A miscellany of articles that didn't make it into the 2009 lineup:
An article by Nicholas Wade in the NYT on research into brain synapses.
Benedict Carey's piece in the same paper on the theory that our adaptive capacity to predict the near future is responsible for some perceptual illusions.
Another one by Carey on a theory of mental disorders that made me laugh because Badcock was one of my lecturers at the LSE and used to come up with daft ideas even then.
An article by Brian Bethune in Maclean's on the theories of Keith Stanovich on Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and his idea of a Rationality Quotient.
Sandra Steingraber's article in Orion on epigenetics, which includes these interesting paragraphs:
Consider this: identical twins are epigenetically unique; attached to their identical chromosomes are nonidentical patterns of methyl groups and histones. Moreover, in a phenomenon called epigenetic drift, twins become more different with time. As revealed in a 2005 study, younger twins are more alike than older twins. As twins age and have different environmental experiences, their genetic expression diverges. Twins who spend more of their lives together in the same environment have gene-expression portraits that are more similar than twins who go their separate ways.
. . .
Perhaps most astonishing of all, epigenetic changes can be inherited. This means that the environmental exposures we experienced as children can have consequences not just for us but also for our descendants. More philosophically, it means that, contrary to current biological dogma, the nineteenth-century idea that acquired traits can be passed down the generations may not be so wrong-headed after all. And this brings us back to Darwin, who developed his ideas before we had a working understanding of genes and who was agnostic on the subject of the heritability of acquired characteristics. The reality of epigenetic inheritance hardly overturns natural selection—indeed it shows us another route by which species can adapt. Finally, it shines a spotlight on one of Darwin’s lesser-appreciated insights: that all of life is interrelated—not only by our common origins but also by our common ecology.
and finally a piece from Wired by Clive Thompson on the virtues of a wandering mind. For anyone who gets their best ideas while out for a walk.
4 comments:
Hi John,
Happy New Year!
I read one of Badcock's books once and quite enjoyed it (about how Freud and evolutionary psychology might link hands).
What's daft about his new theory?!
Cheers
Hi Stuart--
And a happy new year to you too!
From my recollection, Badcock was a pretty unsophisticated sociobiologist in the same mould as Desmond Morris, and practicaly every paragraph in the NYT article is prefaced by some paraphrasing of "this is purely speculation, but . . ." The article more or less begins by saying, "We know this is wrong, but . . ." You can't really base a scientific theory on noticing that autistic kids don't make eye contact whereas schizophrenics think they're being watched all the time. ;-)
I remember in one seminar Badcock suggesting that psychotic murderers could be rehabilitated by giving them jobs in butchers' shops, where they'd be able to cathartically work out their blood lust by chopping up animal carcasses! My jaw just dropped.
Cheers
John
Hmmm, well, not sure I can mount a defence on the butcher shop hypothesis! But there's nothing wrong with wild speculation. It's where all our currently accepted science started out! Cheers
ha ha ha! Touche.
And religion, too, of course.
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