Three articles for August and surprisingly for this blog, not a single one of them has anything to do with human nature. Two are related to biology but are more interesting in the way that they serve as examples of how science can correct a past mistake, even a long held one, as well as how popular reporting can easily misinterpret a scientific finding. The remaining one is a piece on dark energy, found via The Sycologist.
The first article deals with what is commonly taught as the most useless of human organs: the lowly appendix. As this article which appeared on Yahoo! by way of Livescience.com explains, all of us have probably been taught at some point in our lives that the appendix not only serves no purpose, being a relic of our evolutionary past, but is in fact a potentially lethal liability if it becomes inflamed.
Three articles this month and all of them are related in some way to the study of human nature. The first article touches on an explanation of why depression occurs from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The second one demonstrates that humans really are that irrational when it comes to making economic decisions. The last one is on how caffeine might hold the key to curing Alzheimer’s disease.
The first article is from The Economist and covers a theory by Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan. Dr. Nesse thinks that depression can be thought of as being analogous to physical pain. Just as pain serves to dissuade us from doing things that cause us physical harm, so depression serves to dissuade us from doing things that cause us mental harm. By this, he means specifically the pursuit of unreachable goals. Since pursuing goals that are ultimately unreachable wastes precious time and energy, he theorizes that depression exists as a mechanism to inhibit doing so.
Even with Michael Jackson dominating all the news, the most interesting thing I’ve read all day is this one, about a girl who apparently haven’t aged since she was born sixteen years ago. The headline to the article isn’t actually true since it seems that she does age, most notably the telomeres in her cells seems to undergo changes consistent with aging, but different parts of her body seem to be aging at different rates and she certainly doesn’t seem to grow much, if at all. I certainly agree that this is a unique and extremely interesting case from a scientific perspective, and probably as close to a real-life Benjamin Button case as we’re ever likely to see.
Just three articles this month, all of them related to biology in one way or another. The first one concerns what looks like an evolutionary adaptation in humans to living in the tropics. As this article from BBC News explains, scientists have long known that the birth rates of boys and girls vary across the world and that one of the factors that determine this variance is environmental stress. Biologically, males are considered more fragile than females and since having children is a huge investment, it makes sense that in a harsh environment, women tend to give birth to more girls since they would be likelier to survive.
According to research by Dr. Kristen Navara published in Biology Letters, people who live in the tropics produce more girls than boys compared to more temperate regions, even after adjusting for differences in lifestyle and socio-economic status. As Dr. Navara explains, this could simply be because male sperm works in a different way closer to the equator or that miscarriage rates might be affected somehow, but it could also be interpreted to more generally mean that living in the tropics is itself a form of environmental stress on the human organism.
Just a quick link to the news that the Texas school board is voting this week on a new curriculum that would challenge the principle of evolution. It’s pretty depressing that the chairman of the school board is someone who believes that God created the Earth less then 10,000 years ago. So again, for anyone who still has any doubt about evolution and wants to educate himself or herself on the mechanics and literature behind what is now of the most solidly well-documented principles in science, just go spend some time on the TalkOrigins Archive.
One thing that I’m somewhat grateful for is that Muslims at least don’t seem to have jumped onto the Creationism bandwagon in a big way. Then again, our Education Minister in Malaysia has just called the leader of the opposition a race traitor so that’s not much of an improvement.
Three articles for this last installment from 2008, though two are from The Economist, both of which are related to human sexuality in some way. The last one is speculation about a device that could one day be used to let someone see what another person is dreaming about.
The first article from The Economist covers a paper by Rosalind Arden of King’s College, London and her colleagues on correlations between genetic fitness, general intelligence and, of all things, sperm quality, in human males. Researchers have recently discovered that general intelligence is correlated with many aspects of an individual’s health including his or her lifespan. This is unsurprising, because it can be expected that people who are more intelligent might take extra care to live healthier lives, but evolutionary psychologists are also interested in the idea that intelligence is a manifestation of a general, genetically-based healthiness which is attractive to the opposite sex. They believe that humans evolved general intelligence above and beyond its usefulness in everyday life as part of a genetics arms race to attract mates, in the same way that male peacocks have evolved elaborate tails.
Three science articles for this month, one on an exciting new development in the ongoing quest for a real cure for AIDS, one on nuclear energy, and the last one on a theoretical attempt to create a scenario right out of Jurassic Park.
In the AIDS-related news, The Wall Street Journal reports the case of a doctor, Gero Hütter, who managed to functionally cure a patient of the disease at the Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany despite not being an AIDS specialist. Instead, Dr. Hütter is a hematologist, a specialist in diseases of the blood and bone marrow, and his patient suffered from leukemia as well as AIDS.
