Neural Darwinism

Edward Rothstein's NYTimes review of Wider Than the Sky, Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman's book about the nature of human consciousness. Rothstein gently chides Edelman for trying to shoehorn his complicated theory into a meager 148 pages; Rothstein's 2-page summary of that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'll have to check it out.

Anyone else read it?

Correct liberal bias

This is an old thought I wanted to catalog a while ago. I had been reading a few screeds from conservative types bitching that academia has such a terrible liberal bias, blah blah, same shit they say about the media.

Then I come across a David Brooks column in which he talks about the liberal bias -- as you'd expect, in gentler terms than the real battle axes of the right -- and unintentionally, I think, revealed what's really going on here:

"Conservative professors emphasize that most discrimination is not conscious. A person who voted for President Bush may be viewed as an oddity, but the main problem in finding a job is that the sorts of subjects a conservative is likely to investigate — say, diplomatic or military history — do not excite hiring committees."

I think what's really at the heart of this is that most academic studies are simply by their nature more suited to liberal ways of thinking. Think, for instance, of a liberal and a conservative looking at poverty in a society. Conservatives tend to say it comes down to individual responsibility. Liberals tend to look at the root causes that lead to poverty. Ending the conversation by attributing things to individual responsibility is not going to lead to much academic investigation, and academics, like everyone else, know how not to run themselves out of a job. Liberals, though, will argue for decades about what exactly is the reason for pervasive poverty, becoming increasingly more obscure as they tunnel through the ivory tower.

In a rebuke to Brooks, Christopher Shea pointed out in the Globe Ideas section that the bias was subject-related: 'Brooks speaks broadly of bias in the "humanities or social sciences." But what about, say, economics departments? If you wander from a meeting of the Modern Language Association to an economics conference, you exchange a world in which "market logic" is a punchline for one in which it's mostly an article of faith.'

I think it interesting that this widespread bias, which I would agree does exist, is an emergent phenomenon caused by the sum effect of individual, non-coordinated actions by academics. And I would argue that it is a good thing, at least to some degree, because conservative attitudes would not lead to the deepest exploration of many of the humanities and social sciences.

Of course, it can go too far the other way. More on this to come soon.

Neuromarketing marketing

Douglas Rushkoff, in his blog (thanks for the pointer, Chun), takes another whack at neuromarketing, which I posted about in October, and the NYTimes then quickly yanked away.

He spends a minute saying that neuromarketing is scary, yes, and aren't these advertisers just dodgy.

But then he makes the interesting claim that neuromarketing may just be so much bullshit that won't really work. So the fracas over all this stuff actually makes it seem to companies that neuromarketing is this all-powerful tool. 'Hey, if Ralph Nader hates it, it must be great.' The neuromarketers, Rushkoff says, have done a bang-up job only in their marketing of neuromarketing to stupid companies. Interesting.

But I wonder: If they are so good at marketing things to companies, might they also be good at marketing things to people? Or do they really not give a shit about what people think? It is the companies that pay them, not the people. How weak is the connection between advertising and results?

Am I still writing? Jeezus.

Internet saves us all

Allow me to wax overenthusiastic about the Internet for a moment.

Like so many things in life, the Internet was cool, and then discovered, and then everybody went hogwild with, and it got overhyped and played out and sucked. But, fact of the matter is, that it's really powerful from a human-discovery standpoint. I think that some of its advantage, in terms of journalism, are becoming clearer.

I've seen many blogs recently criticize journalists' propensity to mistake objectivity with neutrality. In many cases, politicians think they can wipe their asses with scientific consensus by using a little, idiotic shred of non-credible to fool many reporters (working on tight deadlines) into falling into the typical he-said, she-said formula.

Two sites have recently re-ignited my faith in the Internet leading to a new kind of journalism: FactCheck.org, and The Campaign Desk. The both provide a similar sort of non-partisan news-analysis perspective, and really take aim at the idiotic neutrality that looks dumber and dumber in the mainstream press.

Blogs are, of course, a good addition to the journalistic discourse. But I'm especially liking the viewpoint brought by these two sites, which ditch political opinion for reasonable question-settling.

Dr Aas does poop transplants

Gene Weingarten's new column in the Washington Post is one of the funnier things I've ever read. Any further explanation will probably take away from it. Just read this and get transported away to that happy place.

Orgasmatron has arrived!

Remember that part of Woody Allen's Sleeper when Woody hides (alas, by himself) inside the Orgasmatron, the device that couples use in the future to have clean, no-contact, antiseptic sex? Well, they're getting close:

The [Slightest Touch] stimulates the nerves sending gentle pulses up the woman's leg for between 10 and 30 minutes leaving women on the verge of climax.

"The Slightest Touch does not provide an orgasm," said Cherisse Davidson, the company's director of customer support.

"It gently stimulates the sexual nerve pathways taking the woman to a pre-orgasmic plateau where she dangles on the edge of orgasm for as long as she wants...

Ms Davidson, who first tested the device three years ago, insists it is effective.'

Fall of the Public Intellectual

I first became acquainted with David Brooks' writing about a year and a half ago when I came across his story Patio Man and the Sprawl People in the Weekly Standard. The piece made a lot of sense to me, and I was frankly surprised that someone at the Standard could be so eminently reasonable, even if I disliked his prediction that US sociology would increase Republican control over the federal government.

I then saw his work popping up more often, usually doing similar sociological journalism. People referred frequently to his book Bobos in Paradise, which dubbed the members of the new wealthy class "bobos" -- bourgeois bohemians. His star was in the steep part of its ascent in 2002, and it hit the top a little while later when he became a columnist at the NYTimes.

Sasha Issenberg just wrote a story for Philadelphia magazine criticizing Brooks' journalism, especially in his influential story One Nation, Slightly Divisable that explained the difference between Red America and Blue America in the December 2001 Atlantic. Issenberg goes through Brooks' reporting -- much of which is based in Pennsylvania's Franklin County -- and finds that many of the specifics are slightly to very wrong. (Whoever titled Issenberg's piece "Boo-boos in Paradise" gets a tip of the hat from me.)

Issenberg did get Brooks on the phone to ask him about the errors, and Brooks said Issenberg was being too particular about a work that wasn't supposed to be a very specific investigated piece. Issenberg writes:

'He accused me of being "too pedantic," of "taking all of this too literally," of "taking a joke and distorting it." "That's totally unethical," he said... "I tried to describe the mainstream of Montgomery County and the mainstream of Franklin County. They're both diverse places, and any generalization is going to have exceptions. But I was trying to capture the difference between the two places... You've obviously come at this from a perspective. I don't think if you went to the two places you wouldn't detect a cultural difference."'

What Brooks says makes a fair amount of sense to me. It makes sense that this piece wasn't exactly correct in its points. But that did get me to wondering what it was Brooks was actually doing. He says Issenberg at one point distorts a joke he made. How much of Brooks' writing is a joke? At one point Brooks says people in red country wear sleeveless shirts, and Issenberg points out that this observation was the basis for a joke previously used by the somewhat funny comic Jeff Foxworthy, whose whole shtick was to make fun of rednecks.

Wonkette, who originally pointed me toward this story, sums it up well, in responding to Brooks' claim that Issenberg's reporting is 'unethical': "Yeah! We hate it when that happens. When someone, like, builds a career on interpreting literally a gross stereotype of middle America? Ew. And then gets all pedantic about it? Maybe even lectures potential Democratic candidates on how they should behave? That sucks!"

Perhaps this explains why Brooks' writing makes sense -- he's trading on stereotypes and updating them a little bit for the Bush II era? (There's a great part from a Simpsons episode in which a black stand-up comedian makes a hoary, cornball joke about how white people drive like dorks with sticks up their asses. "It's true," Homer says, laughing hysterically. "We're so lame!") Is Brooks simply re-working stand-up comedy for the Atlantic and the NYTimes?

Maybe. I don't really have a problem with him doing that. The problem, really, is in how that now everyone seems to think Brooks is a genius for this. Issenberg also explains this, and I agree with her/his(?) piece, so I don't really need to go too deep into this. Issenberg points out that prominent federal judge Richard Posner listed Brooks as the 85th highest-profile public intellectual. Is he actually an intellectual, or just a stand-up comic who is a geeky white guy (let's check his driving!) and therefore writes his jokes in snooty publications? (Posner's list of course has a lot to do with his own biases. Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a great profile of him in the New Yorker, claiming he's "more attracted to rhetoric than to proof," and Adam Liptak pointed out in the NYObserver that Posner thinks it's okay that "public intellectuals are often careless with facts and rash in prediction."

Issenberg suggests public intellectuals ain't what they used to be:

'Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon demographer whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class earned Bobos-like mainstream cachet, nostalgizes a time when readers looked to social scientists in academia for such insights:

'"You had Holly Whyte, who got Jane Jacobs started, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Galbraith. This is what we're missing; this is a gap," Florida says. "Now you have David Brooks as your sociologist, and Al Franken and Michael Moore as your political scientists. Where is the serious public intellectualism of a previous era?"'


Interestingly, Richard Florida has recently come under attack for making mistakes in The Rise of the Creative Class that are pretty damn similar to what he seems to be criticizing in the not-serious public intellectualism. Christopher Shea recently wrote in The BoGlobe Ideas section about the Florida backlash (no, nothing to do with the election).


I'm almost dumb enough to suggest that the Internet will democratize information and let people do their own social judgments. It won't happen, of course, because people don't want to put in that much time; we need gatekeepers to interpret data and make conclusions. Still, I've found some interesting stuff just over the past few days:

- Most literate American cities
- 2004 Presidential election predictor (sadly, and almost unbelievably, this blogger's parents died in a drive-by attack in Iraq a week after I first looked at his site)
- Richest towns in America (5 Bay Area towns are not identified, btw)

The triple mixer

A Kerry financial advisor said, "each plank in and of itself is not a silver bullet, but a building block toward a comprehensive plan."

Everybody got that?

The best thing I've seen since Ari Fleischer's triple mixer back in October.

Smell is the biggest and best

People overlook the importance of smell at their own risk. We may be predominantly visual/verbal creatures, but smell connects our big cortexes with our most animalistic insides. Never forget...

Oh, and I have specifics for you, kind reader. Fear not! First, recent research shows how a particular olfactory defect is connected with the onset of Alzheimer's: "According to researchers, the sense of smell is one of the first casualties of the disease as it begins its cell-by-cell assault on the human brain. A smell-based early detection test might let patients be treated earlier and more effectively, they say."

Basically, scientists made mice that overproduce a protein called tau that interferes with the brains of people who have Alzheimer's. And the poor mice couldn't tell rotting meat from "meadow forest" and "vanilla orange spice," which are presumably really quite nice smells. (I'm being slightly creative with the test procedure here -- enjoyable as the scent of meadow forest, no?)

The Independent takes the opportunity to point out that aromatherapy may be useful psychologically, mostly because of olfaction's deep connection with emotion and memory. The article does point out, interestingly, that olfaction seems to take a subservient role to sight and hearing in terms of rational understanding of our surroundings. (You might say that smell accesses a more "monkey", concrete, or analog part of the brain.)


And speaking of monkeys, a study shows that "sexy smells" (uh huh) make male monkey brains go into overdrive -- and not just the horny parts, but also the more complicated areas that process decision-making and cognitive reasoning. (Is thinking about sex inherently complicated? Too bad Sex in the City isn't around to address this question any more.) This test is especially interesting because marmoset monkeys, the ones in the studies, form pretty similar social groups to humans'.

Drugs? Genetic engineering!? Run for the hills!!

After a big pot bust, the San Diego Union-Tribune says, "Most of the cannabis, which was genetically engineered to be considerably stronger than ordinary marijuana, was grown in rental properties in such residential areas as Del Mar, Mira Mesa and Rancho Penasquitos, Vigil said." [Emphasis mine.]

(Sigh.) I was really curious about this at first. Am I missing out on some groundbreaking pot? No, this is just cannabis that's been bred to have more THC in it -- like almost all the pot found in the Bay Area, for instance, or any decent pot anywhere in the world. Like all pot since the 70s, really, when people began making better -- ie, more potent -- strains. This use of breeding -- idiotically called "genetic engineering" here -- actually makes cannabis less bad for people, because they need smoke less of the plant to get the same high, and sucking on burnt anything is bad for you.

Just reminds you how the scientific/media establishment can dovetail so well with anti-drug propaganda, as I mentioned with regard to that pathetic Science report on MDMA.

And yes, the smokers are up in arms: "Isn't the proper term for what the DEA is using called Newspeak or Doublethink?" Yes. Big Brother gonna git yer momma.

Color - Time for wasting

"Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

- Bertrand Russell, via Mark Robinson in Wired

More on moderate environmentalism

Last week I mentioned the moderate environmentalism depicted in a New Scientist article. I just came across a Wired story by Drake Bennett that talks about Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace who has become disenchanted with the environmental movement, saying its extreme positions are counterproductive.

Here's the essence of his argument: "'There's no getting around the fact that 6 billion people wake up every morning with a real need for food, energy, and material.' It is this fact, he charges, that environmentalists fail to grasp. 'Their idea is that all human activity is negative, while trees are by nature good,' he says. 'That's a religious interpretation, not a scientific or logical interpretation."

This also calls to mind Bjorn Lomborg, the scientist and Greenpeace member who wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, an argument that environmental dangers are grossly overestimated. Of course, the book precipitated a massive backlash; Grist Magazine made a good clearinghouse for some of the strongest rebuttals to Lomborg.

And The Atlantic Monthly published a quite-interesting story by Jonathan Rauch a few months ago about how biotech crops could be an environmental boon.

Nibbling humans

New research suggests that part of what makes humans human was a mutation that decreased the size of our ancestors' jaw muscles, which allowed the skull to get bigger. The mutation came around 2.4M years ago, right around the time that the Homo species broke off from the other apes. They say that it might have had to do directly with a change in diet, e.g., if Homo was eating more meat than the other nut-chomping apes. This fits in with a bunch of research that suggests meat-eating was a critical component of the development of humans.

So where does this leave vegetarians? A sub-evolved sub-class? No. Humans had to take a little bit more from Mother Nature in order to get to where we are -- now it's time to give a little back, through eating less meat, burning fewer dinosaurs, etc.

English history

I've always been interested in how modern English was formed from Old English and French/Latin influences. This site reveals a quick history about it. Neat stuff.



I'm happy that it mentions that sometime in the 13th century, the French word "moton" came into English as "mutton" (it's "mouton" in modern French). This is part of one of best factoids about the history of English: the names for farm animals are Anglo-Saxon, while the meat that comes from those animals are French. Cow and beef, sheep and mutton, pig (or swine) and pork. This is due to the fact that the Normans were in charge after the invasion. American Heritage says:

The French nobles who ruled England after the Norman Conquest of course used French words to refer to the meats they were served, so the animal called cow by the Anglo-Saxon peasants was called buef by the French nobles when it was brought to them cooked at dinner. Thus arose the distinction between the words for animals and their meat that is also found in the English word-pairs swine/pork, sheep/mutton, and deer/venison.

Color -- Dynastic memories

Talking Points Memo says -- referring to the Bush admin's idiotic clutching to old, Cold War-era threats -- "As Talleyrand said of the restored Bourbons, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing during their time in exile."

Well said, especially because it's such a good picture of the Bush crowd's mental shortcomings.

Science's shame

This blog-post title works for big-S and little-s science. One of the most pathetic episodes in the recent annals of science was this study published in Science that claimed that ectasy (MDMA) was incredibly bad for your brain, much of the monkeys' brains after just one night out on E. Other researchers thought this was a little strange, because if the drug had such dramatic effects we would see millions upon millions of severely brain-damaged zombie-kids wandering the streets (which we don't). They thought it particularly strange that many of the monkeys in the experiment died, which is still a pretty rare result of taking E.

It turned out later that the researchers had confused MDMA with methamphetamine (oops!) and made an enormous, colossal, stupendous error that somehow had made it through the review process of one of the two most prestigious science publications in the world. How this happened is way beyond me. But not the Village Voice. It suggests that the lead researcher, George Ricaurte, is pushing a politically popular anti-drug line which, entirely coincidentally, wins him a lot of money from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

This episode alone is almost enough to make you give up on the whole politico-scientific complex. (Sigh.)

No-way Nader and Third-way environmentalism

I just came across this New Republic article that slags Nader, saying he hasn't only recently become an idiot -- he's been paranoid, monomaniacal, and disastrously inflexible and disloyal for decades. I believe it.

Reminded me of this good New Scientist article from last year describing moderate environmentalism, which some say is more effective because it turns off fewer stakeholders. Even some big environmental groups are getting into it. Believing that environmentalism is more an approach to getting things done rather than a position for argumentation and a badge of identity, I'm all in support of this.

It takes a grandma to raise lots of children

Having grandmothers around increases the reproductive success of a family. Not terribly surprising, but interesting backup to the idea that strong extended-familial bonds are important for human survival. May also explain why human females are some of the only mammals who live beyond childbearing age.

Torturous temptation

I'm currently in day 7 of a 10-day fast. I want everything umami in my mouth. Right now.

Poop power!

A new type of experimental fuel cell takes human sewage and turns it into electricity. No guarantee this will ever become practical or efficient, but we can hope.

And another thing...

Speaking of the Union of Concerned Scientists, they are the same group that recently came out with that report saying the Bush administration was consistently ignoring scientific evidence in its decisions.

Reason magazine's Ronald Bailey wrote a sort of critique of that report saying that UCS is somewhat biased, and ignored some evidence that might disagree with its case, and Hey, government will never really heed science's lesson. I must say that Reason's article, while at least being part right, is also part wrong.

There are a couple of process problems with the story, like one very weakly-supported point about the FDA's decision not to approve silicone-breast implants, and a long, meaningless quote about the Office of Management and Budget that should have provided evidence for an important conjecture.

But the big problem is that it takes this newspaper-reporter type of analysis where it says there are some ways in which the Bush administration distorts science, and some other ways the Clinton administration distorted science, so government always does this kind of thing. But the degree to which the Bushies is much greater, and many scientists have legitimately been raising this flag. Bailey's piece doesn't make overt claims that the two administration's were equally non-scientific, but it should more clearly take this into perspective.

Extinct-o-Fish

Experiments by a group at Purdue found that the release of a genetically engineered fish into the wild could, conceivably, lead to the fish's extinction. They were working with a fish called a medaka that was genetically engineered to grow faster. The GE males outcompeted normal males in fertilizing eggs, implying that in the wild they might turn the population into the genetically altered variety. The group also found that the GE fish's offspring have a certain dying problem and don't always make it to adulthood.

You might wonder if that means it's all fine, because the transgene won't propagate because the GE fishlings die out. But the researchers did a computer analysis of the fish's population dynamics and found that it could drive the species to extinction.

The company that creates these GE fish is also working on making fully sterile ones that would pose no threat to wild populations. Whether it'll work, who knows. But remember that part of Jurassic Park when they are sure the dinosaurs won't reproduce, but life finds a way to do it? As Michael Crichton is my God, I would be wary of this approach.


It's not exactly news, but now might be a good time to point out that the Union of Concerned Scientists recently reported that conventional varieties of canola, corn, and soybeans in the US have become contaminated with a measurable amount of genetically engineered material. No danger as of yet, just something to keep in mind (and supermarket, and bowl, and mouth...)

Consciousness components

Alfred North Whitehead, renowned English philosopher and mathematician, broke human consciousness down into 'Instinct, Intellect, and Wisdom.' I like that.

Mendo no GMO

You know how there's dry counties around the American South? Well, now there's a no-GMO county: Mendocino, California, which illegalized transgenic crops through a referendum, despite the fact that a big biotech trade group spent the better part of a million dollars to defeat it, more than 7 times what the pro-initiative folks spent.

Now activistos [sic] in neighboring Humboldt County are trying to pass the exact same initiative (Sonoma's thinking about it, too), while the biotechers say they will fight against this currently symbolic ban. And they might win, because California has voided previous county bans against particular pesticides. Tune in next week.

(By the way, it turns out to be a bad all-round week for big, pushy corporations in NoCal: Humboldt County voters turned down a recall of District Attorney Paul Gallegos, an effort which Pacific Lumber put $250k behind. Gallegos had sued Pacific, claiming they basically lied and cheated the federal government out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Here's the kicker: Pacific says they funded the recall effort not because Gallegos is causing them problems, but because he's soft on crime. Bwah ha ha ha...)

Emerging biological truths

Leaf stomata and ants both show complex emergent behaviors based on pretty rudimentary rules, sort of like the simple computer simulation Game of Life. Neato.