race
gregladen | February 16, 2009So Amanda and I arrive at some public building in a largish Midwestern city. I'm a scientist, here to sit on a panel for a public discussion related to science and education. The building, a library, is not open yet but is scheduled to open in a few minutes. There are two groups of people standing in the flurries and chilly wind waiting for opening. The larger group is pressed against the door, seemingly anxious, and I (incorrectly, it turns out) attribute this anxiety to the cold. I'm thinking they want to go inside because it is cold. All but two people in this group are brown to dark…
dgmacarthur | February 16, 2009Just in case anyone has missed it, the pair of duelling essays in the latest issue of Nature is well worth a read. The topic is whether there is any justification for scientific exploration of associations between gender or race and intelligence; Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams from Cornell argue the affirmative, while Steven Rose takes up the opposing case.
The debate continues as a lively discussion on Nature Network, which contains many thoughtful comments from both sides.
I find it pretty hard to stomach the notion that any field of scientific enquiry should be completely off the table…
edyong | January 23, 2009It's been a big week. With a simple words, Barack Obama became the first black President of a country whose history has been so haunted by the spectre of racial prejudice. His election and inauguration are undoubtedly proud moments but they must not breed complacency. Things may be changing outwardly, but problems remain.
For a start, it goes without saying that many people, even the most liberal and left-wing among us, still harbour unconscious prejudices against members of other races. These "implicit biases" may be hidden, but their effects are often not. For example, a study published…
edyong | January 8, 2009Picture the scene - you sit in a room with two other people, one white and one black, waiting for a psychological test. As the black person leaves to use their mobile phone, they bump the knee of the white person on their way out. While they're gone, the white person turns to you and says, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that." How would you feel? Would you be shocked? Angry? Indifferent? And would you want to work with that person later?
This was the scenario that Kerry Kawakami from York University used to try and understand the state of race relations in 21st century America.…
edyong | December 8, 2008We tend to think of race as a fixed part of our identity, a trait that is set at the moment of conception and stays unchanged for our entire lives. But a new study shows just how fluid our conceptions of race can be.
By following a group of people over almost two decades, Andrew Penner and Aliya Saperstein from the University of California, Irvine found that the way people identify themselves racially, and the way others define them, change over time and are coloured by social status. Their study strongly argues that race is as much a flexible indicator of our social standing as it is a…
edyong | August 19, 2008When you look at someone's face, what part do you concentrate on? Common wisdom has it that the eyes are the focal point of the face and they are the features that draw attention first. But according to a new study, that may not be universally true - while Western cultures do fixate on the eyes, East Asians tend to focus on the nose.
We owe a lot of our knowledge about the way we look at images to a Russian psychologist Alfred Yarbus. He was the first scientist to carefully record the subtle eye movements that people make when they take in a view. Yarbus's experiments showed that our gaze…
zooillogix | March 27, 2008We have brought you the outstanding time lapse photography of Mochimochi Land in the past, but these new works are breathtaking.
No-holds-barred snail on slug rumpus!
"The Great Foot Race!"
Friends below the fold
Reversible chicken and egg. If only life were so easy.
"Beware the Ninjabun...He's covert, sneaky, and hungry!"
"The world's fattest butterfly thinks it might be time for a diet. The flowers agree."
purepedantry | October 22, 2007James Watson, Nobel Laureate and member of the Watson-Crick duo that discovered DNA, has been suspended from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after some comments about race and genetics:
James Watson, in London to promote a new book, was forced to return to New York after Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, relieved him of his duties because of his apparent views. It follows a hellish week for the 79-year-old geneticist who helped to unravel the structure of DNA more than 50 years ago.
After being quoted in The Sunday Times saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of…
zooillogix | April 10, 2007Leatherback sea turtles are almost 100 million years old but their rapid decline in population has led researchers to believe that they may be extinct in as few as 10. In an effort to learn more about these rare animals and bring attention to the cause, scientists outfitted 14 leatherbacks with satellite tags this past February as they lay their eggs on a beach in Costa Rica. On April 16th, the eleven turtle race begins as the leatherbacks head back to their Galapagos feeding grounds. Sponsor your favorite turtle and track its progress on the internet. Known for their fiercely competitive…
purepedantry | December 5, 2006In light of the incidents with Michael Richards and Mel Gibson, Malcolm Gladwell posits some criterion by which we could judge the severity of racism:
1. Content. What is said clearly makes a difference. I think, for example, that hate speech is more hateful the more specific it is. To call someone a nigger is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites. To make a targetted claim is worse than calling a name. Similarly, I think it matters how much a stereotype deviates from a legitimate generalization. For instance, (and this is, admittedly, not a great…