Two years ago I noted that George Orwell had started a blog. Or, rather, Orwell’s diaries began to be posted, day by day, online. I liked the idea at first, but after a while I drifted away. The initial entries came from a relatively quiet time in Orwell’s life, dealing with stuff like how many eggs he got from his chickens on a given day.

But there’s nothing like a war to make life all too interesting:

It is impossible even yet to decide what to do in the case of German conquest of England. The one thing I will not do is to clear out, at any rate not further than Ireland, supposing that to be feasible. If the fleet is intact and it appears that the war is to be continued from America and the Dominions, then one must remain alive if possible, if necessary in the concentration camp. If the U.S.A is going to submit to conquest as well, there is nothing for it but to die fighting, but one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing somebody else first.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Originally published June 17, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at epigenetics and the brain. Along with the genetic circuitry in the DNA of our brain cells, we also have an additional layer of molecules that can switch genes on and off. A lot of this so-called epigenome gets locked into place when our brains are first developing, but it still remains malleable throughout our lives. Our environment can rework our epigenome, and some studies suggest that this reworking may produce long-term changes in personality. Even mental conditions like depression may be partly epigenetic. And if we can figure out how conditions like depression alter the epigenome, we may be able to re-alter it to counter those disorders.

For some reason, epigenetics is getting burdened with a lot of sensationalist quasi-mysticism these days. Epigenetics does not overturn everything we ever knew about everything. But it’s possible for something to be woo-free and cool at the same time, as I hope my column makes clear. Check it out.

[Image: U.S. Army Center of Military History]

Originally published June 17, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Uta Frith, a world expert on autism, has listed Soul Made Flesh as one of her favorite books about the mind over at the web site Five Books:

I admire communicators who tell you about complex matters, which you would otherwise have little hope of learning about. I write scientific books so I understand how difficult it is. This book is a book about science and at the same time a book about history, and I love reading about the history of science. Here he writes about the beginnings of the Royal Society in the 17th century.

Thomas Willis is the main hero of the book. He was a doctor who began studying the brain itself in the turbulent time of the Civil War. Christopher Wren, famed for building St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London, did some beautiful anatomically accurate drawings of the brain, which was interesting to find out about. And you have the astonishing idea that the brain produces the mind — and in Zimmer’s words, the soul is made flesh — which even today many people find hard to accept.

What I like about this book is that it is not just about the early history of how people came to study the brain, but it is also about recent brain science, where scanners are used to watch what happens in the brain while it is thinking. One of the ideas he tells about is some research I myself was involved with, the brain’s “Theory of Mind”. It is a strange concept, which is historically linked with autism. This is the idea that one of the fundamental problems in autism is an inability to understand that other people have minds that explain and predict their behaviour. And I find Zimmer’s account very interesting. We need to find out how the mind can go wrong in such a way that autism results and what it is that stops the ability to socially interact and communicate.

Check out her other four picks here.

Originally published June 16, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

In honor of the tenth anniversary of the human genome project, here are a couple telling images, courtesy of Mihaela Pertea and Steven L Salzberg.

First: a visual history of the estimates of the number of genes in the human genome.
And second, a warning to anyone who believes in an iron law that the more protein-coding genes in a species, the more sophisticated/complex/cool/human that species is: I for one welcome our grapey overlords.

[Update: Biochemist Larry Moran takes issue with the very high numbers for early gene number estimates. Steven Salzberg defends the graph. Read it all here!]

Originally published June 15, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.