As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I’ve often had people say to me, “I just can’t believe that evolved.” Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature–the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of birds in flight. The implication was that these things were so beautiful and intricate that they had to be created for a purpose–a beautiful purpose, obviously.
Discover, September 30, 2003
James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA’s double helix, thinks the world would be a better place if there were fewer stupid people. “If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease,” Watson said on the documentary DNA, which aired in Britain in March. “The lower 10 percent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 percent.”
Over the past couple weeks an unplanned experiment has taken place that shows what sort of science makes it into the popular consciousness and what doesn’t. In the past couple weeks we’ve had three pieces of research on the same evolutionary puzzle in the same high-profile journal (Nature). One was all over the place–I’ll just link the USA Today article as one example. The other two vanished with barely a peep.
The New York Times, September 28, 2003
Daniel Rios is 24 years old, with wavy black hair, a thick mustache and a glassy stare that seems to look both at you and through you. One day almost four years ago, while he was taking a shower, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain, and he collapsed on the bathroom floor. After emergency surgery, he lay in a coma for three weeks. When he finally opened his eyes, he could not speak or move his body; his head simply lolled. In the months that followed, the doctors monitoring him at the Center for Head Injuries at the J.F.K. Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., saw few signs that he had any meaningful mental life.
Continue reading “What if There Is Something Going On in There”
I wrote an article for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. Stories like this one are always hard, because there are so many crucial dimensions to the subject and so little room to do justice to them all. For example, I couldn’t even begin to explain how the research I describe in the article–using PET and MRI scans to measure the brain activity in people with traumatic brain injuries–is a beautiful reverse twist on some of the most famous research ever done on the brain: the nineteenth century doctor Pierre Paul Broca’s discovery of a region of the brain dedicated to speech.