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Harvard’s Damning Report on Marc Hauser’s Fraud Charges
Ever since Marc Hauser’s 2011 resignation from Harvard amid findings of scientific misconduct, observers, critics, colleagues, and defenders have argued about Just How Bad His Behavior Was or Wasn’t....
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Social Service is Depressing, Oil and Gas Are Fun – Jobs Rated by Depression...
Depressing news you can use. Or possibly delight in, depending. From Neuroskeptic: An interesting study just published examines the rates of clinical depression experienced by workers in different...
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Hard-Wired to NOT Be Hard-Wired – Pat Clarkin on Our Marvelous Flexibility
Zebra finches in conversation. Photo by RHL Images, via Flickr. Humans are hard-wired not to be hard-wired. That phrase, drawn from Ken Weiss, is perhaps the simplest of the many ways that Patrick...
View ArticleThe Net’s Brightest Glitter, from Bonobos to Nabokov
Best of the Week: Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem. by Patrick Clarkin. We’ve built a wall between genes and environment. Clarkin tears it down. And in Does Nature Need to be...
View ArticleRead two* of these and call. Wed Jul 2 2014 edition
Rose Eveleth on a long string of virtual visits to the real town that shares her name In what was once a lively town, the mining industry collapsed, the population thinned, and businesses went away....
View ArticleCan Bergdahl’s statements in therapy be used against him?
That’s what this story from the LA Times appears to say. If that’s true, seems something is amiss. Surely a POW being debriefed has some a right to confidential psychotherapy? If anyone knows (really...
View ArticleWhites Win, Because Genes. My Times review of “A Troublesome Inheritance”
Today the New York Times Book Review published its advance online version of my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance. (It will appear in print this Sunday.) Others have already reviewed...
View ArticleTalking Genetics and Writing with David Goodman
My journalist friend and colleague David Goodman had me on his radio show “The Vermont Conversation” this past Wednesday, over at WDEV’s fine studios in Waterbury, Vermont, and we spent a few minutes...
View ArticleHuge Study Throws Tiny Bit More Light on Schizophrenia
An unprecedently large genetic study of schizophrenia has linked a bunch of new genes to this confusing ailment. This’ll take years, decades maybe, to sort out, partly because if you repeated the study...
View ArticleThe Limits of Lawyers, Murderers, Maggots, and Brain Scans
Anne Fausto-Sterling is killing it lately on the brain and gene beat. She does so again here with On Maggots and Brain Scans What do brain images really tell us? What critical questions can a layperson...
View ArticleA game about depression draws fire, because misogyny.
Women in tech get harassed for all sorts of idiotic reasons, mainly because the world, and perhaps tech in particular, seems overstuffed with misogynist creeps. To the list of Things That Excite...
View ArticlePaleo-tourist puts a bug up his ass. John Hawks calls BS.
From Hawks: Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I replaced 99% of the genes in my...
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Schizophrenia is a thing we all carry a bit of.
Michael O’Donovan and Kenneth Kendler, eminences in psychiatric genetics for good reason, look at the implications of recent (early) progress in identifying the dispersed genetic roots of...
View ArticleToday’s Nobel was about how the brain navigates space. Here’s what happens...
Today’s Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology went to a trio of researchers who figured out the basis of how the brain tracks and manages space, a task that is closely tied to memory. This ability to...
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Christine Kenneally’s Rich, Rompy Read on Genes
Illo by Eric Nyquist, via NY Times. Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father — a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished —...
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Yaba-daba – my “Social Life of Genomes” story won a AAAS award.
A good day (so far). The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that “The Social Life of Genes” (Pacific Standard, Sept/Oct 2013), my article on how the genome...
View ArticleIs SCOTUS’s gambit to wreck healthcare unprecedented?
Linda Greenhouse says it is — and that next to SCOTUS’s decision to put Obamacare on the choppping block, Bush v. Gore was nothing. There was no urgency. There was no crisis of governance, not even a...
View ArticleJames Watson as genetic error
Adam Rutherford addresses James Watson’s attempt to dodge his past: Like all contemporary biologists, my career is largely based on his work. The medal? If I could afford it, I wouldn’t want it. My...
View ArticleThe Art of Deception: When Kindness is a Lure to Betrayal
Over at NPR, Barbara King has a post about the mostly amusing deceptions that chimpanzee mothers sometimes engage in. It’s a nice post that includes an amusing video, which I’ve pasted below; note the...
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The war on Billie Holiday; happy marriages; racist Oregon
Billie Holiday and her dog, Mister, in NYC, 1946. Photo courtesy Wikimedia. The War on Drugs started with Billie Holiday. – Johann Hari, POLITICO Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger...
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