I really had no idea of that this had happened on this scale: “The dark shadow of thalidomide is still with us. The original catastrophe maimed 20,000 babies and killed 80,000”. Harold Evans at The Guardian on new research by the UK Thalidomide Trust uncovering evidence that this was a crime and not a tragic accident, revealing German government corruption on a massive scale.
Sociobiology cat fight: Richard Dawkins reviews E.O. Wilson’s “Social Conquest of the Earth” for Prospect Magazine: “Nobody doubts that some groups survive better than others. What is controversial is the idea that differential group survival drives evolution, as differential individual survival does. The American grey squirrel is driving our native red squirrel to extinction, no doubt because it happens to have certain advantages. That’s differential group survival. But you’d never say of any part of a squirrel that it evolved to promote the welfare of the grey squirrel over the red. Wilson wouldn’t say anything so silly about squirrels. He doesn’t realise that what he does say, if you examine it carefully, is as implausible and as unsupported by evidence.”
While we’re on the subject of picking fights, Gary Marcus starts his “How to study the brain” piece at the Chronicle with this subtle critique: “The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons and trillions, perhaps hundreds of trillions, of intricate interconnections among those neurons. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of different kinds of cells within the brain. And—after nearly two centuries of research—exactly zero convincing theories of how it all works.”
John Pickrell at Scientific American on how fake fossils pervert paleontology, and the economics of digging for some of the world’s most precious specimens in one of China’s poorest regions. ”Archaeoraptor was soon dubbed the ‘Piltdown bird’ and the ‘Piltdown chicken’ by the press, in reference to the biggest fossil hoax of all time, in which faked remains of putative early hominids were dug up from Piltdown in England in 1912.”
Quantum entanglement- what Einstein called “spooky actions at a distance”, an attempt to describe equations, or a description of reality? “Starting in the early 1970s, a few intrepid physicists — in the face of critics who felt such “philosophical” research was fit only for crackpots — found that the answer appeared to be yes.” David Kaiser writes in the New York Times on quantum weirdness.
Alice Fishburn of the Financial Times (whose access policy is a mystery to me- I did get this article without subscription or subterfuge) speaks to Atul Gawande about medical progress and some minor issues like mortality and what exactly is the point of life: ”What Gawande wants the medical professionals of the future to take on board is the idea that wellbeing means more than survival. Each of us has different priorities that make our lives worth living. “Since [doctors] have the capacity to keep trying not just to relieve pain but . . . keep you on machines and extend life, we lose sight of what people might want to be alive for,” he says. For Gawande, as long as his brain is still working, he’s happy to be kept going. In one of the stories he relates, an elderly man only wants to stay alive if he is able to continue eating chocolate ice cream and watching football.”
If you’re tired of calculating how many oreos would you have to line up to reach the moon or how many Lamborghinis bumper-to-bumper would it take to circle the Earth, Patrick Clarkin stretches an imaginary line not in space, but in time: “About 12 and a half minutes into the video, the narrator informs us that the first modern human appeared around 100,000 years ago, and would stand about 3 miles behind us in our chain of ancestors. We now think the first modern humans appeared earlier than this (the video is a bit dated), around 200,000 years ago, so we can double that estimate to about 6 miles.”
Evolutionary Biologist and uber-catperson Jerry Coyne in his blog Why Evolution is True on a recent paper examining the genetics of feline domestication: “(…) there’s only so much you can say about the evolution of Felis silvestris catus from sequencing its genome and comparing it to genomes of other mammals. And, of course, cats have been domesticated for only around 10,000 years, so there hasn’t been much time for evolution, especially because artificial selection practiced on cats has been less intense than that practiced on dogs. Cats, after all, are still semi-feral, not much removed from their wild ancestor, the Middle Eastern subspecies of the European wildcat (F. s. lybica). And they keep escaping and mating with their wild ancestors, unlike dogs.”
