Brain and Behavior
jtoney | January 20, 2011
Is kissing unique to humans? Why do we do it? What is its biological role, with our spouse, our children, our friends and family? {I can't imagine saying goodnight to my children without a peck on their foreheads or cheek - why am I compelled to do so?}
These are questions that researcher and science journalist Sheril Kirshenbaum addresses in her newly released book "The Science of Kissing - What Our Lips Are Telling Us" (Grand Central Publishing, January 2011.)
While this book has already been reviewed by the press, the publisher has invited me to write a review for ScienceBlogs, from…
jtoney | January 19, 2011Inducing a worm to lay eggs with laser light from Samuel Lab on Vimeo.
A research group at Harvard University, led by Prof. Samuel has developed a new way to manipulate nerves using lasers, given the cheeky term "CoLBeRT"{reference to Stephen Colbert}. In science terms, CoLBeRT is:
Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time
Here's how it works. The nematode is a simple organism that contains 302 neurons that can be genetically altered to make a foreign protein sensitive to a certain type of light - such as that coming from a laser. By tuning the laser to a specific wavelength,…
pharyngula | January 17, 2011There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it's so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It's just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel.
I've just finished reading an article titled "Darwin's Rape Whistle: Have women evolved…
oracknows | January 10, 2011The fallout from Brian Deer's further revelations of the scientific fraud that is anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield continues apace.
Remember last week, when I wrote about the first article of the two-part series enumerating the various ways that Andrew Wakefield committed scientific fraud in putting together the case series that became the basis of his now infamous 1998 Lancet paper (now retracted)? Remember how, in describing the crazed manner in which Wakefield apologists immediately started circling the wagons to defend their hero?, I wondered what had happened to the celebrity…
tfk | January 9, 2011In my post yesterday about the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords, I tried hard not to say that Loughner's mass murder was caused by insanity, or by violent political rhetoric. We don't know anything about that, and we'll know more once he goes to trial. What we'll find at trial is surely that his actions had complex causes that are hard to untangle: that's the nature of most things people do. But we can still look for major causes, even if they can't explain all of his tragic decisions.
Vaughan Bell has an important essay at Slate, making clear that "he did it because he's crazy" isn't…
cwilcox | January 7, 2011
Photo by Sara LeeAnn Banevedes
I don't think Brian Alexander is a bad guy or a misogynist. He writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC, so sure, his job is all about selling sex stories to the public. He even wrote a book about American sexuality. But I don't personally think he has a burning hatred for women, or views them as objects placed on this Earth for the sexual satisfaction of men. However, I very easily could, given how he chose to report on a recent study published in Science about men's physiological responses to the chemicals present in women's tears. The headline alone was…
oracknows | January 6, 2011If my post today is a bit shorter on the usual Respectfully and not-so-Respectfully Insolent verbiage that you've come to know and love (or hate), I hope you'll forgive me. It's hard not to sit back, rest a bit, and enjoy the spectacle of Andrew Wakefield being pilloried in the press in the wake of the BMJ's article documenting his scientific misconduct in gory detail. He's gotten away far too long with trying to split the difference when credulous journalists "tell both sides of the story" so that to those not knowledgeable about his scientific fraud and incompetence it seems as though there…
pharyngula | January 5, 2011Among my usual flood of daily email, I frequently get tossed onto mailing lists for conservative think tanks. Why? I don't know. I suspect that it's for the same reason I also get a lot of gay porn in my email: not because I follow it or asked to be added, but because some tired d-bag with no imagination thinks its funny to dun me with more junk. The joke's on them, though: I might keep it around and skim the stuff now and then to get inspiration for a blog post, and then click-click — a few presses of a button and I add the source to my junk mail filter, and never see it again.
No, I didn't…
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Morphological variation is important, it's interesting…and it's also common. It's one of my major scientific interests — I'm actually beginning a new research project this spring with a student and I doing some pilot experiments to evaluate variation in wild populations here in western Minnesota, so I'm even putting my research time where my mouth is in this case. There has been some wonderful prior work in this area: I'll just mention a paper by Shubin, Wake, and Crawford from 1995 that examined limb skeletal morphology in a population of newts, and found notable variation in the wrist…
jtoney | December 30, 2010
Photo source.
As you prepare for your New Year's celebration, here's something to consider: researchers have found that having more friends may play a role in whether you identify yourself as a liberal or a conservative.
How did they determine this?
The researchers studied a group of about 2,000 adolescents with different variants of the dopamine receptor ("allele 7R"). The dopamine receptors in our brain are associated with pleasure, cognition, memory, learning and fine motor control to name a few key functions, and the "allele 7R" has been linked to "novelty seeking behavior." They…
pharyngula | December 28, 2010The Pope had a Christmas message for the world this year: we should forgive Catholic priests for raping children because everyone else was doing it. He invented a peculiar history that bears no resemblance to the late 20th century I lived in.
"In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children," the Pope said.
"It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a 'better than' and a 'worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself."
The Pope said…
oracknows | December 16, 2010There are multiple recurring messages on this blog that have evolved over the years, but, if there's one of them that has been consistent since the very beginning, it's been about the inherent unreliability of single person testimonials. I wrote about this very topic virtually at the inception of this blog in a post that I still quote from time to time, and I wrote about it just last week when I discussed the case of a woman named Kim Tinkham, a woman who gives every indication of having died of breast cancer, a cancer that had a good chance of being cured had she only pursued effective…
cagapakis | December 8, 2010Evolution connects all living things on earth, from the arsenic tolerant bacteria in the news this week to the human scientists and bloggers chatting about it. Eyes are intricately complex structures made up of many many cells, but even single-celled microbes can sense and respond to light through the function of proteins that share evolutionary similarity with the light receptors of the human retina. Incredibly, genetic engineering is showing us just how similar these proteins can be--transferring the genes that code for these processes leads to functional proteins, even when huge…
pronald | December 7, 2010Click here to see the Dr. Oz show on GE crops with yours truly.
I tried to provide a science-based perspective to the audience.
It was a tough go, though, because one of the other panelists (Jeffery Smith, a former Iowa political candidate for the Natural Law Party with no discernible scientific or agricultural training) believes that eating GE crops causes infertility, organ damage and endocrine disruption. Of course, the scientific evidence for these statements is about as strong as saying that looking at carrots will give you brain tumors.
Can the audience glean that from the information…
jgoldman | December 7, 2010King of all blogmemery Drugmonkey has started another one this week.
The rules for this blog meme are quite simple. Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.
Seems easy enough. Instead of just choosing the first blog entry this month, however, I'm going rogue and just randomly choosing a blog entry from each month. I've been blogging The Thoughtful Animal for exactly a year, so I'll have something for each month (my one-year bloggiversary will be during Science Online).
Without further ado:
January: As promised, here is the beginning of a…
gregladen | November 19, 2010In some societies, men hunt together and this is probably a part of male bonding. Before you write off the idea of male bonding as facile pop psychology, please step back a moment from the term, which is so overused in mostly cynical contexts that it has probably lost its meaning. Let me try to put some fresh meaning on those old bones.
Men are somewhat obnoxious and hard to be around unless they are purposefully trying to be nice (and that can be worse). Many of the tasks in which men engage, depending on the society, require what we would probably call "training," whereby a complex…
oracknows | November 16, 2010I hadn't planned on beating on that wretched hive of anti-vaccine scum and quackery, Age of Autism, again today so soon after having done so not just once but twice yesterday. I really hadn't. After all, AoA is the crank gift that keeps on giving (and has kept on giving for three years now), and there is such a thing as going to the well too many times; i.e., too much of a "good" thing. I say this even though I had been planning on posting a blog post "rerun" today because last night I went out to dinner with a job candidate for our institution and didn't get back until late. By the time I…
pharyngula | November 7, 2010I've hated those Survivor TV shows for as long as they've been on — I've never been able to sit through a single episode. Staging a phony zero-sum game and encouraging backstabbing betrayal and vicious psychopathic behavior is not my idea of fun.
I have this fantasy version of the game in which there are months of lead time, lots of promos highlighting the most odious aspects of each contestant's personality, with elaborate web sites (all in flash, of course) pushing the competitive edge, all working to build audience anticipation to a fever pitch. Then the day of the premiere comes, and…
jgoldman | November 5, 2010Despite the fact that my research lies at the intersection between cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology, I am also quite interested in the evolution of our understanding of psychopathology. The ultimate goal of the study of psychopathology is to ground such disorders in brain and body. But our understanding of some pathologies are simply not there yet (though some of our therapeutic interventions still prove effective even if we don't quite understand the etiology of a given disease or disorder). The main conflict in the field that characterizes the study of psychopathology is…
cwilcox | November 3, 2010I couldn't help but be intrigued that my stiffest competition for winning the $10,000 Blogging Scholarship was a makeup blogger. What is it about cosmetics that is so appealing? Why do people wear makeup, and what might have caused early man to play around with blush and lipstick? Well, like everything else in life, a lot can be explained by science.
Makeup has been around for centuries. The earliest records of makeup use date back to around 3000 BC when ancient Egyptians used soot and other natural products to create their signature look. Evidence suggests that the origins of makeup may go…