Apparently it’s Eric Michael Johnson week here at Neuron Culture. Last Friday Johnson, who studies evolutionary anthropology and the history of science, wrote about the Allure of Gay Caveman. Today he published a magnificent cover story at Times Higher Education, “Ariel Casts Out Caliban,” that explores the long-running argument over whether humans are more like […]
Continue reading →Over at The Thoughtful Animal, which thoughtful animals should read regularly, Jason Goldman covers a clever study on contagious yawning in chimps. It’s a small study, so apply the appropriate dose of of salt. But it’s an interesting little study, and I especially like the methodological efficiency here, in which the researchers use two simple […]
Continue reading →As many know, Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser was placed on a year’s leave yesterday after an internal Harvard investigation found problems in some of the data supporting a 2002 paper on monkey cognition, and, according to coverage at the Globe and elsewhere, perhaps some others as well. … The longer source is Horace Freeland Judson’s “The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science” , a splendid account of not only how outright fraud occurs, but how pressure to produce, which is intense in most research universities, can lead to the sort of atmosphere DrugMonkey alludes to.
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