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.”
After years at a slow burn, the controversy over Terri Schiavo has hit the national news. Schiavo lost consciousness in 1990 after a cardiac arrest, and her husband recently won a lawsuit to have her feeding tube removed, over the objection of her family. Then on Tuesday, Governor Jeb Bush ordered that her tube be reattached, using powers given to him by the Florida legislature the day before.
Continue reading “Consciousness and the Culture Wars, Part 2”
The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish–particularly with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different ways–sucking out eyeballs of other cichlids, scraping algae off of rocks, and so on. What’s strange about all this is that the Great Lakes of East Africa are some of the youngest lakes on Earth. By some estimates, Lake Victoria was a dry lake bed 15,000 years ago. All that diversity has evolved in a very short period of time.
Science is so specialized these days that it’s hard for scientists to look up beyond the very narrow confines of their own work. Biologists who study cartilage don’t have much to say to biologists who study retinas. Astronomers who study globular clusters probably can’t tell you what’s new with planetary disks. But sometimes scientists from different specialties can come together and integrate their work into something truly impressive. A case in point comes from some ongoing research into the evolution of language.