For everyone interested in how their brain works, I’d suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans of mental activity, such as fMRI or PET, are basically complex graphs that represent the relationships of data gathered in very narrowly defined experiments and which are then statistically massaged with special-purpose software. But for most of us non-scientists (and even some scientists) it’s easy to look at these images as objective snapshots of thought. As Dumit points out, it is even easier for us to impose what we want to believe about human nature on those pictures, getting a comforting feeling of certainty from our misconceptions about how neuroimaging really works.

Continue reading “This Is Your Brain On Racism. Or Is That Liberal Guilt? “ →

Over the past couple years, a few pounds of rock from Australia have been the subject of a fierce scientific battle between geologists and paleontologists. Some paleontologists have claimed that microscopic marks in the 3.5 billion year old rocks are the oldest fossils of life yet found. Some geologists have recently argued that the marks are just odd mineral formations that could have been created without the help of life. Today in Science, the geologists have struck again. A team from Spain and Australia mixed up some silica, carbonate, barium, and other compounds that can be found in the Australian rocks. With a little lab cooking (which they argue is akin to how the rocks formed) they were able to create little lumpy chains. When UCLA’s William Schopf discovered similar little lumpy chains in 1993, he declared that he had found fossils of cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae). Not only did the chains look like living chains of cyanobacteria, but Schopf also found organic carbon around them. The geologists who published the Science paper today point out that non-living processes can create “organic” carbon too, and when they added this carbon to their recipe, they found that they could readily coat their pseudofossils as well.

Continue reading “Microbe or Mineral?” →

The case of Terri Schiavo has moved back into the Bleak House realm of endless trips to the courthouse. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Schiavo lost consciousness thirteen years ago, and her husband has been trying for the past few years to have her feeding tube removed over the objections of her parents. The Florida legislature recently passed a law that gave Governor Jeb Bush the authority to order Schiavo’s tube put back in, and now her husband is going to court to challenge the constitutionality of the law.

Continue reading “Suffering and Knowing” →

In February I wrote an article in Science about what Craig Venter’s up to these days. In the late 1990s Venter made his mark by challenging the government human genome project to a race, promising to beat them to the full sequence for a fraction of their budget. Ultimately the race was a tie, and before too long Venter had been shown the door from his company. (I highly recommend James Shreeve’s upcoming The Genome War for all the grisly details.) But he had also been working with the genomes of other organisms–particularly microbes–for years, and he went back to his first love. Not surprisingly, he was soon making headlines again, by setting out to build a microbial genome from scratch. His goal is to be able to tailor-make microbes for various applications, like providing clean energy or consuming carbon dioxide or other unwanted substances.

Continue reading “Venter’s Virus” →

Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution?

Continue reading “Recoil from Dollo’s Law” →