In his fine short Leonardo da Vinci: A Life, for Penguin’s Penguin Lives series, Sherwin Nuland wonders if there are times when good scientists or entire disciplines, psychology among them, sound idiotic in their speculations because the empirical underpinnings of their fields are simply not yet in place. [Leonardo] has been criticized, now and in […]
Continue reading →I love this post at Genotopia. The ever-interesting Nathaniel Comfort reviews the usual frustrations about “gene for X” thinking, cites a few efforts to turn it back, and then, with some nice meta, concludes that genetic determinism is, well, multifactorial in origin: Genetic determinism, then, is not monocausal. It has many sources, including sensationalism, ambition, […]
Continue reading →To Joshua Rothman, over at The New Yorker, “The Triple Package” might not be convincing as an argument about “the rise and fall of cultural groups in America,” but it’s valuable in another way: it offers a fascinating window onto a particular interpretation of family life. In this interpretation, parents see themselves as dangerous risk-takers […]
Continue reading →Some I read and liked, others just look good. Not news: Most of us carry Neanderthal genes. News: Collectively we carry about 20 percent of the Neanderthal’s genome. As Ed Yong explains, the influence is huge, and will take time to sort out. Meanwhile, the technique that spotted this may — may — allow us to […]
Continue reading →The latest in the 23andme versus FDA saga, in which the FDA halted 23andme from offering health-risk analyses of the genotyping service the company sells, comes in a commentary published yesterday in Nature. The commentary’s authors, Robert Green of Harvard Medical School and Nita Farahany of Duke Law School, address a key question raised by the FDA’s […]
Continue reading →US soldiers escort Dutch girls in costume to a concert after the 1945 liberation. See above. You’re welcome. Via @HistoricalPics A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops. Brilliantly reported and written story by Amy Harmon about a Hawaiian county councilor’s struggle to do the right thing on a bill calling for a ban on […]
Continue reading →Scott Stossel’s fine vivid account of his spectacular struggles with anxiety — an Atlantic article excerpted from his new book —carries, among other pleasures, a splendid answer to the question of how temperament arises: Is pathological anxiety a medical illness, as Hippocrates and Aristotle and many modern psychopharmacologists would have it? Or is it a […]
Continue reading →Amy Harmon, in the New York Times, on the efforts of a Hawaiian county council to respond properly to a bill proposing a ban on all GMO crops: What really stuck with Mr. Ilagan were the descriptions of tumorous rats. Reading testimony submitted before the hearing, he had blanched at grotesque pictures of the animals […]
Continue reading →This morning Aeon published a revised version of my story “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” which originally ran last Tuesday. The title is the same, the subtitle altered: Die, selfish gene, die For decades, the selfish gene metaphor let us view evolution with new clarity. Is it now blinding us? In the original (as in the […]
Continue reading →Below is a corrective comment I left below Jerry Coyne’s second of two posts (his first is here) critiquing “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” my recent article in Aeon about complaints from some biologists that the “Selfish Gene” framing of genetics and evolution was hindering both public and scientific understanding of genetics and evolution. This is rather a tempest […]
Continue reading →