cortex | September 20, 2006One of the more unfortunate side-effects of the endless creationist controversy is that it dehumanizes Darwin: he either becomes a biological prophet - the Newton of life - or a Faustian devil, a thinker who sold his soul to discredit god. What gets lost is Darwin's astonishing scientific process, the stubborn way he solved the history of life by trying to make sense of its strange details. (Among creationists, it's also a truism that Darwin did no experiments, that the "theory" of natural selection was never empirically tested. Needless to say, they are magnificently wrong.) David Quammen's…
cortex | September 19, 2006I was raised on Costco farmed salmon, those mealy slabs of pinkish fish protein. My first bite of wild salmon was a revelation. It was a different species of taste, so rich and oily and strong. You could practically taste the swim upstream. So I was interested in this WSJ article on the billions of conservation dollars that have been wasted on wild salmon in the Northwest. The failed program offers a lesson in the difficulty of tampering with the logic of nature, even when our intentions are noble:
For more than a quarter of a century, a federal agency in the Pacific Northwest has been…
cortex | September 19, 2006One of the few accurate criticisms of An Inconvenient Truth was the way it deliberately avoided difficult policy prescriptions. For one thing, there was no mention of a high carbon tax, one thing our country (and atmosphere) desperately need. (And liberals aren't the only ones endorsing a carbon tax. See this list of Pigou club members...)
In an eloquent speech yesterday at NYU, Gore made up for any wonkish details that his movie left out. I was most struck by his proposal to replace all payroll taxes with pollution taxes.
For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of all…
cortex | September 18, 2006Peers matter. According to two recent economics papers, the behavior of our peers determines our own. Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti looked at worker productivity:
A 10% increase in average co-worker permanent productivity is associated with 1.7% increase in a worker's effort. Most of this peer effect arises from low productivity workers benefiting from the presence of high productivity workers.
A separate working paper looked at the peer effects on 6th graders. Was their behavior affected by whether or not they went to a middle school (with older peers) or an elementary school (with…
cortex | September 18, 2006Is nothing sacred? I'm starting to wonder if nutrionists are the scientific version of fashion designers, and make sure to contradict their claims every few years or so, just to stay cutting edge. Anyways, I like breakfast. Noting gets me going like a nice bowl of sugary Cinnamon Life.
Whatever you do, don't skip breakfast.
Breakfast: It's the most important meal of the day.
Such pronouncements carry almost the aura of nutritional religion: carved in stone, not to be questioned. But a few nutritionists and scientists are questioning this conventional wisdom.
They're not challenging the…
cortex | September 16, 2006From David Remnick's outstanding profile of Bill Clinton in The New Yorker (not online):
"'I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,' Clinton went on. 'So I can't give him a bad grade on curiousity. I think both he and his father, because they have peculiar speech patterns, have been underestimated in terms of their intellectual capacity. You know, the way they speak and all, it could be, it could just relate to the way the synapses work in their brain.'"
I just love the reference to neuroscience. The whole article, though scrupulous and fair,…
cortex | September 15, 2006David Buller's book, Adapting Minds, is in the news again. I agree with Mixing Memory that many of Buller's specific debunkings - such as his full-throated attack on the cheater module - seem flimsy. (And trust me, I was prepared to believe...In my humble opinion, too much evolutionary psychology seems unrigorous , unempirical, and designed for the express purpose of selling bad books.)
That said, I still think Buller's tome made an important point. While most critics of evolutionary psychology continue to borrow from Lewontin and Gould's old playbook - the debate includes an unwieldy amount…
cortex | September 15, 2006The always interesting Sharon Begley has a WSJ column today on the new scientific journals that only publish negative results.
A handful of journals that publish only negative results are gaining traction, and new ones are on the drawing boards.
"You hear stories about negative studies getting stuck in a file drawer, but rigorous analyses also support the suspicion that journals are biased in favor of positive studies," says David Lehrer of the University of Helsinki, who is spearheading the new Journal of Spurious Correlations.
"Positive" means those showing that some intervention had an…
cortex | September 14, 2006Over at the Loom, Carl Zimmer reflects on 18th century science, lightning, and the nervous system. The question of when scientists first realized that our nerves used the same stuff as lightning bolts - a completely outlandish idea - has long fascinated me. It's an empirical story in which two great Italian scientists - Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta and Luigi Galvani - engaged in a bitter argument about the interpretation of a classic experiment. Volta was right about the experiment, but Galvani was right about the biology.
The story begins in the early 1780's, when…
cortex | September 14, 2006From the WSJ:
Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific research journals, has embarked on an experiment of its own.
In addition to having articles submitted for publication subjected to peer reviews by a handful of experts in the field, the 136-year-old journal is trying out a new system for authors who agree to participate: posting the paper online and inviting scientists in the field to submit comments praising -- or poking holes -- in it.
Lay readers can see the submitted articles as well, but the site says postings are only for scientists in the discipline, who must list…
cortex | September 13, 2006From The Atlantic:
Studies indicate that Asian students achieve some of the highest scores in the world in math and science comparisons. However, owing to excessive focus on memorization, done solely for the purpose of passing tests, these gloomy idiot savants demonstrate surprisingly little practical know-how and often are unable to apply what they've learned. And this is the educational system we mistakenly aspire to, argues Alexandra Robbins, who traces the U.S. overachiever culture back to the President Reagan's 1983 Department of Education report "A Nation At Risk."
While I'd still…
cortex | September 13, 2006According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Starbucks Frappuccino is equivalent in calories to a McDonald's coffee plus 11 of their creamers and 29 packets of sugar. A venti Caffè Mocha with whipped cream is calorically equivalent to a Quarter Pounder with cheese. This is the glory of American fast food: it can even make espresso drinks fattening.
cortex | September 12, 2006From Dean Baker:
If physicians in the United States received the same pay as physicians in Europe, this step alone would save $80 billion a year from the country's health care bill - approximately $800 per family.
cortex | September 12, 2006It's not that rich people sleep more hours per night - although they often do - it's that they are more efficient at using their time in bed. In other words, they are less likely to toss and turn. I wonder if this is because they can afford Ambien...
cortex | September 12, 2006In honor of the start of football season, I thought I'd blog about one of my favorite economics papers. It's by David Romer of UC Berkeley, and it should be mandatory reading for every sleep-deprived NFL coach out there. The question Romer was trying to answer is familiar to every NFL fan: what to do on 4th down? Is it better to bring on the kicking team or to go for it? Under what conditions should coaches risk going for it?
To answer this profound question, Romer analyzed every fourth down during the first quarter in every NFL game between 1998 and 2000. (He had help from a computer program…
cortex | September 11, 2006I have had the tragic privilege of living in New York during 9/11 and London during 7/7. The two events are, of course, incomparable, if only because the falling skyscrapers puncutated our lives without warning. I still vividly remember the first night of 9/11, when the stench of melted plastic seeped uptown, and the thousands of dead were still smoldering, and the skyline had been broken. There was still smoke in the air, and the sick smell of it had taken care of my hunger. We knew that everything had changed.
We were right. History pivoted with the hi-jacked planes. The wars that began on…
cortex | September 8, 2006Spy shots of a new BMW that runs on hydrogen have just been released. Back in 2004, BMW promised that they would have a hydrogen car ready in 4 years. Seems like they might keep their word (unlike GM and Ford.)
As far as I can tell, there is only one problem with his fine piece of German engineering (apart from the price): where do you buy the fuel? My local gas station doesn't even carry diesel, let alone explosive liquid hydrogen.
cortex | September 8, 2006For me, one of the most heartbreaking images of Katrina was a picture of a dying dog, resting underneath a junked car. At a certain point, the press photographs of bloated human bodies floating on the greasy Louisiana water became numbing - they were just too awful - and it was this image of a sick mutt that reminded me of Katrina's tragic scope. Thousands of animals were left behind by their owners, and thousands more wandered the streets after the authorities separated owners and pets in the shelters. Some animals survived when their owners didn't.
But the sad saga of Katrina animals…
cortex | September 7, 2006Any bets on what Bush will drive (or get driven in) once he gets out of office? My hunch is a Hummer. But Clinton is about to become the proud owner of a Mercury Mariner Hybrid. If Hillary weren't running for President (and didn't need to carry Michigan), Bill could have upgraded to a nicer car.
cortex | September 7, 2006Cognitive Daily brought my attention to an interesting study about consumers and health care. Simply put, Americans are terrible at knowing when we are getting good medical treatment. Our satisfaction with our doctors bears no relationship to how good our doctors actually are.
This shouldn't be too surprising. Psychologists and economists have long known that humans are bad judges of health and health care. As Amartya Sen pointed out several years ago, life expectancy is often inversely related to self-reports of sickness. Sen arrived at this outlandish conclusion after looking at the health…