I’ll be talking about evolution on Tuesday at 12 pm PST/3 pm EST with Alan Stahler on KVMR in California. You can listen to the live webcast here.
Category: Blog
It’s too early yet for reviews of Soul Made Flesh to start rolling in (it pubs in January 2004), so I’m still in an anxious state. But this is promising: The Daily Telegraph in London asked several leading writers to name the favorite book they read in 2003. Yesterday it printed the results. Steven Pinker chose Soul Made Flesh.
The glow of a beetle has inspired an elegant bit of evolutionary detective work that appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Americans like myself are familiar with fireflies, but in the tropics the night is also illuminated by beetles. When Darwin came to Brazil on the Beagle, he amused himself by noting how the beetles were “rendered more brilliant by irritation.” Naturalists have gotten a bit more sophisticated at studying beetles since then. They now know that the male beetles use the light organs on their underside to get the attention of females that are sitting in the trees and bushes; when the female sees a glow she likes, she registers her approval by flashing light organs on her back. (Fireflies do the same thing, but while they flash, the beetles give off a steady glow.) Scientists also know how the glow is made–a gene creates a protein called luciferase, which cuts up another protein called luciferin, releasing photons at a distinctive frequency. Depending on the species, the frequency is different.
Texas may be off the hook for now, but Razib at Gene Expression observesthat some medical students at the University of Oslo are lobbying for anti-evolution lectures. I guess I’ll try not to be in Norway if I need antibiotics.
For everyone interested in how their brain works, I’d suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans of mental activity, such as fMRI or PET, are basically complex graphs that represent the relationships of data gathered in very narrowly defined experiments and which are then statistically massaged with special-purpose software. But for most of us non-scientists (and even some scientists) it’s easy to look at these images as objective snapshots of thought. As Dumit points out, it is even easier for us to impose what we want to believe about human nature on those pictures, getting a comforting feeling of certainty from our misconceptions about how neuroimaging really works.
Continue reading “This Is Your Brain On Racism. Or Is That Liberal Guilt? “