Scientists should lose the hype and just get on with the work
This week I went to the funeral of an unsung great man of math education, Steve Sigur, who taught at a local school for thirty-five years. He was always described as a gentle bear of a man, and that he was.
With his great height, huge belly, and big red scraggly beard, he looked like a mountain man, Read more
Low fertility helps the species but threatens cultures and some dreams.
Weddings get me thinking about reproductive success. I went to two this week, both outstanding professional couples, and I couldn't help wondering if and when they might make a contribution to the next generation's genetic and cultural mix.
And I do mean "if."
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Genes in chocolate trees, cancers, and sea water are confirming Darwin and changing the world.
I knew genomics had come of age when I heard they were sequencing the chocolate genome-or the tree chocolate comes from, anyway. That’s Theobroma (“food of the gods”) cacao, which is so beset by diseases that the world’s chocolate addicts, me included, could lose our fix.
"Maladaptive" habits help the poor cope with their stressful lives, and the best healers don't blame them.
I recently had the privilege of "shadowing" one of the best docs I know as she made hospital rounds at Grady. Grady is one of those places-like Los Angeles County Hospital, Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and Kings County in Brooklyn where I volunteered as a high school kid-
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Obama and McCain have different ideas about war. Neither may be able to prevent it.
Is war a permanent part of the human condition?
I’ve been interested in this question since high school, when an inspiring teacher named Dora Venit spent two years confronting me with the grotesque facts of history. It was not very long after the Holocaust, and the height of the Cold War.
Prejudices change slowly, but they change.
Anthropologists take the long view. Fads come and go–hula hoops, Heavy Metal–but where it counts, culture change–cultural evolution, really–is slow.
Take racial equality for instance. I am always amazed by people who say that affirmative action has gone on long enough.
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Next to the Genome, Culture is a Mess, and Its Evolution a Much Harder Puzzle
Okay, so what are memes? This is a term invented 30 years ago by Richard Dawkins, to try to find an equivalent for genes in cultural evolution. The term is now in general usage among those who study cultural evolution, and it has a certain usefulness.
However, it’s a mess compared to the concept of gene. A gene is Read more
Maternal yearning has its day in court
In early April Texas state authorities entered the compound of a polygamous sect and took as many as 468 children into custody for their own protection, following an anonymous phone call accusing the sect of promoting sex between grown men and girls as young as thirteen.
Whose genome matters more–the weirdest mammal or the decoder of DNA?
This month my mailbox has been filled with genomic goodies. Last month we had Jim Watson’s very own genome–the discoverer of DNA is out there now with all his base pairs.
May 1st, Nature reported on variation in eight human genomes, not counting Jim’s. The idea was to spot “one-armed bandits,”
Welcome to the Age of Personal Genomics
I had a celebrity sighting in mid-town Manhattan a few weeks ago. It was unmistakable: the unkempt sparse white hair, the glasses slipping a bit on the nose, the eyes intense in conversation, the head leaning into the world—this was James Watson, who 55 years ago, with the late Francis Crick, played around with some cardboard cutouts representing nucleic acids and (with some help from Rosie Franklin’s X-rays) built the strange spiral that changed the world.