History/philosophy of science
ddobbs | June 28, 2010Research Digest has posted an q&a interview with me as part of their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits. Do read the rest there, as well as the other interviews already run and to come.
On why I write about psychology, psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences:
Science constitutes our most serious and rigorous attempt to understand the world -- and psychiatry, psychology, and now neuroscience make great material partly because they so often and starkly show science's power and pitfalls. These disciplines are hard. The people who work in them, whether…
ddobbs | June 21, 2010
John Hawks, in his paleodreams. I mean that in the best way.
John Hawks bumps into a prescient estimate of the total gene number in humans:
While doing some other research, I ran across a remarkable short paper by James Spuhler, "On the number of genes in man," printed in Science in 1948. We've been hearing for the last ten years how the low gene count in humans -- only 20,000 or so genes -- is "surprising" to scientists who had previously imagined that humans would have many more genes than this. So here's the next to the last line of Spuhler's article: On the basis of these speculations…
ddobbs | May 20, 2010
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Phineas Gage enjoys an unfortunate fame in neuroscience circles: After a 5-foot iron tamping rod blew through his head one September afternoon in 1848, the once amiable and capable railroad foreman became a uncouth ne-er-do-well â and Exhibit A in how particular brain areas tended to specialize in particular tasks. (In his case, the prefrontal cortical areas that went skyward with the tamping rod proved, in retrospect, to be vital to his powers of foresight and self-control.)
I've always taken an extra level of interest in Gage because his horrific accident happened in my adopted home…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.
Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp
jayrosen_nyu: "The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company." <--- Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz
dhayton: âH-Madnessâ is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/
stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards - http://bit.ly/daP9Go…
ddobbs | March 9, 2010
Jonah Lehrer's story on "Depression's Upside" has created quite a kerfuffle. The idea he explores â that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight â sits badly with quite a few people. It's not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle. But Jonah (who â disclosure department â is a friend; plus I write for the Times Magazine, where the piece was published) has stirred the pot with an update drawing from (among other things) a very long review paper published last year by psychiatric researchers Paul Andrews and…
ddobbs | December 21, 2009
Note: The version below is altered from the original, which was near-gibberish in a few spots. Why? Because I mistakenly posted a pre-edit version that contained the raw 'transcription' from voice-recognition software I've been trying out. (I suppose it could have been a lot worse.)
Here, more or less as I meant it to appear:
Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University. Philosophers have long theorized about how…
ddobbs | December 18, 2009
A nice short piece on "The Prehistory of Stress" by Matt Ford at Ars Technica (newly designed site worth checking out).
I have heard people say, on multiple occasions, that they think stress is a modern, Western phenomenon. While the psychological phenomenon known as stress has only had a formal name for just over 80 years, knowing when it was first suffered by our ancestors is a daunting task. Was life really better in the past? Is stress an entirely modern phenomenon?
Using modern forensic technology and a decidedly modern understanding of biochemistry, researchers from The University of…
ddobbs | November 12, 2009
Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the…
ddobbs | November 6, 2009
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
The Maldives, featured in a Wired gallery of islands shot from space. A place crucial to the story I told in Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong. It's also a singularly beautiful place, and particularly threatened by global warming.
ddobbs | October 14, 2009
via press.princeton.edu
I am extremely pleased to report that my friend Adrienne Mayor's riveting (if queasy-making) biography of Mitradates, "Poison King," is a finalist for the National Book Award. It's wonderful to see a skillfully executed and absorbing account of an obscure bit of history get this sort of well-deserved attention.
Congratulations, Adrienne. And to the rest of you, click above and read it now -- so when she wins, you can say you've already read it.
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model, Alexander -- and this reconstruction a splendid read.
A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Ricks' The Gamble, an excellent account of the surge in Iraq. Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco, a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear:
The surge was not about more soldiers…
ddobbs | September 22, 2009
Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates.
Tara Smith explains why she'll be getting her kids their (seasonal) flu vaccines. Revere does likewise
Daniel Menaker, former honcho at Random House, defends the midlist. (Where was he when my book was getting so much push?)
Just in case you missed it, lack of insurance is killing 45,000 people a year (Times) in the U.S. This doesn't include preventable deaths among the underinsured (like yours truly, who is sitting on some surgery that he'd rather put behind him). You can download the…
ddobbs | September 10, 2009
photo: Philip Todeldano for the New York Times
Part of any real healthcare reform will be improving practices in hospitals, and -- as Obama's proposed commission on comparative effectiveness would do -- identifying what works and what doesn't. Knowing what works and why people get better or not is vital to good medicine. But amid the talk on improving such knowledge as part of healthcare reform, a vital and fairly cheap way to generate some of it -- the autopsy -- is going ignored. This is too bad, as autopsies yield incredibly good information about the quality of both diagnosis and…
ddobbs | September 7, 2009Bloggingheads.tv just posted a conversation Greg Laden and I had about the second-biggest scientific controversy of Darwin's time, and of Darwin's life: the argument over how coral reefs form. The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.
His story -- and the tumultuous 19th-century struggle to define science and empiricism -- is the…
ddobbs | July 13, 2009
Greg Laden, trying to toss a line between the "New Atheists" and 'Accommodationists" who are currently squabbling about a dust-up featuring PZ Myers v Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum (who apparently rough Myers up a bit in their book Unscientific America), writes:
Now, I just want to make this point: I learned early on (when I was still an altar boy) that where religion and life conflict -- where the religion was not doing a good job at explaining the bits and pieces of life that were not making sense -- it was OK to drop the details of the religion part and chalk it up to mystery.
I'…
ddobbs | June 25, 2009Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables:
Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers.
Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…
ddobbs | April 13, 2009Kew Gardens (that is, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) is trying to collect and bank the seeds and pollen from 10% of the world's plants -- a nice 21st-century continuation of the stunning collecting effort that started in the 1700s and helped supply evidence, via Joseph Dalton Hooker, that proved crucial to Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. The Guardian has put up a nice photo gallery of some of the seeds they've collected so far. A few:
Seed of wild spider flower (or spider wisp) Photo: Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley
Himalayan iris pollen. Photo: Rob Kesseler…
ddobbs | March 20, 2009A few weeks ago, Matt Stevens, the National Guard captain and medic who served in Iraq and whom I mentioned in my Scientific American article, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap, wrote me an email about the social unease he often encountered when he showed any behavior that might remind people he had served in Iraq -- a greater seriousness, an impatience with petty concerns or inefficiency, or even just talking about the place.
I have begun to think of military PTSD as to some extent a civilian problem rather than a soldier problem. To expand slightly here; civilians/politicians send soldiers…
ddobbs | March 19, 2009"Faith" is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see --
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)
via A Word a Day, 3/17/09
ddobbs | March 6, 2009Ezra Klein reviews Obama's handling of yesterday's health summit -- a piece well worth reading for a taste of how sharply focused and serious Obama is about truly comprehensive health-care reform.
Karen Tumlty, a health-care expert, describes in Time her own family's grueling wrestling match with the health-insurance industry. A timely story -- no pun intended -- as it makes painfully clear that it's not just the 46 million people uninsured (did I just say "just" 46 million people) who fare poorly in the current system.
Genetic Future looks at how a Victorian-era height-prediction system…