blood-sucker buzzes by your exposed flesh. Now, in a discovery calculated to increase my irritation, I learn that the little bastards are singing a love…
pharyngula | July 9, 2006Today, we have a little something for the neuroscientists, and something for the atheists. Godless neuroscientists are especially fortunate.
The Synapse 1(2)
Carnival of the Godless #44
Carnival of Socialism #6
pharyngula | June 30, 2006Once upon a time, as a young undergraduate, I took a course in neurobiology (which turned out to be rather influential in my life, but that's another story). The professor, Johnny Palka, took pains at the beginning to explain to his class full of pre-meds and other such riff-raff that the course was going to study how the brain works, and that we were going to be looking at invertebrates almost exclusively—and he had to carefully reassure them that flies and squid actually did have brains, very good brains, and that he almost took it as a personal offense when his students implied that they…