Darwin in the Classroom

Political descent has a fascinating reflection on Darwin in the classroom.

This is one reason why I think that we need to be open to and educated about the political history of evolution, - the history of the various ways in which people have taken the fact of our evolution to speak directly to questions about the sort of creatures we are, and in consequence the sort of society that we might live in. - This is especially important in light of the fact that many who oppose the teaching of evolutionary biology in public schools today argue that evolution is inherently tied to a politics that is competitive, individualistic, racist and xenophobic. The book I am writing, entitled Political Descent, will show that this has often been far from the case. Of course, there is no guarantee that the opponents of evolution will like the idea that evolution has also been used, for instance, by Charles Darwin to endorse an inclusive liberal politics that argued that there is an evolutionary grounding for a morality that was inclusive of all people of all races, and ultimately of all sentient beings; or by the likes of Peter Kropotkin to endorse the ethics of anarchist socialism. But these are both subjects for another time...

Neuroengineering! A Video Worthy of Contemplation

History before our eyes!

Why Academics Should Blog: A College of One’s Own

Every now and then I make the mistake of confessing to a colleague that I blog. They usually greet this confession with an uneasy smile and follow it with a look that says: “do you really have time for that?” I understand what they really mean: a serious tenure track assistant professor does not have time for blogging. With respect to my colleagues, they’re wrong: graduate students, post-docs, young faculty, and senior faculty too, should do more blogging not less. And, moreover, institutions of high education ought to start recognizing such work as an important component of a scholar’s profile.

An amazing teacher taught me the form, mechanics and sweat of composition in high school. I deserve credit for the grammar and spelling errors - they are all mine. But he helped me to understand the art and tone of truthful writing. He encouraged me to rewrite drafts completely. He suggested ways of outlining essays, showed me essay styles, and always argued for the importance of pre-writing. He also showed me that writing was one of those activities that required diligence, persistence and above-all continual practice. Those last qualities are the ones that I think deserve further consideration, as they are undoubtedly the best reason to blog. But let’s take those as given and begin by asking why people are suspicious of blogs. After that, I will suggest reasons why instant publishing should be given greater respect.

A New Blog About the Politics of Darwinism

Piers Hale, whose work focuses on the question: "In light of our evolution, what kind of creature is Man, and in consequence, how might we live?" has just started one:

A forum to explore the relationship between our politics and our evolution - and what people think about this today and what they have thought about it in the past - and I might even speculate on the relationship between the two every now and again.

How The Synapse Got Its Name

In his Creating Modern Neuroscience: The Revolutionary 1950s Gordon Shepherd quotes a letter from Charles Sherrington to John Fulton that describes how Sherrington named the junction:

You enguire about the introduction of the term "synapse"; it happened thus. - M[ichael] Foster had asked me to get on with the Nervous System part (Part iii) of a new Edition of his 'Textb. of Physiol.' for him. I had begun it, and had not got far with it before I felt the need of some name to call the junction between nerve-cell & nerve-cell [because that place of junction now entered physiology as carrying functional importance]. I wrote him of my difficulty, & my wish to introduce a specific name. I suggested using syndesm. He consulted his Trinity friend Varrall, the Euripeidean scholar, about, & Verall suggested "synapse", & as that yields a better adjectival form, it was adopted for the book.

The Superorganism: Further thoughts on L J Henderson

Brainstorm, Michael Ruse's mildly interesting blog at the Chronical of Higher Education, offers some interesting observations on E. O. Wilson and the holistic tradition at Harvard:

The split between evolutionists who think that selection is for and only for the individual, and those who think that the group often comes first and foremost, goes back to the two men who discovered natural selection—Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin always thought in terms of individuals, even when it comes to humans (I have discovered a letter making this point very clear), and Wallace always thought that often selection favors the group.

Without saying that the whole of science is a social construction — an epiphenomenon on the culture of the day—I don’t think there is any doubt that the Darwin-Wallace dispute reflects different socio-political commitments. Darwin the child of industrialists (his maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood the potter) favored competition at all levels. Wallace, an ardent socialist, always pushed for integrative thinking and solutions.

Another who favored an integrative approach—for all that he is usually portrayed as the paradigmatic nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw Social Darwinian—was Herbert Spencer, about whom I have written before. And it was Spencer who had the big influence on early 20th-century American biology, not Darwin. Especially at Harvard, where there was a group of Spencerian holists, including the physiologist Walter B. Cannon, the father of the notion of “homeostasis,” the biochemist L.J. Henderson, who formulated an early version of the so-called anthropic principle, and most significantly the ant specialist William Wheeler. This last was ardent for group thinking and superorganisms.

Wilson is the direct intellectual grandson of Wheeler, for Wheeler’s student was Frank Carpenter and his student was Edward O. Wilson. So whether he is right or whether he is wrong, I am not at all surprised at the turn that Ed Wilson has taken. I would have been surprised otherwise. I remember the first time I met him in his lab over 30 years ago. On his wall, right next to the picture of Darwin was a picture of Herbert Spencer. “My God, Professor Wilson,” I gasped, “Herbert Spencer! Herbert Spencer!” “Great man, Mike.” He replied. “Great man.”

Ruse's observations rather neatly accord with my increasing conviction - I would love for it to be disproved -that physiologists in Britain and America were thinking systemically about political organization and were actually at the frontlines of organizational theory. Its worth reflecting, as I recall Steven Shapin does somewhere, that it was Henderson who introduced Vilfredo Pareto to Harvard and to Talcott Parsons.

But why, in the first instance, would Henderson have been interested in Pareto? Italy, following unification, was a mess. While there had been some positive developments in the sense of economic policy, Italian politics took a turn for the worst from the 1890s onwards. True, the Giolitti administration promoted liberal reforms, but quite frankly the direction of Italian politics was towards corruption and consequent radicalization both in nationalist and socialist terms. Violence prolifferated -  both in discourse and action. And against this backdrop we see the likes of Gramsci, Mosca, and Pareto. But fundamentally, as I understand it, Pareto was arguing against political liberalism. Indeed, he seems to have naturalized the position of the elite to the cost of democracy. What I cannot understand is why such a view would have appealed to Henderson? What does a cornerstone of Italian fascism - I don't know that Pareto was a fascist - offer to Anglo-American physiologists? There is a story here.

Sigmund Freud Film Footage and BBC Audio

Are Brains Necessary?

Michael Steinberg discusses the question and opens evocatively with:

You can't swing a cat these days without hitting yet another book about the brain. The way we hear it, everything about the mind and the way we live and act and feel—all of this goes on in the brain, and now that we've got all these nifty brain scanning machines we're well on our way to understanding the real nature of life.

Neuroscience on Art and Law: A Reflection on Recent Essays by David Eagleman and Mark Changizi

Are you your brain?

It's hard to own a spine these days. All anyone wants to talk about is the marvelous structure that is our “brain.” The poor spinal cord has been relegated to a distant, presumably dusty, corner. The brain gets all of the accolades. It wins all the prizes. And it's never runner-up in any beauty pageants. It's “three pounds of the most complex material in the universe,” and that fact, according to David Eagleman in a recent article in The Telegraph, accounts for why humans have done something truly extraordinary: “As far as we know, we’re the only system on the planet so complex that we’ve thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language.”

At the same time, we are almost wholly ignorant about the brain. This is the brain difficulty: “we don’t understand the brain.” That’s Mark Changizi, a smart and charismatic guy, who writes in Psychology Today, “Although the field is jam-packed with fantastically clever experiments giving us fascinating and often valid data, there is usually very little agreement (or ought to be little agreement) about how to distill the data into broad principles. And the broader and higher-level the supposed principle, the more controversial and difficult-to-defend it is.”

But what about the poor spine? And let’s not forget about those other marvelous elements of the central nervous system – the eyes. Weren’t they supposed to be the window to the soul? It's easy to ignore reflexes. They aren’t very interesting. And certainly a lowly peripheral neuron located in the arm is of little interest to anyone (provided, of course, its functioning). But surely the eyes and the spine deserve a little attention. And what about the heart? Aren’t there matters of the heart and facts of the mind?

At this moment I’m hungry. Is that a mere matter of concern to the brain only or does the stomach have some role here? The brain is inspiring – but so is food poisoning. If you’ve had some undercooked chicken, then your body knows it. And even if your brain didn’t bother to register the fact by alerting you to the agonizing fact that you want to die now, your body’s gastro-intestinal crises of severe proportion would have made it fairly clear that you are, and have always, been a member of the coelomatic party.

The Nervous System of Humanity - It Makes You Think

The opening line:

For an author with cochlear implants, the merger of computer and brain, bytes and thoughts, has never felt far-fetched. In a brilliant new book, Michael Chorost makes his case: by making the internet a new nervous system for humanity, humans will also re-connect with one another in a profoundly new way.

Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan

Peter Lawrence Reflects on the Nature of Scientific Research

Several posts on this blog have discussed the deskilling of doctors (see here or here). This week my attention was drawn to an extremely interesting interview (pdf) with Peter A. Lawrence in Lab Times. It captures a similar process in the life sciences. On young scientists, Lawrence comments:

I described what happens to young scientists when they get their postdocs, which are usually limited to two years. In that two-year period, they are expected to start what is often a new line of research, and to have produced and got published a paper in a major journal, by say, at the latest, 18 months, so that they can apply for another grant. Who can do that?

On the research more generally, he observes:

But the intellectual heart of research is sick because its main purpose is discovery. Illuminating our understanding of nature, that’s what it’s about. It’s not about producing a paper that nobody wants to read or understand. If we lose sight of that, then we won’t find out things so easily. We may stumble across things occasionally, as we’ve always done. But many young people just don’t see what science is for. Most of them are trying to get a paper. We have to be ambitious. We have to find something that is worth telling other people about.

The Neuro Times is now on Twitter

Did Twain help Darwin?

Sarah Ellis reflects on one of my favorite books by Mark Twain - "Eve's Diary"

The book version of "Eve's Diary" came with some really lovely illustrations by Lester Ralph, one depicting Eve, nude (oh no, what a shock!), demurely stirring the water of a stream with her foot. It is a beautiful picture, perfectly matched to the story - Eve is innocent, yet obviously sensual and very womanly. It turns out that this illustration caused quite a stir and Twain was eventually brought to testify before congress about the "pornography" in his book. Twain later described the experience,

"It seems curious to me — some of the incidents in this case. It appears that the pictures in Eve's Diary were first discovered by a lady librarian. When she made the dreadful find, being very careful, she jumped at no hasty conclusions — not she — she examined the horrid things in detail. It took her some time to examine them all, but she did her hateful duty! I don't blame her for this careful examination; the time she spent was, I am sure, enjoyable, for I found considerable fascination in them myself."

Could Twain be funnier? As an aside, I do wonder how Twain's irreverance might have encouraged acceptance of a wider secularism. One, for instance, that made Darwinism more acceptable. Perhaps heretics need satirists for courage. In any case, I don't know how widespread "Eve's Diary" was but I think it would be worth finding out whether any famous American scientists had read it. Its certainly worth reading now - it has a spirited originality much like that of Melville or Kafka.