Denyse O'Leary

David L. Chandler asks, Are we all Martians? According to many planetary scientists, it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.- “Are you a Martian? We all could be, scientists say — and new instrument might provide proof” (Physorg March 23, 2011) The article provides a useful summary of the state of the evidence, capped by Christopher McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA-Ames Research Center in California who specializes in research related to the possibility of life on Mars, says this work is “very interesting and important.” He says, Read More ›

In “Supplemental or detrimental?: Journals debate the value of supplemental materials”, Michele Solis reports at The Scientist (24th February 2011) on the problem material supplemental to journal publications, available only online, materials publication creates for peer review, and the bold step Journal of Neuroscience and several other journals have taken by just abolishing it: Editor-in-chief John Maunsell argued in an editorial that the escalating amount of supplemental materials had begun to devalue the peer review process.[ … ] “More data, in and of itself, is always a good thing — if there aren’t adverse effects,” said Maunsell, who is also a neuroscientist at Harvard University. But peer review was becoming less effective because many reviewers failed to evaluate the supplemental Read More ›

It is your fault.

In “The Brain Is Not an Explanation,” Wray Herbert (Psychological Science March 23, 2011) tries to bring some rationality to the interpretation of brain science here:

Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked. This headline appeared in The Guardian a couple years ago above a science story that began: “Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain.” The story went on to describe a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of chocoholics and non-cravers. The study found increased activity in the pleasure centers of the chocoholics’ brains, and the Guardian report concluded: “There may be some truth in calling the love of chocolate an addiction in some people.”

Sure, that’s it. It’s not my fault, it’s Russell Stover’s. As it happens, however, Read More ›

A friend writes about this BoingBoing from a member of a four-generation family of secular humanists (originally, an address to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010), asking for comments. See what you think, but this jumps out at me:

There’s a quote I love: “Evil is a little man afraid for his job.” I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.

That’s another classic in not-true catchy slogans. Idi Amin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin … were hardly little men and were not afraid for their jobs.

That “little man” type, hardly an endangered species, is good at stamping in the mail and complaining about his co-workers and his bad back, but he only ever becomes a tool of evil when co-opted by genuinely evil – and not little – men. The worst he could do on his own is fail to call an ambulance when someone showed obvious signs of heart failure because he was busy hanging curtains or something.

Ordinary people can be evil. An older, somewhat flawed, but still useful book on what evil can look like in everyday life is People of the Lie by the late psychiatrist, Scott Peck. He recounts, for example, the case of a young man who had crashed up his car in an apparent suicide attempt. It turned out that his parents had given him the gun with which his elder brother had committed suicide as a Christmas gift. Then Peck interviewed the parents and … He became interested in studying how evil works in everyday life. But none of it was about littleness. Had they been more important people, the scope of their evil would have extended far beyond their own family.

Mostly, the rest of the published address is just more not-quite-truisms about growing up, but then there’s this: Read More ›

“Will the real Baby Einstein please stand up?” is the hedder on a university media release aimed at pop science central:

When it comes to what causes genius, nature may be ready to pull a stunning upset over nurture. University of Alberta researcher Martin Mrazik has put forward the argument that an increased presence of a naturally-occuring hormone could mean that genius is determined before birth.In a recent article in Roeper Review, Mrazik and a colleague posit that genius may be caused by prenatal exposure to an excessive level of testosterone. Mrazik notes that there is evidence that this high exposure facilitates increased brain connection. This hormonal “glitch” in-utero, Mraizk notes, would explain why children are born with an affinity for certain areas such as math, science or arts.

I was invited to e-mail or call for details.

Now, the nice thing about Roeper’s thesis is that it is undemonstrable. Read More ›

At Wired Science’s Science News, Rachel Ehrenberg tells us, “Adult Brain Activity Stirs Before Birth” (February 16, 2011):

Nerve cells from developing brains as young as 20 weeks old fire in a pattern that persists into adulthood, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides a glimpse into the behavior of extremely young brain cells and could help scientists understand what happens when brain development goes awry.Cells from the cerebral cortices of 20- to 21-week-old fetuses exhibit bursts of electrical activity interspersed with periods of quiet, researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington found. When the adult brain is sleeping, or under anesthesia, it also displays this busy-then-quiet firing pattern, suggesting it may be an intrinsic property of human brains.

As to why they do it, Read More ›

(Who were the old Humanists, by the way? Anyone know?)

In “Natural history of the soul”, Caspar Melville profiles “the man who thinks that spirituality is essential to consciousness, and science can tell us why.”

That would be Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist and author of Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness who

claims to have solved two fairly large intellectual conundrums. One is something of a technical matter, about which you may have thought little or not at all, unless you happen to be a philosopher. This is the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. The problem is how an entity which is apparently immaterial like the human consciousness – it exists, but you can’t locate it, much less measure it – can have arisen from something purely physical, like the arrangement of cells that make up the human body. The second problem Humphrey claims he has solved is a rather more everyday one, about which you may well have puzzled yourself. This is the problem of the soul. Does it exist? What sort of a thing might it be? Does everyone have one, even atheists? (Volume 126 Issue 2 March/April 2011)

I’ve often wondered why just anyone who claims to have solved two hard problems in one book is accorded a lot of acceptance and respect. But credulity could have something to do with it.

Anyway, we buzzes of neurons learn, Read More ›

In “Science and religion are wise to talk”, a letter to Nature, UK Christian Darwinists Denis Alexander and Bob White explain,

As far as the mingling of scientific and religious language is concerned, we agree that this is a justifiable concern. In the United Kingdom, the Faraday Institute (our institution) is well known for its criticism of both creationism and intelligent design. Attempts to introduce theological language into the practice of science is as damaging for theology as it is for science. Each academic discipline has its own specialized language and its own criteria for justifying its claims; mixing them only creates confusion.However, we disagree with the scientists you cite who oppose any kind of interdisciplinary engagement between science and religion, or who maintain that they are in conflict. (Nature, 471, 166 (10 March 2011) | doi:10.1038/471166b)

Thought, on hearing the good word above:  A widely used phrase like “conflict (or no conflict) between science and religion” is meaningless absent details about what science and whose religion.

For example, if someone, using advanced neuroscience, can exquisitely target and destroy brain areas so that people cannot form concepts that might include dissent from the government – and the Catholic Church opposes it? Is that a “conflict between science and religion”?

What if representatives of another religion come along and say, “Yes, this is wonderful, now there will be no more infidels and no more disobedience to the great prophet. It fits our theology because we don’t believe in free will anyway.” So that is “no conflict between science and religion”?

Must be. That’s pretty much how the debate on using stem cells from abandoned embryos has been understood.

Anyway, physicist David Tyler offers an interesting comment here: Read More ›

David Tyler asks, Are evolutionary biologists really ready for the Extended Synthesis? Here, he discusses the sad story of efforts to reform the discipline three decades ago: The background to the 1982 paper was the burgeoning disquiet with Neo-Darwinism. Gould and Eldredge led the way with their assault on gradualism in the fossil record. Brooks recounts his own involvement with a small band of pioneering rebels: “By 1982, the centenary of Darwin’s death, Niles Eldredge and Steven J. Gould had catalyzed a loosely connected group of evolutionary biologists unhappy with the New Synthesis to unleash a cascade of criticisms and proposals. Emboldened by this display of the scientific community at its meritocratic best, Ed Wiley and I entered the fray. Read More ›

Here, University of Toronto’s Larry Moran, blogger at Sandwalk (named after Darwin’s garden path) and famed (okay, okay, reputable) textbook author, commented at UncommonDescent on this story about Jonathan Wells’ new book on the junk DNA myth, complaining, Denyse, you’ve promised in the past to stop using the term “Darwinism” to refer to all of evolution. What happened to that promise?In evolutionary biology, “Darwinism” refers to those who focus on adaptation as the almost exclusive mechanism of change. They are also called adapationists. Moran calls himself a pluralist. For the record, he said, I’m a pluralist who promotes the importance of random genetic drift and accidental evolution. That’s perfectly consistent with junk DNA. I am not a Darwinist. Yes, as Read More ›

In The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies–How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, Michael Shermer explains it all for you. And Publishers Weekly’s reviewer offers As the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of Why People Believe Weird Things, and a columnist for Scientific American, Shermer is perhaps the country’s best-known skeptic. His position is as clear as it is simple: “When I call myself a skeptic I simply mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims.” But now Shermer is interested not only in why people have irrational beliefs, but “why people believe at all.” Our brains, he says, have evolved to find meaningful patterns around us. But Read More ›

(Or, why human evolution should not be taught in school) Jessica Hamzelou tells us, “Fire did not spark human colonisation of cold Europe” (New Scientist, 14 March 2011): To try to pin down the earliest evidence of controlled fire use, Paola Villa at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands re-examined the data from over 100 European sites. They were looking for evidence of fires that were unlikely to have occurred naturally – those in caves, for example – and for clues that fire had been used in a controlled way. These include activities such as making pitch: some early hominins made this sticky substance by burning birch bark and using it Read More ›

In “All alone and no one knows why” former nanotechnology watchdog Mike Treder tells us (Ethical Technology, Mar. 2, 2010)

In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi famously wondered, “Where is everybody?” He was referring to the strange silence in the universe, the apparent lack of any advanced civilizations beyond Earth.

Fermi reasoned that the size and age of the universe would indicate that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis is inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.

He offers a solution he says his critics have been unable to refute.

First, he rejects the idea that humans may simply be the first intelligent beings to explore outer space, arguing that humans “along with every other form of life” evolved by natural selection and are not special”: “Why, then, would it even be conceivable that earthlings are destined to be the very first species to make a noticeable mark on the universe?”

(The logic here escapes me. Earthlings could just happen to be first to explore because 1 is the first natural number. Indeed, absent prejudice, his first option is far more reasonable than what follows.)

He then finds himself stuck between:

2. There have been others before us, but all of them, without exception, have chosen—or somehow been forced—to expand in such a way that they are presently undetectable by our most sophisticated instruments. ?

3. There have been others, but all of them, without exception, have run into a cosmic roadblock that either destroys them or prevents their expansion beyond a small radius.

Well, he rejects 2 because it is unreasonable to suppose that millions of advanced civilizations before us chose or were forced to avoid detection by ourselves.

Again, I don’t follow because we cannot establish the definite existence of even one of these millions of secretive civilizations, which makes it premature to dispute their motives. However, unless one is paranoid (“Secret groups are hiding critical information from me”), one must agree with him.

That leaves proposition 3: Read More ›

Here, we noted one recent effort to rid biology of language that implies design. A friend writes to say that Noam Chomsky, no friend to design in nature, wrote, with co-authors, in a 2002 article in Science, “The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” “… All living things are designed on the basis of highly conserved developmental systems that read an (almost) universal language encoded in DNA base pairs.” (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, Science, 298, 2002) I wonder if that would get past the referee today? Today, it might be a game misconduct, not just five minutes in the penalty box. It’s interesting to reflect that evolutionary biology today exists mostly to Read More ›

There was an interesting debate among friends regarding the recent BioEssays editorial lamenting purpose-based language in science (teleology): “…It is that innocent little word ‘to’ that transforms the meaning, giving enzyme Y the essence of ‘will’ – ‘to’ being short for ‘in order to’, or ‘with the purpose of’. Purpose can only be exercised by a supernatural entity in this situation.”

A sampling of comments: Read More ›