Quiz: name that synonym! | Mind your language

Jamie Fahey: Now you know your popular orange vegetables from your war-torn republics, can you work out what these phrases refer to?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jun 2011 | 5:55 am

Gene related to aging plays role in stem cell differentiation

A gene shown to play a role in the aging process appears to play a role in the regulation of the differentiation of embryonic stem cells, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Could life survive on Mars? Yes, expert says

Researchers have discovered that methane-eating bacteria survive in a highly unique spring located on Axel Heiberg Island in Canada's extreme North. Microbiologists explain that the Lost Hammer spring supports microbial life, that the spring is similar to possible past or present springs on Mars, and that therefore they too could support life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

A sense of humor helps keep you healthy until retirement age

A sense of humor helps to keep people healthy and increases their chances of reaching retirement age. But after the age of 70, the health benefits of humor decrease, researchers have found.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Autism finding could lead to simple urine test for the condition

Children with autism have a different chemical fingerprint in their urine than non-autistic children, according to new research. The researchers suggest that their findings could ultimately lead to a simple urine test to determine whether or not a young child has autism.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Video game research project to help blind children exercise

Researchers have developed a motion-sensing-based tennis and bowling "exergame" that will help the visually impaired, especially children become more physically active.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

Scientists capture very moment blood flow begins

By capturing movies of both the blood and vasculature of zebrafish embryos, each less than two millimeters long, researchers have been able for the first time to see the very moment that blood begins to flow.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

New gene therapy proves effective in treating severe heart failure

Researchers have developed a new gene therapy that is safe and effective in reversing advanced heart failure. SERCA2a is a gene therapy designed to stimulate production of an enzyme that enables the failing heart to pump more effectively. In a Phase II study, SERCA2a injection through a routine minimally invasive cardiac catheterization was safe and showed clinical benefit in treating this patient population and decreasing the severity of heart failure.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Glaciers in Tibet were never really large

The Tibetan Plateau is the largest and highest mountain region on Earth with glaciers whose meltwater provides the water supply for more than 1.3 billion people through several of the largest rivers in Asia. Glaciers in Tibet have remained relatively small and have not been much larger than today for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years back in time, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Mongooses pass traditions on to their young, too

For the passing on of traditions, it appears that an especially big brain isn't required. Even mongooses in the wild carry out traditions that are passed down from one generation to the next, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Stroke prevention study in children with sickle cell anemia, iron overload stopped early

Researchers have stopped a clinical trial evaluating a new approach to reduce the risk of recurrent stroke in children with sickle cell anemia and iron overload because of evidence that the new treatment was unlikely to prove better than the existing treatment.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 9:00 am

Obama: I'll stand with the Gulf (AP)

AP - President Barack Obama promised Saturday to stand with the people of the Gulf Coast "until they are made whole" from the oil spill catastrophe.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 4:15 am

BP siphons gushing oil while Obama defends his actions (Reuters)

Reuters - President Barack Obama on Saturday defended his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, while BP Plc said it aims to siphon off most of the oil gushing from the ruptured deep-sea wellhead within days.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 4:01 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Severe weather was expected to stretch from the Midwest into New England on Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 3:06 am

Birds frozen in oil: image of a desperate summer (AP)

AP - They are the ghastly images of a summer fouled before it started. Squawking seagulls and majestic brown pelicans coated in oil. Click. Gunk dripping from their beaks. Click. Big eyes wide open. Click. Even the professionals want to turn away. They can't.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 1:46 am

BP cites progress in capping well (AFP)

AFP - BP appeared to make progress early Saturday in capping the worst oil spill in US history, but President Barack Obama warned the British energy giant not to shortchange victims of the disaster.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2010 | 1:39 am

The one that got away

One tiny brain-imaging study of fatty acids has been used to endorse fish oil as education's magic pill

Fish oil helps schoolchildren to concentrate ran a headline in the Observer. Regular readers will remember the omega-3 fish oil pill issue. The entire British news media has been claiming for several years now that there are trials showing that the pill improves school performance and behaviour in mainstream children, despite the fact that no such trial has ever been published.

There is something very attractive about the idea that solutions to complex problems in education lie in a pill.

So have things changed? The Observer's health correspondent, Denis Campbell, is on the case, and it certainly sounds as if they have. "Boys aged 8-11 who were given doses once or twice a day of docosahexaenoic acid, an essential fatty acid known as DHA, showed big improvements in their performance during tasks involving attention."

Great. "The researchers gave 33 US schoolboys 400mg or 1,200mg doses of DHA, or a placebo every day for eight weeks. Those who had received the high doses did much better in mental tasks involving mathematical challenges."

Brilliant news. Is it true? After some effort, I tracked down the academic paper. The first thing to note is that this study was not a trial of whether fish oil pills improve children's performance; it was a brain imaging study. They took 33 children, split them into three groups (of 9, 10 and 12 children) and gave them either: no omega-3, a small dose, or a big dose. The children performed some attention tasks in a brain scanner, to see if bits of their brains lit up differently.

Why am I saying omega-3? Because it wasn't a study of fish oil, as the Observer says, but of omega-3 fatty acids derived from algae. Small print.

If this had been a trial to detect whether omega-3 improves performance, it would be laughably small: a dozen children in each group.

While small studies aren't entirely useless, as amateurs often claim, you do have a very small number of observations to work from, so your study is much more prone to error from the simple play of chance. A study with 11 children in each arm could conceivably detect an effect, but only if the fish oil caused a gigantic and unambiguous improvement in all the children who got it, and none of those youngsters taking the placebo improved.

This paper showed no difference in performance at all. Since it was a brain imaging study, not a trial, the results of the children's actual performance in the attention task was only reported in a single paragraph. But these results were clear: "There were no significant group differences in percentage correct, commission errors, discriminability, or reaction time."

So this is all looking pretty wrong. Are we even talking about the same academic paper? I've a long-standing campaign to get mainstream media to link to original academic papers when they write about them, at least online, with some limited success on the BBC website. I asked the writer Campbell which academic paper he was referring to, but he declined to answer, and passed me on the Stephen Pritchard, the readers' editor for the Observer, who answered a couple of days later to say he did not understand why he was being involved. Eventually Campbell confirmed, but through Pritchard, that it was indeed a paper from the April edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

If we are very generous, is it informative, in any sense, that a brain area lights up differently in a scanner after some pills? Intellectually, it may be. But doctors get very accustomed to drug company sales reps and enthusiastic researchers who approach them with an exciting theoretical reason as to why one treatment should be better than another (or better than life as usual without the miracle treatment): maybe their intervention works selectively on only one kind of receptor molecule, for example, so it should therefore have fewer side effects.

Similarly, drug reps and researchers will often announce that their intervention has some kind of effect on some kind of elaborate measure of some kind of surrogate outcome: maybe a molecule in the blood goes up in concentration, or down, in a way that suggests the intervention might be effective.

This is all very well. But it's not the same as showing that something really does actually work back here in the real world. Medicine is overflowing with unfulfilled promises from this kind of early theoretical research. It's not even in the same ballpark as showing that something works.

Oddly enough, someone has now finally conducted a proper trial of fish oil pills, in mainstream children, to see if they work: a well-conducted, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, in 450 children aged 8–10 years from a mainstream school population. It was published in full this year – and the researchers found no improvement. Show me the news headlines about that paper.

Meanwhile, Euromonitor estimates global sales for fish oil pills to be at $2bn, having doubled in five years, with sales projected to reach $2.5bn by 2012. The pills are now the single best-selling product in the UK food supplement market. This has only been possible with the kind assistance of the British media, and their eagerness for stories about the magic intelligence pill.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Jun 2010 | 1:00 am

Obama warning over Gulf optimism

President Obama says it is too early to be optimistic over oil spill progress, as he pays a third visit to the US Gulf coast.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Jun 2010 | 12:37 am

Successful blast-off for Falcon 9

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which could one day carry astronauts, launches successfully on its maiden test flight.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 10:23 pm

BP capturing oil from Gulf gusher, Obama slams firm (Reuters)

Reuters - BP began capturing some oil spewing from its ruptured Gulf of Mexico well on Friday as President Barack Obama warned the company against skimping on compensation to residents and businesses hurt by the 46-day-old spill.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2010 | 9:13 pm

Jupiter collision 'was asteroid'

An object that hit Jupiter last year and left a scar the size of Pacific Ocean was probably an asteroid, say astronomers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 6:00 pm

Rome gets hotel made from rubbish

A hotel made from rubbish opens its doors in Italy's capital, Rome, as part of a campaign to raise awareness of beach pollution.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:49 pm

Disaster Laws: Will Gulf Oil Spill Change Anything? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Earlier this week, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) responded to the continuing Gulf oil leak by proposing new legislative action that would raise the liability BP could face for the disaster. Sen. Schumer's action is merely the latest move in Washington's month-long reaction to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and if history is any guide, it won't be the last.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:31 pm

Feds settle lawsuit over protection for penguins (AP)

AP - Several species of penguins will get special protection after a federal judge in San Francisco approved a legal settlement involving the Endangered Species Act.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:29 pm

Obama Space Plan 'Vindicated' by Private Rocket Launch, Builder Says (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The successful liftoff of a new private rocket helps vindicate President Barack Obama's plan to rely on commercial spaceships to carry cargo and possibly astronauts to orbit, the rocket's millionaire owner said.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:15 pm

Millionaire's test rocket reaches orbit on 1st try (AP)

AP - A multimillionaire's test rocket blasted off on its maiden voyage Friday and successfully reached orbit in a dry run for NASA's push to go commercial.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:06 pm

Marilynne Robinson: Can science solve life's mysteries?

Far from providing all the answers, many bestselling science and philosophy books are reductionist, argues Marilynne Robinson in her new book Absence of Mind

It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of brilliant and diligent labour. And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us. There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say, if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms.

Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word "I" and to mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception and thought. For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently. Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM. Putting to one side the question of their meaning as the name and character by which the God of Moses would be known, these are words any human being can say about herself, and does say, though always with a modifier of some kind. I am hungry, I am comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent into particularity in every statement of this kind – Being itself made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being – may only startle in the dark of night, when the intuition comes that there is no proportion between the great given of existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which it is inevitably forced. "I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

There is much speculation about the nature of the mind, its relation to the brain, even doubt that the word "mind" is meaningful. According to EO Wilson, "The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbour a nonphysical mind". Perhaps this statement is to be taken as tongue in cheek. But to prove a negative, or to treat it as having been proved, is, oddly enough, an old and essential strategy of positivism. So I do feel obliged to point out that if such a site could be found in the brain, then the mind would be physical in the same sense that anything else with a locus in the brain is physical. To define the mind as nonphysical in the first place clearly prejudices his conclusion. Steven Pinker, on the soul, asks, "How does the spook interact with solid matter? How does an ethereal nothing respond to flashes, pokes and beeps and get arms and legs to move? Another problem is the overwhelming evidence that the mind is the activity of the brain. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals," and so on. By identifying the soul with the mind, the mind with the brain, and noting the brain's vulnerability as a physical object, he feels he has debunked a conception of the soul that only those who find the word meaningless would ever have entertained.

This declension, from the ethereality of the mind/soul as spirit to the reality of the mind/brain as a lump of meat, is dependent, conceptually and for its effects, on precisely the antique dualism these writers who claim to speak for science believe they reject and refute. If complex life is the marvel we all say it is, quite possibly unique to this planet, then meat is, so to speak, that marvel in its incarnate form. It was dualism that pitted the spirit against the flesh, investing spirit with all that is lofty at the expense of flesh, which is by contrast understood as coarse and base. It only perpetuates dualist thinking to treat the physical as if it were in any way sufficiently described in disparaging terms. If the mind is the activity of the brain, this means only that the brain is capable of such lofty and astonishing things that their expression has been given the names mind, and soul, and spirit. Complex life may well be the wonder of the universe, and if it is, its status is not diminished by the fact that we can indeed bisect it, that we kill it routinely.

In any case, Wilson's conception of mind clearly has also taken on the properties of the soul, at least as that entity is understood by those eager to insist that there is no ghost in the machine. As Bertrand Russell pointed out decades before Gilbert Ryle coined this potent phrase, the old, confident distinction between materiality and nonmateriality is not a thing modern science can endorse. Physicists say a change in a split photon occurs simultaneously in its severed half, at any theoretical distance. As if there were no time or space, this information of change passes instantly from one to the other. Is an event that defies any understanding we have of causality a physical event? Yes. Can the seeming timelessness and spacelessness that mediate this change also be called physical? Presumably, since they have unambiguous physical consequences. Then perhaps we cannot claim to know the nature of the physical, and perhaps we ought not to be so confident in opposing it to a real or imagined nonphysical. These terms, as conventionally used, are not identical with the terms "real" and "unreal", though the belief that they are is the oldest tenet of positivism. The old notion of dualism should be put aside, now that we know a little about the uncanny properties of the finer textures of the physical. If, as some have suggested, quantum phenomena govern the brain, evidence for the fact is not likely to be found in scrutiny of lobes or glands or by means of any primitive understanding of the brain's materiality.

Let us say the mind is what the brain does. This is a definition that makes the mind, whatever else, a participant in the whole history and experience of the body. Pinker offers the same definition, but modifies it differently. He says, "The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation" – excluding the felt experience of thinking, with all its diverse burdens and colorations. Elsewhere he says, with the certitude typical of his genre, "Family feelings are designed to help our genes replicate themselves, but we cannot see or smell genes . . . Our emotions about kin use a kind of inverse genetics to guess which of the organisms we interact with are likely to share our genes (for example, if someone appears to have the same parents as you do, treat the person as if their genetic wellbeing overlaps with yours)." And again we have the self we experience at a qualitative remove from what the brain really does. Presumably we are seduced into collaborating in the perpetuation of some part of our genetic inheritance by those moments of love and embrace. But why are these seductions necessary? Why are they lovely to us? Why would nature bother to distract us with them? Why do we stand apart from nature in such a way that the interests that really move us should be concealed from us? Might there not be fewer of these interfamilial crimes, honour killings, child abandonments, if nature had made us straightforwardly aware that urgencies more or less our own were being served in our propagating and nurturing? There is more than a hint of dualism in the notion that some better self – the term seems fair – has to be distracted by ingratiating pleasures to accommodate the practical business of biology.

This automaton language of Pinker's sounds a bit like Descartes. But Descartes theorised that the pineal gland, central and singular in the symmetries of the brain, moved one way or another to permit or obstruct the actions of the body, which he knew were governed by the brain. In his theory, the impressions of the senses, integrated in this gland, were appraised by the soul, which in Descartes is a term that seems pointedly synonymous with the mind. That is to say, his interest is in cognition and reason, not sin or salvation, and this in a physical and intellectual landscape inflamed by theological controversy in which those concepts figured prominently. Still, it is the soul that appraises what the mind integrates. In this way Descartes acknowledges the complexity of thinking, judging, and in his way incorporates the feeling of consciousness and the complexity of it more adequately than most theorists do now. He speaks of the mind, which he calls "I, that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am", in ways that assume it is nevertheless accessible to instruction and correction by an I that stands apart from it. To correct the syntax of his thinking so that the anomaly is removed would be to deprive it of its power as testimony – we do indeed continuously stand apart from ourselves, appraising. Every higher act of the mind, intellectual, aesthetic, or moral, is, paradoxically, also an exercise in self-doubt, self-scrutiny.

What Descartes actually intended by the words "soul" and "mind" seems to me an open question for Descartes himself. Clearly they are no mere ghost or illusion. No doubt there are volumes to be consulted on this subject. What their meanings are for us as inheritors of the thought of the modern period is a more manageable question. I am excluding the kind of thinking on this point that tends toward the model of the wager. According to this model, we place our faith in an understanding of the one thing needful, and, ultimately, suffer or triumph depending on the correctness of our choice. By these lights the soul exists primarily to be saved or lost. It is hardly more our intimate companion in mortal time than is the mind or brain by the reckoning of the positivists, behaviourists, neo-Darwinists and Freudians. The soul, in this understanding of it, is easily characterised by the nonreligious as a fearful and self-interested idea, as the product of acculturation or a fetish of the primitive brain rather than as a name for an aspect of deep experience. Therefore it is readily dismissed as a phantom of the mind, and the mind is all the more readily dismissed for its harbouring of such fears and delusions.

Descartes complains that "the philosophers of the schools accept as a maxim that there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in the senses". The strictures of this style of thought are indeed very old. It strikes me that the word "senses" is in need of definition. As it is used, even by these schoolmen, it seems to signify only those means by which we take in information about our environment, including our own bodies, presumably. Pinker says, "The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle."

But the mind, or the brain, a part of the body just as Wilson says it is, is deeply sensitive to itself. Guilt, nostalgia, the pleasure of anticipation, even the shock of a realisation, all arise out of an event that occurs entirely in the mind or brain, and they are as potent as other sensations. Consistency would require a belief in the nonphysical character of the mind to exclude them from the general category of experience. If it is objected that all these things are ultimately dependent on images and sensations first gleaned from the world by the senses, this might be granted, on the condition that the sensory experience retained in the mind is understood to have the character the mind has given it. And it might be granted if sensory experience is understood to function as language does, both enabling thought and conforming it in large part to its own context, its own limitations. Anyone's sensory experience of the world is circumstantial and cultural, qualified by context and perspective, a fact which again suggests that the mind's awareness of itself is of a kind with its awareness of physical reality. The mind, like the body, is very much placed in the world. Those who claim to dismiss the mind/body dichotomy actually perpetuate it when they exclude the mind's self-awareness from among the data of human nature.

What grounds can there be for doubting that a sufficient biological account of the brain would yield the complex phenomenon we know and experience as the mind? It is only the pertinacity of the mind/body dichotomy that sustains the notion that a sufficient biological account of the brain would be reductionist in the negative sense. Such thinking is starkly at odds with our awareness of the utter brilliance of the physical body.

I do not myself believe that such an account of the brain will ever be made. Present research methods show the relatively greater activity of specific regions of the brain in response to certain stimuli or in the course of certain mental or physical behaviours. But in fact it hardly seems possible that in practice the region of the brain that yields speech would not be deeply integrated with the regions that govern social behaviour as well as memory and imagination, to degrees varying with circumstances. Nor does it seem possible that each of these would not under all circumstances profoundly modify the others, in keeping with learning and with inherited and other qualities specific to any particular brain. What should we call the presiding intelligence that orchestrates the decision to speak as a moment requires? What governs the inflections that make any utterance unmistakably the words of one speaker in this whole language-saturated world? To say it is the brain is insufficient, over-general, implying nothing about nuance and individuation. Much better to call it the mind.

If the brain at the level of complex and nuanced interaction with itself does indeed become mind, then the reductionist approach insisted upon by writers on the subject is not capable of yielding evidence of mind's existence, let alone an account of its functioning.

The strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science, and the assumptions of science, however tried and rational, are very inclined to encourage false expectations. As a notable example, no one expected to find that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that the rate of its acceleration is accelerating. It is a tribute to the brilliance of science that we can know such things. And it is also an illustration of the fact that science does not foreclose possibility, including discoveries that overturn very fundamental assumptions, and that it is not a final statement about reality but a highly fruitful mode of inquiry into it.

The neo-Darwinists argue that the brain evolved to maximise the chance of genetic survival, to negotiate access to food and sex, presumably before the species evolved to the point where the prolonged helplessness of infants made genetic survival dependent in some degree on cooperation. Therefore, they tell us, we may not assume that any motive can depart from an essential qualitative likeness to these original motives. The "evolutionary epic" explains the brain exhaustively. But "the material" itself is an artifact of the scale at which we perceive. We know that we abide with quarks and constellations, in a reality unknowable by us in a degree we will never be able to calculate, but reality all the same, the stuff and the matrix of our supposedly quotidian existence. We know that within, throughout, the solid substantiality of our experience, indeterminacy reigns. Making use of the conceptual vocabulary of science to exclude a possibility that in a present state of knowledge – or a former one – that vocabulary would seem to exclude, has been the mission of positivist thinking since Auguste Comte declared scientific knowledge effectively complete. If doing so is a reflex of the polemical impulse to assert the authority of science, understandable when the project was relatively new, it is by now an atavism that persists as a consequence of this same polemical impulse. The ancient antagonist that has shaped positivism and parascientific thought and continues to inspire its missionary zeal is religion. For cultural and historical reasons, the religions against which it has opposed itself are Christianity and Judaism, both of which must be called anthropologies, whatever else. "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" The very question is an assertion that mindfulness is an attribute of God, as well as of man, a statement of the sense of deep meaning inhering in mindfulness.

If I were not a religious person, but wished to make an account of religion, I believe I would tend towards the Feuerbachian view that religion is a human projection of humanity's conceptions of beauty, goodness, power and other valued things, a humanising of experience by understanding it as structured around and mirroring back these values. Then it would resemble art, with which it is strongly associated. But this would dignify religion and characterise the mind as outwardly and imaginatively engaged with the world, as, in parascientific thought after Comte, it never is. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, says of religion, "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life". Then, two pages on, he says, "The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times: it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one . . . Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system." And then he says, "As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it."

It seems a little strange that religion is infantile but the desire for pleasure, which "dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start", is not, or not, at least, in any pejorative sense. It seems strange as well that though "there is no possibility at all of its being carried out", the programme of the pleasure principle is not also, like religion, "foreign to reality". Pinker says, "Religion is a desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success". Then a little farther on he lists the "imponderables" that lie behind the human tendency towards religion and also philosophy. These imponderables are consciousness in the sense of sentience or subjective experience, the self, free will, conceptual meaning, knowledge and morality. He says, "Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our brains are organs, not pipelines to the truth."

How odd that these "imponderables" should be just the kind of thing humankind has pondered endlessly. Neo-Darwinism allows for hypertrophy, the phenomenon by which evolution overshoots its mark and produces some consequence not strictly useful to the ends of genetic replication, the human brain as case in point. How strange it would be, then, that this accident, this excess, should feel a tropism toward what Pinker himself calls "the truth". The great difference between parascientific thought on one hand and religion and traditional philosophy on the other is perhaps encapsulated in that word "solve", assuming the use of the word is not simply a casual imprecision. It does seem as though, for the purposes of these writers, science is the conquest of mystery, as it was for Auguste Comte and as it certainly was not for Isaac Newton. A difference between a Newton and a Comte, between science and parascience, is the desire in the latter case to treat scientific knowledge as complete, at least in its methods and assumptions, in order to further the primary object of closing questions about human nature and the human circumstance.

Science has arrived at a cluster of hypotheses about the first instant of creation. They attempt description, in the manner of science. In course of time, on various grounds, one description might prove to be more satisfactory than others. A consensus might be arrived at about the nature of a very fecund particle whose eruption became everything we know, and a great deal more beside. We might learn at some point whether time was created together with this universe or exists independently of it. The questions to which science in its most sophisticated forms has come would have been the imponderables of philosophy a few generations ago, of theology a few centuries ago, of religion a few millennia ago. Why this ancient instinct for the greatest questions? It is striking that Freud identifies religion with the meaning of life, and Pinker identifies it with the high-order questions humankind has posed to itself from antiquity. Then both writers for all purposes dismiss these things as insoluble, as if that were a legitimate reason to dismiss any question. We may never know why gravity is so much weaker than, in theory, it should be, or know if we are only one among any number of actual and potential universes. But every real question is fruitful, as the history of human thought so clearly demonstrates.

And "fruitful" is by no means a synonym for "soluble". What is man? One answer on offer is, An organism whose haunting questions perhaps ought not to be meaningful to the organ that generates them, lacking as it is in any means of "solving" them. Another answer might be, It is still too soon to tell. We might be the creature who brings life on this planet to an end, and we might be the creature who awakens to the privileges that inhere in our nature – selfhood, consciousness, even our biologically anomalous craving for "the truth" – and enjoys and enhances them. Mysteriously, neither possibility precludes the other. Our nature will describe itself as we respond to new circumstances in a world that changes continuously. So long as the human mind exists to impose itself on reality, as it has already done so profoundly, what it is and what we are must remain an open question.

Each of us lives intensely within herself or himself, continuously assimilating past and present experience to a narrative and vision that are unique in every case yet profoundly communicable, whence the arts. And we all live in a great reef of collective experience, past and present, that we receive and preserve and modify. William James says data should be thought of not as givens but as gifts, this by way of maintaining an appropriate humility in the face of what we think we know. The gifts we bring to the problem of making an account of the mind are overwhelmingly rich, severally and together. This is not an excuse for excluding them from consideration. History and civilisation are an authoritative record the mind has left, is leaving, and will leave, and objectivity deserving the name would take this record as a starting point. In practical terms, this would mean doing as the humanists have done since the building of the library of Alexandria, more or less. Humankind never ceases to express itself in new terms, and the data at hand are inevitably flawed and partial. But the complexity of the object, the human brain, and all associated phenomena are at the centre of the question, inextricable from it. The schools of thought I have criticised exclude the great fact of human exceptionalism, though no one would deny that it is a pure expression of the uniqueness of the human brain. A primary assumption of the evolutionary model behind neo-Darwinism is that development can be traced back through a series of subtly incremental changes. At what for our purposes is the terminus of all these changes there emerges, voila, the world as we know it. The neatness of this argument has always bothered me, but this is no refutation of it, nor am I interested in refuting it. I wish only to point out that there are certain things it should not be taken to imply. For example, it does not imply that a species carries forward an essential similarity to its ancestors. A bird is not a latter-day dinosaur. We can assume the ancestors ate and slept and mated, carrying on the universal business of animal life. Still, whatever the shared genetic history of beast and bird, a transformative change occurred over the millennia, and to find the modern sparrow implicit in the thunder lizard is quite certainly an error, if one wishes to make an ornithological study of sparrow behaviour. On the same grounds, there is no reason to assume our species resembles in any essential way the ancient primates whose genes we carry. It is a strategy of parascientific argument to strip away culture-making, as if it were a ruse and a concealment within which lurked the imagined primitive who is for them our true nature.

Here is another instance of evolution, to illustrate my point. The universe passed through its unimaginable first moment, first year, first billion years, wresting itself from whatever state of nonexistence, inflating, contorting, resolving into space and matter, bursting into light. Matter condenses, stars live out their generations. Then, very late, there is added to the universe of being a shaped stick or stone, a jug, a cuneiform tablet. They appear on a tiny, teetering, lopsided planet, and they demand wholly new vocabularies of description for reality at every scale. What but the energies of the universe could be expressed in the Great Wall of China, the St Matthew Passion? For our purposes, there is nothing else. Yet language that would have been fully adequate to describe the ages before the appearance of the first artifact would have had to be enlarged by concepts like agency and intention, words like creation, that would query the great universe itself. Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimised ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us, a change gradualism could not predict – if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are.

This is an edited extract from Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind (Yale).

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:06 pm

Sue Arnold's audiobook roundup: Pullman, religion and the afterlife | Audiobook reviews

Sue Arnold's audiobook choice

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, written and read by Philip Pullman (3½hrs unabridged, Canongate, £16.99)

If you've read His Dark Materials, Pullman's action-packed trilogy about alternate worlds, witchcraft, armoured bears and the powers of darkness (and if you haven't you should, but make sure it's the original unabridged BBC version read by the author), you won't need reminding that he's a brilliant storyteller. True to form, his version of the gospels has credulous Mary being impregnated by a local lad posing as a divine messenger and later giving birth to twins, Jesus and his sickly younger brother, Christ. Jesus is totally straightforward. He knows he's the son of God but he doesn't do celebrity or miracles to make his point. When his disciples tell him that 5,000 people need feeding, he says, don't worry – he's got some bread, and people always have some dried fish or a few raisins in their pockets. And he's right. Christ, on the other hand, is complex, tormented, scheming. While he recognises his brother's divine mission, he knows that without a few flashy crowd-pulling signs and wonders – throwing yourself off a crag in the wilderness, say, on to the rocks below and surviving – the public won't buy it. He's right, too, of course. Ever well-intentioned, Christ assumes the Judas role, betrays his big brother, fixes the resurrection, tweaks the historical record he has been keeping of Jesus's life for a mysterious stranger, and then goes home and settles down to married life. Clever and thought-provoking – but give me Serafina Pekkala every time.

Mark's Gospel, read by Peter Wickham (2hrs unabridged, St Mark's Press, £12.99)

This is the real thing, untweaked, written circa AD65 by a close friend of St Peter, Jesus's key disciple. As a convent-educated child I must have read the gospels umpteen times, but don't remember any of them making JC as human as this tough-talking, impatient, often wearily exasperated man. "Do you still not see or understand?" he barks at his disciples who, yet again, have failed to grasp his meaning. "Are you so dull?" Yes, they certainly are, and irritable and quarrelsome; but it rings true, it's real. Mind you, it could just be Peter Wickham's brilliant reading.

Sum: Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman, read by Harriet Walter and others (2hrs 40mins, unabridged, Canongate, £16.99)

When you get to heaven you might find Mary Frankenstein Shelley, God's favourite author, sitting on a throne, or discover that God is actually a married couple anxious to try out their parenting skills on newcomers, or that despite the permanent San Diego climate, some rather gaunt-looking archangels are sitting on street corners with begging bowls. Wacky and whimsical; a little goes a long way.

The Ancestor's Tale, written and read by Richard Dawkins with Lalla Ward (9hrs abridged, Orion, £19.99)

Wherever you stand on the God debate, there is no better way of putting religion into perspective than by accompanying Dawkins on his 3bn-year genetic quest to discover how microbes evolved into men. Dawkins's "just one damn species after another" approach to genetics is deceptively casual. His academic credentials are impeccable but, better still for scientific klutzes like me, he's as good a storyteller as Pullman. The Chaucerian connection is a tad tricksy. On this pilgrimage, instead of the Knight's and the Nun's Priest's we have the Dodo's Tale and the Elephant Bird's Tale as we journey backwards in time to primordial Canterbury. There are 39 pitstops at genetically significant confluences. The first rendezvous is with chimpanzees 6m years ago, the 15th with the duck-billed platypus at 180m, and, not far behind (in genetic terms at least), come the protostomes circa 300m years ago. And we're still more than 2bn years short of our founder, the microbe in a termite's gut. So where exactly in the bigger picture, you may ask, do either Jesus or Christ feature?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:05 pm

Doctor, doctor: Does popcorn prevent cancer? | Medicine

US research suggests popcorn prevents cancer – can this be true, and should I let my kids eat more of it?

I read a research study, presented to the American Chemical Society, that popcorn is good for preventing cancer. Can this be true? Should I let my children eat a lot more of it?
There's a big problem in extrapolating from results reported in animals to human beings – and the popcorn story comes from an interesting but solitary animal study. We are very far from knowing how popcorn might change the risk of cancer in people, if it does at all. But we do know, from years of experience and our knowledge of nutrition, that excessive intake of popcorn can lead to obesity and probably also to overdosage of salt, which can induce high blood pressure. So if you encourage your children to overdo their popcorn consumption, you almost certainly won't change their cancer risk, but will probably increase their chances of heart attack and stroke. When we know a bit more about the reason for the apparent influence of popcorn on cancer in the laboratory – such as from a particular chemical in the mix – then we might be better able to make a judgment.

For the last three years or so, I've often woken up in the morning with a severe stiff neck that means I can't move my head to one side at all. The stiffness lasts for three or four days, is relieved only slightly by painkillers and there are no other symptoms. Could it be a virus? Should I be worried?
There's no evidence that a virus infection could lead to three years of symptoms like yours, so you have to look for another cause for your stiff neck. The fact that you wake up with it this way suggests that your posture when asleep isn't right – is your pillow firm enough to support your neck while you are sleeping? Active exercises to stretch your neck may also be an idea: a helpful one is the first stage of the Alexander technique, in which you lie on the floor with your head resting on something firm and just high enough to tilt your chin down slightly, and then stretch the rest of your body away from your head. This can stretch the neck muscles and prevent stiffness. If you can, lie like this for about 15 minutes, three times a day. You may be surprised by the results.

• Got a medical question for Dr Tom? Email doctordoctor@guardian.co.uk

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:02 pm

Glaciers' wane not all down to humans

Natural climate swings have had a major role in eroding Alpine ice.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/YDvRi17aFPo" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 4 Jun 2010 | 3:31 pm

Apple to Make 'TV that Includes Everything,' Analyst Says

The next big step in Apple consumer technology is to release a full-sized TV with Wi-Fi and storage built-in.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 3:20 pm

Scots: an auld dug with plenty of bite | Brian Logan

This great expressive language is a distillation of a country's history. To let Scots die would be a tragedy

I saw Rory Bremner performing recently, impersonating Gordon Brown. So leaden are his public pronouncements, joked Bremner, he sounds as if he's speaking a second language. How the audience laughed – in innocence, presumably, of the fact that, when Brown speaks standard English, he is speaking his second language. Brown is of a generation with my parents, and grew up calling a chimney a lum, an ear a lug, a frog a puddock, and the likes of David Cameron, a sleekit skellum. Gordon Brown grew up speaking Scots.

It's no surprise that Bremner (a Scotsman) should neglect this fact. As a Scottish government report revealed this year, 64% of people in Scotland do not consider Scots a language, "just a way of speaking". We Scots have spent 400 years being told (or worse, telling ourselves) that the language of Barbour's Bruce, of Robert Burns and Gavin Douglas – who wrote the first translation into any Anglic language of Virgil's Aeneid – is nothing more than a slovenly version of its sister tongue, English. But an auld dug snaks siccar – an old dog's bite holds fast. Despite centuries of neglect, the Scots language refuses to let go.

Should its tenacity be encouraged? That was the subject of a carnaptious (or bad-tempered) debate in Scotland after the release in January of Public Attitudes Towards the Scots Language. Cultural nationalists stressed the survey's positives (85% of respondents spoke Scots "at least some of the time", and more than half wanted it taught in schools), while a Tory spokesman dismissed his own national tongue as "a collection of regional dialects of the English language". At the same time, a collieshangie (some call it a controversy) broke out over the National Theatre of Scotland's refusal to stage classic works of Scots-language drama – particularly, Sir David Lyndsay's 1540 play, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. "As long as I am [here]," Vicky Featherstone, the NTS artistic director, was quoted as saying, "we shall not do any of these plays."

Here, I declare an interest. I write plays in Scots, one of which – a comedy about the Scottish Enlightenment called David Hume's Kilt – was developed at the NTS. The play stages one of the most ignominious moments in the history of the Scots tongue. In the mid-18th-century, "it is to Scotland that we look," said Voltaire, "for all our ideas of civilisation." But in that civilised land, English was already the medium of economic and social advancement. And its finest men of letters – including Hume, Adam Smith and James Boswell – were so ashamed of their native tongue they hired an elocutionist to purge "Scotticisms" from their speech. (The elocutionist was Irish.)

Not much has changed since Hume's day. As John Corbett of Glasgow University said of the recent report: "It suggests that many [Scottish] people don't rate their own speech very highly." That's a tragedy. Scots was undeniably one of the great languages of medieval Europe. Even the watered-down form that survives today can be as distinct from standard English as Czech from Slovak and Portuguese from Spanish. More importantly, it's a wonderfully expressive way to talk about the world.

That's why I write plays in Scots – because it's a vernacular that leaps from the page. In "this most onomatopoeic of languages" (says scholar Derrick McClure), you can be scunnert and stamagastert rather than surprised; skelpit, dirled or sklaffed instead of hit; and instead of just complaining, you peenge, yammer or girn. Scots is also a window into a unique way of seeing the world. In proverbs such as "A cock's aye crouse on his ain midden" Scotland's tough, sardonic history is distilled. To meekly let Scots die would be to lose irreplaceable insights into human experience. But with a little smeddum, or spirit, Scots could be saved – and celebrated.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Jun 2010 | 3:00 pm

SpaceX rocket soars on debut flight

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - An unmanned, privately built rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Friday on a successful test flight before it begins cargo runs to the International Space Station for NASA.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 4 Jun 2010 | 2:58 pm

Tabnapping Is a New Browser Security Threat

Tabnapping is the latest threat to computer security.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 2:57 pm

A Simple Cure to the Web's Effect on Your Concentration

The Internet is rerouting pathways in our brains, researchers say.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 2:51 pm

Grease Recycling Geeks Out

Computer experts are using mobile technology and a predictive software program to maximize travel time and fuel.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 2:22 pm

What exactly is wrong with the World Cup ball?

Engineers who designed the official World Cup football hit back at criticism of their ball by some players.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 1:57 pm

SpaceX Falcon Rocket Flies

SpaceX, the darling of commercial space advocates and whipping boy of its foes, defied the odds Friday and sent a new rocket into orbit, a stunning achievement considering the company had to quickly recover from a trio of setbacks earlier ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 1:52 pm

Do Shots Ease Allergy Symptoms?

Shots don’t work on all allergies or all people.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 1:38 pm

Coming Soon: A Foldable iPad?

A new way to grow copper nanowires in water could revolutionize the nanotech industry.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 1:34 pm

Brain Quickly Remembers Complex Sounds

A new study on acoustic memorization reveals a remarkable ability of the brain to recognize patterns in complex sound and noise.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 1:23 pm

As the Sun Awakens, NASA Keeps … Eye on Space Weather

The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and the next few years could bring much higher levels of solar activity. NASA is keeping a wary eye on the sun as officials meet in Washington DC to discuss the potential consequences of stormy space weather.
Source: Science@NASA Headline News | 4 Jun 2010 | 1:12 pm

'Taxi Service' to Space Pads Looking More Feasible

A company already has a couple inflatable habitats in orbit. And soon a space taxi service could help you get there.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 1:12 pm

Caught on Tape: Cricket Sex

Thanks to a kind of science reality show, evolutionary biologists are getting a reality check. The day-to-day lives of field crickets, captured on 250,000 hours of surveillance footage, are providing a glimpse into how well studies in the lab match up with life in the wild.

Much of indoor science proved applicable outdoors, but there were surprises, including a more complicated view of how the number of mates relates to the number of offspring, according to the first report on the project, appearing in the June 4 Science.

Biologists have long studied crickets in labs to test ideas about mate choice and other aspects of evolution. To take those questions into the wild, researchers deployed 64 security cameras with motion detectors and infrared sensitivity to monitor flightless field crickets (species Gryllus campestris) day and night in a meadow in northern Spain for the 2006 breeding season. Rolando Rodríguez-Muñoz of the University of Exeter’s campus in Penryn, England, watched every hour of the take. He managed by viewing video from multiple cameras at the same time and speeding through stretches where nothing relevant happened.

One of the surprises, says study coauthor Tom Tregenza , also at Penryn, was that dominant males, which routinely trounce other males in fights, have relatively modest love lives. Lab studies had shown that females prefer a dominant scent to the whiff of routine losers, and also that dominant males can monopolize females by chasing off rivals. Despite such advantages, the dominant males in the meadow had only about half the number of mates during the breeding season that the routine losers did.

Yet in a further twist, the dominant males apparently compensated for their relatively low number of mating partners and ended up with plentiful surviving offspring. “Just having a lot of mates isn’t the whole story,” Tregenza says.

Researchers also found that males that sang more ended up with more offspring, as expected from lab work, but that relationship held only for smaller males. Large male crickets in the meadow attracted females about equally well regardless of how much the males sang.

Even with all the singing and flirting and fighting, reproduction proved an iffy business. Among 77 females in the meadow, more than 40 left no surviving offspring. Fewer than 10 managed to leave even one.

Just looking at the beginning of the process, plenty of crickets of both sexes failed to mate even once (on camera at least). “For a male, perhaps understandable, but what did these females do wrong?” muses Hanna Kokko, currently a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, who was not involved in the study.

One prediction that did prove true in the meadow was the fundamental expectation that males typically vary more than females in the number of offspring they produce. The cricket study provides the first confirmation of this principle in wild invertebrates, Tregenza says.

Animal behaviorist Ann V. Hedrick of the University of California, Davis, who studies a different cricket species, says that the video project “has provided us with extremely valuable information that really hasn’t been possible to collect before.”

Crickets, fruit flies and other small, easy-to-wrangle invertebrates tend to dominate lab studies of sexual and natural selection. In contrast, bigger animals such as deer and meerkats are the most common subjects of long-term field studies. But “you can’t have a lab full of red deer,” Tregenza says. The new study attempts to bring together the two research traditions.

“Crickets live more interesting lives than meerkats,” Tregenza says, and he would love an invertebrate answer to the actual science reality show Meerkat Manor. There might be something about the eye of the beholder, he admits, but “Meerkats, watch out!”

See Also:

• Use Your iPhone to Help Scientists Track Crickets in NYC
• The Spider Awards: Wired.com’s Arachnid Hall of Fame
• 1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth
• Even-More-Gigantic Giant Orb Spider Discovered
• See Them While You Can: Endangered Butterfly Gallery
• Scent of Fear Keeps Male Bed Bugs From Mating With Each Other

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Jun 2010 | 12:57 pm

Editor's Picks: Alien Artifacts, Amelia Earhart, Space Taxis and More

Above, you'll see some of the top images of the week. Click on each one to explore the story behind it. If you didn't get a chance to catch all the latest Discovery News content this week, then be sure ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 12:20 pm

Disaster Laws: Will Gulf Oil Spill Change Anything?

Will the Gulf Oil Leak provoke government regulations in the same fashion as earlier environmental and industrial disasters?
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 12:01 pm

Lead poisons 100 Nigeria children

More than 100 children have recently died of lead poisoning in northern Nigeria digging illegally for gold, health officials say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 11:06 am

Lose Weight the Marmot Way

A new study identified a molecule that makes hibernating marmots hungry. Scientists wonder if this same molecule be manipulated to change hunger patterns in humans too.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 10:53 am

Why Is Cadmium So Dangerous?

The discovery of cadmium in McDonald's "Shrek"-themed drinking glasses has led to a nation-wide recall and fear over how the toxic metal will affect young children.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 10:49 am

Blow out?

American public anger mounts as BP oil keeps leaking
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 10:17 am

Pharmaceutical Waste Seeping into Environment

Pharmaceutical waste is leaking into the environment from wastewater treatment plants.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 10:13 am

£2bn offshore windfarm goes ahead

Work is to begin next year off the coast of north Wales on what will be one of the world's largest windfarms.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 9:43 am

Protein Drinks Packing a Poisonous Wallop?

Consumer Reports found worrisome levels of three heavy metals in mass marketed protein drinks.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 8:53 am

Teen Brains Wired for Risk

Teens tend to take risks, or do stupid things. Now researchers have found biological underpinnings in the brain to explain the risky behavior.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 8:27 am

Hidden Relationship Factors: Beyond Talking and Touching

Factors such as temperature, smell and proximity all influence how people relate to one another.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2010 | 7:58 am

Hubble Watches Restless Star Cluster

Astronomers at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and the University of Cologne waited ten years to catch stars in the Milky Way's densest cluster moving enough to measure.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 7:24 am

Killing time

Questions and answers about the Welsh badger cull
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 7:11 am

Cap Over Ruptured Well Appears to Be Working

Remote-controlled submarines installed the cap in BP's most recent attempt to contain the oil leak.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 7:01 am

Animal-Human Hybrids Banned in Some States

In the new movie "Splice," a human-animal hybrid terrorizes people. In real life, scientists argue mixing human and animal cells could save lives.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 4 Jun 2010 | 6:46 am

Why do gentlemen prefer blondes?

Carole Jahme shines the cold light of evolutionary psychology on everyday life. This week: The allure of blonde women

From an anonymous male
Dear Carole, I am attracted to women with blonde hair. This seems to be true of a lot of men. Is there a biological/reproductive explanation?

Carole replies:
Ten years after he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin started to research the sexual selection of blonde hair in women in preparation for his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, which was published in 1871. Unfortunately he was unable to find enough data to support his theory that blonde hair is sexually selected and had to drop the subject.

Today there are plenty of theories about the evolution of blonde hair and the science of genetics has furthered the debate. Research on variation in human hair colouration has shown that mutations in genes that are involved in the synthesis of melanin pigments are largely responsible. Individuals with lower levels of a melanin pigment called eumelanin are likely to have blonde hair.¹

There is no single gene for blue eyes and blonde hair, but these adaptations are often found expressed together because the genes for each trait are located close together on the same chromosome.

It has been theorised that the blonde hair and blue eyes seen in Caucasians are recent adaptations, dating from approximately 11,000 years ago. The traits are thought to have evolved among northern European tribes at the end of the last ice age. Although both natural and sexual selection have played a part in the evolution of the blue-eyed blonde, sexual selection was probably the primary force.

As regards natural selection, depigmentation allows greater penetration of the skin by ultraviolet B (UVB), which is needed to synthesise previtamin D3. Northern Europe has fewer hours of sunlight compared with Africa, so the theory is that tribes migrating into Europe underwent a genetic mutation that resulted in the depigmentation of skin and hair.²

Sexual selection would certainly have been a powerful driving force behind evolution in northern Europeans. Late Palaeolithic females in southern Europe and Africa could forage for food and feed themselves and their infants, with males occasionally supplementing their diet with meat. In northern Europe, however, where ice covered much of the terrain, people were dependent on meat. Bands of men went in search of herds of prehistoric bison or mammoth. These hunting trips were dangerous, resulting in many fatalities.

It has been suggested that as a result this was a time of intense sexual rivalry between females due to their numbers exceeding those of males.³ At any given time far more fertile women than men were left unmated, so females had to compete for mates and for a favourable share of meat. The theory is that when given the choice, Pelaeolithic males chose blondes, who stood out from their rivals.

In addition, before bottles of hydrogen peroxide became available, blonde hair in females could be interpreted as an honest signal of youth and therefore reproductive fitness. This is because postmenopausal women rarely retain the flaxen locks of their youth, of course eventually becoming grey grannies.

Interestingly, Aboriginal tribes have evolved blonde hair in females independently of the Nordic blonde.³ As this has occurred in an environment not lacking UVB this suggests that sexual selection has been more important than the forces of natural selection. But in some parts of the world, such as central Africa, mutations that result in albinism (or a significant depigmentation) of a baby can provoke fear and superstition and sometimes even infanticide. Colour mutations can only proliferate in populations if they are seen as desirable and are sexually selected for.

There are higher numbers of females born blonde than males and retention of blonde hair into adulthood is a sexually selected indicator of fitness in females.⁴ Caucasian blondes are usually slightly higher in oestrogen than brunettes and are likely to exhibit other infantile sexually selected traits (indicating low levels of testosterone) that are considered desirable by males, for example finer facial features, smaller nose, smaller jaw, pointed chin, narrow shoulders, smooth skin and less body hair, and infantile behaviour such as higher energy levels and playfulness.⁵

Another possible reason for Nordic gentlemen preferring blondes is to assure their paternity. The genes for blue eyes and blonde hair are recessive, meaning both parents must have the genes for them to be expressed in their offspring.⁶ So it has been proposed that blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women as mates because they have some degree of certainty over fatherhood. A blue-eyed male with a brown-eyed mate would not have the same assurance the resulting brown-eyed infant was his child and therefore worthy of a slice of the mammoth he risked his life trapping and slaughtering and then spent days dragging back across miles of icy tundra.

This would also help to explain the existence of blond males. Blond hair in males does not correlate with oestrogen levels as it does in females and blond hair in males is not a known indicator of fitness as it is in females. In addition, females don't select for physical appearance to the degree that men do. For a female to choose a blond male he must be able to deliver resources (mammoth), as his blond hair alone is not enough to turn her on.

Blondes do not seem to have lost any of their popularity since the end of the last ice age. Research suggests that blondes feature more often as Playboy centerfolds than they do in women's magazines, and the percentage of blondes in each type of magazine exceeds the base rate of blondes in the normal population.⁷

This would suggest that the selection pressures that shaped the standards of Western female beauty in the late-Palaeolithic are still the same today, and it may well explain why you are attracted to blonde women.

References
(1) Mengel-From J et al (2009) Genetic determinants of hair and eye colours in the Scottish and Danish populations. BMC Genetics; 10: 88.
(2) Nina, G, Jablonski, NG, Chaplin, G (2000) The evolution of human skin coloration. Journal of Human Evolution; 39(1): 57-106.
(3) Frost, P (2008) Sexual selection and human geographic variation. Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society.
(4) Ridley, M (1993) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. Penguin.
(5) Grammer, K, Thornhill, R et al (2003) Darwinian aesthetics: sexual selection and the biology of beauty. Biological Reviews; 78(3): 385-407.
(6) Laeng, B et al (2007 ) Why do blue-eyed men prefer women with the same eye colour? Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology; 61(3): 371-384.
(7) Rich, MK, Cash, TF (1993) The American image of beauty: media representations of hair color for four decades. Sex Roles Journal; 29(1-2): 113-124.

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Jun 2010 | 6:24 am

Craig Venter explains synthetic genomics

Creator of first synthetic genome describes how replacing the chromosomal software of a cell transforms its protein hardware

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:23 am

In Pictures: Grevy's zebra

Work is ongoing to prevent one of Kenya's most iconic species, the Grevy's zebra, from going extinct.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2010 | 5:09 am