Last week a region of the brain called the insula was in the news. As I described in my post, scientists found that physical pain and social rejection both activate the insula in much the same way. The insula returns now for a disgusting encore that gives a glimpse at how we get inside other people’s heads.
Books have been bubbling up from the comments cauldron. Jim Harrison has asked what I think of Simon Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution. Web Webstersays Cosmos was his first favorite science book and asks for suggestions. Humboldt and Feyerband make an appearance too. It’s ironic that two forms of reading that are competing furiously these days for my free time–books and blogs–meet at this crossroads.
Evolution is nature’s great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It’s possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab. The genetic molecule RNA, for example, can evolve into shapes that allow it to do things no one ever expected RNA to do, like join together amino acids. Over millions of years, evolution can solve far bigger problems. How can a mammal became an efficient swimmer? How can a bug fly?
Loyal denizens of the blogosphere will forgive me if I begin this post by sketching out the details of the recent Gregg Easterbrook affair for those who haven’t kept up with the details. Easterbook, a senior editor at the New Republic, started up a blog recently where he cranked out postings at a feverish pace about all sorts of stuff ranging from politics to religion to science. Recently, he questioned the conscience of Jewish movie executives who allowed Quentin Tarantino’s movie, Kill Bill, to be made. A furor ensued, and Easterbrook lost his column with ESPN Magazine (owned by Disney, the same company that produced Kill Bill). Easterbrook apologized for mangling his words.
When Charles Darwin was thrashing out his theory of evolution, he would doodle sometimes in his notebooks. To explain how new species came into existence, he wrote down letters on a page and then connected them with branches. In the process, he created a simple tree. Across the top of the page, he wrote, “I think.”