Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye–number of legs, color of hair, live young or eggs. Or they can paint a creature at the cellular level–the twist and turns of collagen fibers in a horse hoof or the poison-producing organelles of a rattlesnake. In the past few years a new kind of portrait has been hung in the biological museum: a portrait of the genome. In the thousands or millions of DNA base pairs, genomes can reveal secrets not only about an organism’s natural history, but its ancient history as well.
There’s been a fair amount of press about a new paper in Science that shows how the brain responds to social rejection. The kicker is that a region of the brain known as the insula becomes active. As I mentioned yesterday, that’s the same area that responds to pain and physical distress. It’s an interesting paper with historical dimensions that are missing from the news reports–historical in both the human and evolutionary sense. There’s a lot of back-story behind the word “heartache.”
One reason that I’m so riveted by neuroscience is the way it can blow the lid off of philosophical conundrums that have dogged Western thought for centuries. Case in point: in a recent study, scientists at Dartmouth asked subjects about something that was on their mind–an exam, a girlfriend, and so on. Then, while scanning their brains with an MRI machine, they told their subjects NOT to think about that thing.
Thanks again for the comments on my previous two posts about eugenics. As a novice blogger, I was surprised by their focus. I expected comments about the past–the historical significance of the eugenics movement–but instead the future dominated, with assorted speculations about the possible futures that genetic engineering could bring to our species. By coincidence, I’ve been thinking about the future as well, but from a different angle, thanks to a pair of papers in press at Trends In Ecology and Evolution. Instead of introduced genes, they’re interested in introduced species.
It’s never pretty to see journalism transformed into propaganda, especially when you’re the one who wrote the journalism. I recently did an article for the New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. The National Right to Life web site then posted a long “News & Views” piece by one Dave Andrusko that pretended to recount my article. It was annoying enough to see careless mistakes–adding quotation marks to a passage from the article, so as to put it into the mouth of a doctor, for example. But it was really unpleasant to see my article distorted to serve a political purpose.