There are only a few places on the surface of Earth where you can find really old rocks–and by old, I mean 3.5 billion years old or older. The rest have gotten sucked down into the planet’s interior, cooked, scrambled with other rocks, and pushed back up to the growing margins of continental plates. The few formations that have survived are mere fragments, some the size of a football field, some a house. And generally they’re are mess, shot through with confusion such as intrusions of lava from more recent volcanoes. Paleontologists are drawn and repulsed by these rocks, because they may hold the oldest clues about life on Earth, or lifeless mirages that only look like clues.
My book Soul Made Flesh looks at the roots of neuroscience in the 1600s. The first neurologists saw their work as a religious mission; they recognized that it was with the brain that we made moral judgments. In order to finish the book, I looked for living neuroscientists who carry on those early traditions today. I was soon fascinated by the work of Joshua Greene, a philosopher turned neuroscientist at Princeton. Greene is dissecting the ways in which people decide what is right and wrong. To do so, he poses moral dilemmas to them while he scans their brains. I mentioned Greene briefly in Soul Made Flesh and then went into more detail in a profile I wrote recently. Greene and I will join forces tomorrow on the show “New York and Company” on WNYC tomorrow around 12:30 pm. You can listen to us on the radio or on the web.
John Maynard Smith has died.
No, I didn’t get hit by a car. Instead, I got hit by your typical crush of deadlines, traveling, and a bout of laryngitis. But tranquility is returning, and I’m firing up the blogotron again.
Discover, April 20, 2004
Dinner with a philosopher is never just dinner, even when it’s at an obscure Indian restaurant on a quiet side street in Princeton with a 30-year-old post-doctoral researcher. Joshua Greene is a man who spends his days thinking about right and wrong, and how we separate the two. He has a particular fondness for moral paradoxes, which he collects the way some people collect snow globes.
“Let’s say you’re walking by a pond and there’s a drowning baby,” Greene says, over chicken tikka masala. “If you said, ‘I’ve just paid $200 for these shoes and the water would ruin them, so I won’t save the baby,’ you’d be an awful, horrible person. But there are millions of children around the world in the same situation, where just a little money for medicine or food could save their life. And yet we don’t consider ourselves monsters for having this dinner rather than giving the money to Oxfam. Why is that?”