Back in the 1600s, when neurology was born, it wasn’t scientists who were looking at brains. The word scientist didn’t exist. Instead, those visionary folks would have called themselves natural philosophers. As I researched this chapter of scientific history for my book Soul Made Flesh, I was struck by the way philosophers–and philosophical questions–are now making their way back into the scientific study of the brain. Last year in Discover I wrote about the work of the philosopher/neuroscientistJoshua Greene, who studies how we make moral judgments. But it turns out that neuroscientists are tackling an even deeper philosophical question: what is the self? They may not have the whole answer, but they’ve found some very interesting pieces of it. I’ve written an article on the neurobiology of the self, which appears in the November issue of Scientific American.
The science writer/blogging panel I was on over the weekend is now available on Contentious.
Forbes, October 24, 2005
Humans may be the great communicators of the natural world, but we’re hardly the only ones. Plenty of animals trade signals with one another–calls to love, calls to war. Flowers even woo bees with scents and colors, while bacteria can decide when enough of them have gathered in our guts to start making us sick. Looking at these simpler communication systems is offering scientists some clues to how our own gifts of language evolved. And so it should be no surprise that they’ve focused much of their efforts on our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. Primatologists have spent years observing them, either in African forests or at zoos. And they’ve seen and heard a lot. Chimpanzees hoot, blow Bronx cheers, wave sticks, clap their hands and drum on trees. The tough part comes in figuring out what all the ruckus means.
Tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk in Westport, Connecticut, based in part on my new book on human origins. I’ll be talking about Hobbits, natural selection in our own time, and more (accompanied by visuals). The talk is part of the Westport Library’s excellent lecture series. It will be at 7:30 and is free. Hope to see some readers of the Loom there.
You may have heard about a petition that was being signed by scientists earlier this month against the teaching of intelligent design. The inspiration came from another petition drafted by the Discovery Institute opposing evolution. It garnered 400 signatures of scientists in four years. R. Joe Brandon, an archaeologist, decided to see how many signatures he could get from scientists in just four days by spreading the word from hisweb site.