Diverse perspectives on science and medicine
By Greg Downey. (5000 words) An Italian study in 2012 found that men’s penises were growing smaller over time — two centimetres lost from grandfather to grandson in the twentieth century. Conservative radio bloviator Rush
The subtitle of Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, is transparent. In combining genes, race, and human history, Wade makes a simplistic argument: genes determine race, and race determines
By Sarah Fishleder The way we learn can determine not only our brains, but also the kinds of choices we make, from big to small. You call THAT an elephant? Eight graduate students sat down
I just saw this cute video of a professional magician playing tricks with dogs. It is striking to me just how much the dogs expect the treat to be there, to have fallen to the
By Greg Downey; (long read: 5500 words) Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif succeeded to the sultanate of Morocco after his brother fell from a horse and died in 1672. Twenty-six when he became the Sharifian Emperor,
I just love the individuality of all those faces. Original image found in Yahoo article, Chimp Genetic History Stranger Than Humans’. And for a nice piece on animal subjectivity, see Brandon Keim’s Being a Sandpiper:
On Thursday, 22 March, the then-Tertiary Education Minister of Australia, Chris Bowen, registered for my new, up-coming MOOC (that’s a Massive Online Open Classroom, if you’ve somehow managed to miss it). Apparently, he’ll be taking
Kelsey Siepser, my niece as well as an accomplished actor and artist in LA, sent me this photo of the Darwin Altar she saw at the Dia de los Muertos celebration at the Hollywood Forever
Robert Wright, the journalist and science writer, was kind enough to invite me over to bloggingheads.tv to discuss research on internet addiction. Neither of us liked a recent paper on “genes for internet addiction” that
At the 2010 “Great Expectations” conference, Timothy Ingold took on Robin Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis, and expanded on his own views of how we can better understand the brain as truly social. As he says