Category: Science

“Looking Inside the Brains of the Stingy” is an account of the new field of neuroeconomics: the “science” of using brain scans (MRI) to see what sort of neural activity is correlated with economic decisions. (Via McKenzie Wark on nettime). Neural stimulation and hormone levels are supposed to ‘explain’ why people do not always act in accordance with the dictates of “rational choice” economics. “Neuroscientists do experiments like looking at which parts of the brain are active when someone looks at photographs and decides which faces are trustworthy.” Researchers pursuing this line of examination have found, for instance, that trying to make a financial deal with somebody who is perceived as a cheapskate “stimulates the part of the brain associated with disgust.” When people act generously, on the other hand, levels of oxytocin (the feel-good hormone) in the blood seem to go up. What startling discoveries! This kind of survey is almost the perfect reductio ad absurdum of the cognitive/rationalist worldview, or of what Edward O. Wilson calls consilience: the attempt to give scientific rigor to the ‘soft’ disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. I doubt that the most inventive satirist could come up with anything better.

John Brockman’s latest broadside rephrases the argument for a scientific culture that replaces what have traditionally been called the humanities, outdated in an age of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. Sigh. Here we go again…
Continue reading “More on the Science Wars”

Malcolm Gladwell’s book _The Tipping Point_ is in many ways popular science writing at its best. The book is lucid and intelligent, and it gives concrete examples for its arguments–without being condescendingly simple-minded about those examples in the ways popular science books often are. The subject matter of the book is both fascinating and important: how the logic of epidemic contagion applies to social phenomena, often causing things to develop in ways that are nonlinear, and hence deeply counterintuitive. All in all, a worthwhile read. And yet I find myself having complex reservations about the arguments of The Tipping Point— though my problems are less with Gladwell himself, than with (I guess) the zeitgeist…
Continue reading “The Tipping Point”

Steven Pinker has a curious op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. The ostensible subject of the column is what evolutionary psychology and cognitive science can contribute to educating children. But the article is mostly an oblique polemic against neuroscience, on the one hand, and the humanities in general, on the other….
Continue reading “Pinker’s Agenda”

The controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq explains why he wants to be cloned. He just can’t help it, he says; like most people, he just blindly wants to perpetuate himself. “Such feelings leave no space for freedom and individuality, they aim for nothing but eternal, idiotic repetition”; and yet these feelings “are shared by almost all mankind, and even by the majority of the animal kingdom; they are nothing but the living memory of an overwhelming biological instinct.” As always, Houellebecq’s insights are quite bracing…
Continue reading “Michel Houellebecq Wants To Be Cloned”

Researchers in the UK claim to have discovered that the use of birth control pills “changes women’s taste in men”. (Via Metafilter, where most of the posters rightly pooh-poohed it). This research is worse than worthless in so many ways…
Continue reading “Another Inane Bit of Pseudo-Research”

New scientific research reveals that a cloned animal, in this case a cat, is not identical to the original organism with the same genes. (Via Metafilter). This shouldn’t be a surprise, given that “identical twins” don’t have identical personalities; but it is noteworthy, just because the superstition that clones are necessarily identical to their originals seems to have such wide currency in the popular imagination nowadays. As can be seen both from the Raelians’ claim that they have produced clones–which in their belief system is a way of attaining immortality–and from the horrified public reaction, objecting to the very possibility of cloning.

Donna Haraway is right. “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” Consider how scientists have recently reprogrammed bacteria to use a new amino acid. That is to say, they have not only introduced a 21st amino acid into the bacterium’s environment–in addition to the naturally existing twenty–but also reprogrammed the bacteria’s DNA to code for this new amino acid, so that the organism has genetic instructions for adding the acid to its proteins….
Continue reading “Rewriting the Code of Life”