The New York Times has launched a series called Profiles in Science. When I was invited to join the undertaking, I proposed writing about the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. I had run into Pinker at the World Science Festival in June, and he had told me about his next book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which was due out in the fall. In the 800+ page tome, Pinker argues that rates of human violence have been crashing for millennia, and he offers psychological explanations for the fall.
1. Science Ink excerpt: The Observer (The Guardian’s sister Sunday magazine) has put together a lovely excerpt from Science Ink. Along with a selection of images, they’ve adapted part of the introductory essay I wrote for the book. Here’s a snippet:
Continue reading “The Observer gets inked (+ more #scienceink news)”
The New York Times, November 28, 2011
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.
Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”
At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ”
We know that our species is unique, but it can be surprisingly hard to pinpoint what exactly makes us so. The fact that we have DNA is not much of a mark of distinction. Several million other species have it too. Hair sets us apart from plants and mushrooms and reptiles, but several thousand other mammals are hairy, too. Walking upright is certainly unusual, but it doesn’t sever us from the animal kingdom. Birds can walk on two legs, after all, and their dinosaur ancestors were walking bipedally 200 million years ago. Our own bipedalism–like much of the rest of our biology–has deep roots. Chimpanzees, whose ancestors diverged from our own some seven million years ago, can walk upright, at least for short distances.
Zsuzsa Megyery writes,
I’m a student at MIT in the Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Science Department hoping to solve the glacially-coupled climate problem of global warming by developing efficient carbon sequestration technology. In honor of our beautiful mother Earth, and as a constant reminder of the places I can go under my own human power, I had the world map, minus Antarctica, tattooed on the tops of my feet in a Mercator projection.
It is deeply personal to me–I am Hungarian, with the European continent on one foot–but grew up in the US–so the Western half is on the other side. I have a minimal carbon footprint on our mother Earth, cycling as much as possible for transportation and even hoping to circum-paddle Antarctica some day.
You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Originally published November 21, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.