The Valley of the Teenagers: My new brain column for Discover

Posted on March 25, 2011August 19, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

When you’re a teenager, it seems like nobody understands you. And once you’re finished being a teenager and get to observe them as an adult, you have to wonder what on Earth is going through their heads. In my new column for Discover, I gingerly step into the teenage mind, exploring what neuroscientists are learning about how their brains work. Teenagers may do things that seem crazy and/or stupid, but that doesn’t mean they themselves are crazy or stupid. The teen years turn out to be a unique phase of mental life, when we tally up the rewards and costs of our choices with a kind of math that you won’t find in the heads of children or grownups.Check it out.

The Trouble With Teens

Posted on March 24, 2011May 17, 2020 by admin

Discover, March 24, 2011

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Teenagers are a puzzle, and not just to their parents. When kids pass from childhood to adolescence their mortality rate doubles, despite the fact that teenagers are stronger and faster than children as well as more resistant to disease. Parents and scientists alike abound with explanations. It is tempting to put it down to plain stupidity: Teenagers have not yet learned how to make good choices. But that is simply not true. Psychologists have found that teenagers are about as adept as adults at recognizing the risks of dangerous behavior. Something else is at work.

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Inclusive Fitness: Return to the Wrestling Ring

Posted on March 23, 2011August 19, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Last summer I wrote in the New York Times about a controversy over one of the most influential concepts in the recent history of evolutionary biology. Known as inclusive fitness, it basically says that helping relatives can be a good way to pass on your genes, because they’ve got your genes too.

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Evolvability: My story in today’s NY Times

Posted on March 21, 2011August 19, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Today I’ve got a story about some new research into evolvability–the potential to reach new adaptations. Scientists have explored the possibility of evolvability for some time now, but mostly through analyzing mathematical equations. Now a new study offers a fine-grained picture of evolvability in action.Richard Lenski of Michigan State and his colleagues have watch evolvability help one line of bacteria beat out another one. It’s a Darwinian story of the tortoise and the hare. Check it out.

(For more on evolvability, check out this review by Massimo Pigliucci [pdf])

[Image: Wikipedia]

Tortoise and Hare, in a Laboratory Flask

Posted on March 21, 2011May 28, 2020 by Lori Jia

The New York Times, March 21, 2011

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Ever since Darwin, biologists have recognized that life evolves. But in the past 25 years, some researchers have argued that certain organisms are better at evolving than others. Their genomes have a flexibility that lets them adapt effectively. The less evolvable species, by contrast, are too rigid to take advantage of new mutations or to find new solutions for survival.

Many biologists agree that evolvability makes sense in theory. But finding evidence of it in the natural world has proved difficult.

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