HOW SCIENCE BECAME INTERESTED IN EVERYTHING

From The Telegraph:

It is only in recent years that science has become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive. But long before Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould, Primo Levi had sought to make science accessible to the layperson in his 1975 literary-scientific commentary, The Periodic Table. A lapidary integration of chemistry and autobiography, the book continued a tradition of writing from Galileo to Darwin which vanished in the 20th century following academic specialisation. Philip Ball, like Levi, displays a polymath’s enthusiasm for knowledge of all kinds, and writes of science with humility and intelligent generosity.

Ball’s new book, a readable survey of the role of curiosity in science, is a good example of what the French call haute vulgarisation – high-class popularisation. In pages of limpid prose, Ball brings difficult ideas down a level. Until the early 17th century, when pretty well anything of human concern was fit for study, curiosity was seen as dangerous and condemned as such. The view has never quite gone away. Even Karl Marx was shocked by Darwin’s materialist view of nature as bleak survivalism in On the Origin of Species (the book was a “bitter satire”, Marx reckoned, on human progress). Beneath Darwin’s bleak vision, however, was a childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries of the natural world and a delight in extracting order out of chaos. In Ball’s opinion, Darwin personifies “the modern struggle with curiosity”. The Bible had warned against curious-minded individuals like Darwin conducting investigations where they should not. (“For in much wisdom is much grief”: Ecclesiastes.) Even today, upholders of Biblical morality condemn Darwin as godless: man is not a lonely mutation grubbing with the brutes – he stands at the very pinnacle of God’s creation. In tasting of the fruit of knowledge, Darwin had sinned against the divine order of things.

More here.

INTERPRETING SHARI’A

From Guernica:

Muslims agree that Shari’a is God’s law. But the mysticism surrounding Prophet Muhammed’s nearly 1,400-year-old words has solidified to a point where finding a consensus on the particulars of Shari’a is difficult. The debate has now saturated modern politics and pop-culture around the globe. London-born Sadakat Kadri, human rights Lawyer, travel writer, and journalist, took on this collective confusion in his new book Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslin World. As he traveled through South Asia and the Middle East to conduct research, Kadri began untangling the edicts of Shari’a and its interpretations, which could allow for a sex change but not apostasy. His finished product, full of travel experiences, written through the lens of his knowledge of the law and his connection to the subject matter, “provides a compelling overview of the historical events that shaped Islamic law,” wrote Ian Critchley, in the Sunday Times, and delivers “an admirably even-handed account of [Islamic law’s] often fraught position today.” At Asia House this February, Kadri sat with Mishal Husain to discuss Heaven on Earth, the history of Islamic law, and Islam’s interaction with the religious present—both Muslim and non-Muslim. Kadri earned a Master’s from Harvard Law and spent time in Prague during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. He has written a travel guide to Prague as well as the book The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson (2005), after his experience moving to New York City just before 9/11. He currently writes a column for the New Statesman. Mishal Husain was born in England and grew up in both the Middle East and the UK. She received a law degree from Cambridge and works as a BBC international news presenter on Impact Asia, BBC World News, as well as other programs.

—The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Mishal Husain and Sadakat Kadri, published here courtesy of Asia House London.

More here.

THE IRRATIONALITY OF IRRATIONALITY: THE PARADOX OF POPULAR PSYCHOLOGY

Samuel McNerney in Scientific American:

In 1996, Lyle Brenner, Derek Koehler and Amos Tverskyconducted a study involving students from San Jose State University and Stanford University. The researchers were interested in how people jump to conclusions based on limited information. Previous work by Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and other psychologists found that people are “radically insensitive to both the quantity and quality of information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions,” so the researchers knew, of course, that we humans don’t do a particularly good job of weighing the pros and cons. But to what degree? Just how bad are we at assessing all the facts?

To find out, Brenner and his team exposed the students to legal scenarios. In one, a plaintiff named Mr. Thompson visits a drug store for a routine union visit. The store manager informs him that according to the union contract with the drug store, plaintiffs cannot speak with the union employees on the floor. After a brief deliberation, the manager calls the police and Mr. Thompson is handcuffed for trespassing. Later the charges were dropped, but Mr. Thompson is suing the store for false arrest.

All participants got this background information. Then, they heard from one of the two sides’ lawyers; the lawyer for the union organizer framed the arrest as an attempt to intimidate, while the lawyer for the store argued that the conversation that took place in the store was disruptive. Another group of participants – essentially a mock jury – heard both sides.

The key part of the experiment was that the participants were fully aware of the setup; they knew that they were only hearing one side or the entire story. But this didn’t stop the subjects who heard one-sided evidence from being more confident and biased with their judgments than those who saw both sides. That is, even when people had all the underlying facts, they jumped to conclusions after hearing only one side of the story.

More here.

BYZANTIUM AND ISLAM: AGE OF TRANSITION (7TH–9TH CENTURY)

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Peter Brown in the New York Review of Books:

In the century between 630 and 730 a considerable portion of the Old World took on its modern face. Through a series of astonishing campaigns, Arab Muslim armies created a single empire that, for a time, would reach from southern Spain to northern India and the western borders of China. From the “big bang” of these conquests a new galaxy emerged. From then onward, a closely interconnected chain of Muslim regions (one part of which, from modern Morocco to the borders of Iran, came to speak Arabic) stretched across Africa and Eurasia, joining the Atlantic to western China. A new civilization came into being, one that has lasted, with many permutations, into our own days. In the words of Finbarr Flood, a major contributor to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum’s somewhat modestly titled exhibition “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century),” the foundation of the Arab empire was “one of the most remarkable achievements in human history.”

The exhibition takes us to the heart of this great detonation. It embraces the last century of the pre-Islamic Middle East and the first two centuries of Islam. To our surprise, we do not find ourselves in a world swept by a mighty wind. Instead, we enter a series of quiet rooms where time seems to stand still. Like a perfect late fall day, only the occasional rustle of a falling leaf startles us into realizing that the seasons are about to change. The few clear signs that Islam had, indeed, become politically dominant in the Middle East by the end of the seventh century strike us with almost ominous intensity. For there are so few of them.

More here.

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF PRAYER: IT'S A BRAIN PUZZLE

From The European:

In a recent study our team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain responded to praying in Christian believers. Surprisingly, considering God’s postulated invisibility, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, we found that conversing with God was not associated with regions that process abstract concepts. Rather, we found a marked pattern of activity in four regions that typically activate when humans relate to other humans. Neurologically, this finding suggests that strong believers process God as a concrete person – in spite of the theologically complex and highly abstract nature of the Christian God. Interestingly, we did not find this pattern in believers who did not use praying regularly. Perhaps the religious brain can learn to treat gods as real persons through regular practice and strong beliefs. 

Importantly and somewhat contrary to the widespread assumption that communicating with God constitutes a unique experience reserved for believers, our findings suggest that praying to God is comparable to ‘normal’ interpersonal interaction, at least in terms of brain function. Praying, it seems, is subserved by the basic processing of our biologically evolved dispositions like other complex cultural phenomena, in this case the evolved human capacity for social cognition. One might ask if these findings, then, are evidence that God is just an illusion, an imagined friend that always listens in times of distress? Or may they in fact be proof that God affects us even at the level of brain function? Atheists and believers alike take considerable interest in this kind of research. Fortunately, as a scientist my interest lies solely in the physical world and speculations about the spiritual dimension lie well beyond scientific scrutiny.

More here.

EUSOCIALITY

EUSOCIALITY

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Those famous questions, inscribed by Paul Gauguin in his giant Tahitian painting of 1897, introduce The Social Conquest of Earth. Their choice proclaims Edward O Wilson’s ambitions for his splendid book, in which he sums up 60 distinguished years of research into the evolution of human beings and social insects. Wilson has focused on the biology of behaviour since joining Harvard University as a junior research fellow in 1953. He also has a passion for writing, with 25 books to his credit (including two Pulitzer Prize-winners). The Social Conquest of Earth fully maintains the elegant and informative style of its predecessors. His most influential book, Sociobiology (1975), defined a new discipline, with the message that social behaviour could only be understood through the lens of evolution. At that time the idea that genes and natural selection play such an important role in human society outraged many social scientists and people on the political left. By now the main messages of sociobiology and its offspring, evolutionary psychology, have been absorbed into the intellectual mainstream, though the nature-nurture debate rumbles on as scientists investigate the relative contribution of genes and the environment to various aspects of life.

more from Clive Cookson at the FT here.

TESTOSTERONE ON MY MIND AND IN MY BRAIN

[SIMON BARON-COHEN:] What I want to talk about tonight is this very specific hormone, testosterone. Our lab has been doing a lot of research to understand what this hormone does and, in particular, to test whether it plays any role in how the mind and the brain develops.

Before I get to that point, I'll say a few words by way of background about typical sex differences, because that's the cradle out of which this new research comes. Many of you know that the topic of sex differences in psychology is fraught with controversy. It's an area where people, for many decades, didn't really want to enter because of the risks of political incorrectness, and of being misunderstood.

Perhaps of all of the areas in psychology where people do research, the field of sex differences was kind of off limits. It was taboo, and that was partly because people believed that anyone who tried to do research into whether boys and girls, on average, differ, must have some sexist agenda. And so for that reason a lot of scientists just wouldn't even touch it.  

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