Your mama’s soul doesn’t love you

If it existed, it might also be profoundly autistic and … diabetic? So science cannot disprove the existence of a soul, but one thing we’re learning is how much valued human properties such as love and attachment and awareness of others are a product of our biology — emotions like love are an outcome of chemistry, and can’t be separated from our meaty natures.

The latest issue of BioEssays has an excellent review of the role of the hormone oxytocin in regulating behaviors. It highlights how much biochemistry is a determinant of what we regard as virtues.

[Read more…]

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

I just finished Sean B. Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo the other day, and I must confess: I was initially a bit disappointed. It has a few weaknesses. For one, I didn’t learn anything new from it; I had already read just about everything mentioned in the book in the original papers. It also takes a very conservative view of evolutionary theory, and doesn’t mention any of the more radical ideas that you find bubbling up on just about every page of Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s big book. One chapter, the tenth, really didn’t fit in well with the rest—the whole book is about pattern, and that chapter is suddenly talking about a few details in the evolution and development of the human brain.

So I read the whole thing with a bit of exasperation, waiting for him to get to the good stuff, and he never did. But then after thinking about it for a while, I realized what the real problem was: he didn’t write book for me, the inconsiderate bastard, he wrote it for all those people who maybe haven’t taken a single course or read any other books in the subject of developmental biology. I skimmed through it again without my prior biases, and realized that it’s actually a darned good survey of basic concepts, and that I’m going to find it very useful.

[Read more…]

Trying too hard

Jonathan Eisen dresses down university press departments that oversell science, and also hits on one of my pet peeves: the attempt to portray all scientific research as addressing human ills. In this case, it’s claiming that research on shark gene expression will help treat birth defects.

In my own research, I look at the effects of alcohol (among other things) on embryonic development in zebrafish, and it is a kind of animal model of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. People always jump to the assumption that I’m trying to find a cure for FAS, and I have to correct them: I definitely am not. FAS is a developmental disorder, and is not curable … and we already have a solution in the form of public policy and maternal education that can prevent the problem. I use teratogens as a simple tool to perturb the process of development so I can view the interactions involved; I also see development as an event involving both genes and the environment, and just about everyone mucks around with genes, so I’m looking at it from the other side.

So my work with teratogens is much more directly applicable to research on birth defects, and I deny the association; most of the work out there on gene expression in fins is going to even more remote from applied medical uses, not that that will stop PR departments.

Count your bones!

My last Seed column is online. Print media feels a little weird — it’s like I wrote that one long ago, the one I finished earlier in July is going to print right now (and will be out in mid-August), and I’m already working on the column after that. It’s like looking at old history for me.

It’s also an old story for you subscribers. It’s just those who haven’t subscribed yet who are months behind the times. So when are you people going to join the rest of us…in the future?