In discussing Soul Made Flesh this past Wednesday morning in PZ’s neurobiology class, I brought up what I thought to be an interesting, though somewhat tangential, point. Zimmer mentioned Anne Conway and how ambitious she was in her studies despite not being allowed to attend a university. The fact that females were not given the same opportunities throughout history is something I remember learning about in grade school. But where did the ideology that females are inferior to males begin?

One of my fellow students argued that because females give birth they were probably not expected to hunt and gather food while they were pregnant. I thought about this and although I don’t know for sure, in early civilizations females probably tended fields and gathered crop until while pregnant until they were no longer physically able to, returning to the fields as soon as they recovered from the stress of giving birth. Males, meanwhile, tended to be stronger and did not have to give birth to maintain their population.

Another thought that I had on this topic was that male aggression and anger tendencies probably have something to with the ambition to control their domain. Considering male influence in government, it would be interesting to see the effects of a female United States president. There have been several queens as well as kings in European countries over the last thousand years. Is there a difference in how a country operates that is dependent on the gender of its leader?

Things seem to be much different today than they were a hundred years ago. Females driving, voting, becoming doctors, and all these things that would have been unheard of. Are males falling behind and if they do will females dominate males? Is society moving toward a codominance of gender? There is plenty of debate on this topic and I’m sure it won’t be resolved anytime soon.

References:
Zimmer, Carl. 2004. Soul Made Flesh. Free Press, New York, NY.

Sorry about that last post. I am still trying to figure out how to format this blog correctly. Here are links to the abstracts of the articles I used to design my experiment. Admittedly I played up the sophomoric college student part a bit. Apparently a bit too much. To answer a few concerns about this experiment, the fish are not likely to die. I would never preform an experiment that was cruel or served no purpose other than my own personal enjoyment. While, it is not likely that I will have any groundbreaking results, I hope to further my own personal research experience and possibly recreate some fairly important biomedical research. Drinks like a fish and the second article Ethanol effects on three strains of zebrafish

There are those who have questioned the reason for getting fish drunk. I could stumble through the explanation and make the issue much more confusing than it has to be, or I could just post a few of research articles I used to design my experiment.

Gerlai, R., Lahav, M., Guo, S., Rosenthal, A. 2001. Drinks Like a fish: zebra fish (Danio rerio) as a behavior genetic model to study alcohol effects. Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. 67:773-782

Dlugos, C.A., Rabin, R.A., 2003. Ethanol effects on three strains of zebrafish: model system for genetic investigations. Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior. 74:471-780

I hear from Andy that you’ll be able to listen to a debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox, both of Oxford, on … oh, I bet you can guess what it’s about. It’s going to be streamed live on a number of Christian talk radio stations, so look it up if you’re interested, it should be on in about an hour and a half.

The neurobiology of intelligence

Where do people get the idea that intelligence has a biological basis? Oh yeah, from those geneticists, whose research has shown that intelligence levels can be inherited. One fairly new development for researching intelligence is through the conduction of brain imaging studies.

Recently, two neuroscientists by the names of Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine and Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico, compiled a review of 37 such intelligence imaging studies. With this data, and current neurobiology studies that indicate intelligence is a measure of how well information travels through the brain, Haier and Jung formulated what they call the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT). This theory identifies the stations of the brain, chiefly found in the frontal and parietal lobes, that network to produce intelligent information processing. So, whether you are smart or stupid depends, in part, on differences in connections between, and composition of, specific areas of the brain.

Haier and Jung have made many contributions to intelligence research. They discovered that it is unlikely that a single “intelligence center” exists, as the regions of the brain related to general intelligence are dispersed throughout the brain. In another study, general intelligence levels between the sexes were determined to have essentially no disparity, and yet their neural structures are different, with women having more white matter and men having more gray. This indicates that intelligence levels are independent of brain design.

Of course, can all of this just be taken with a grain of salt, because how does one really measure intelligence?

As one of my fellow classmates has already described in part, we have proposed to study the effects of sleep deprivation and alcohol on zebrafish. We have a good idea of how to execute experimentation on this topic. The meaning behind it however remains, as of yet, a bit vague. The idea was brought up during our last class discussion that we could experiment with the effects of sleep deprivation and alcohol on zebrafish development or adult mating and feeding patterns. We also thought of experimenting with the behavior of zebrafish on cocaine, or with the effects of alcohol and sleep deprivation on oursleves but neither of those ideas flew too high with PZ. Understandably so.

Although, while researching, I didn’t find too many articles on intoxicated and sleep deprived zebrafish, I did find a lot of articles on genes and regeneration. In one experiment, researchers surgically removed a small portion of zebrafish hearts and then monitored recovery. The zebrafish were not only able to regenerate the removed portion of their hearts within two months, the regenerated heart tissue functioned the same and looked histiologically the same as the heart tissue of zebrafish in the control group (Poss, Wilson, & Keating). Another group of researchers discussed the effects of cyclic adenosine monophosphate on neuron regeneration in zebrafish (Bhatt, Otto, Depoister, & Fetcho). This could obviously have significant implications on human neuron regeneration.

After thinking about my findings for a moment, I discovered the reason why articles about regeneration out number articles on the effects of sleep deprivation and alcohol. Areas of research like regeneration are much more useful, not as well understood, and provide lots of room for scientific advancement. I’m not sure that I have the skill or tools required to surgically alter an organism the size of a minnow or track specific chemicals throughout the nervous system but I’ll definately be giving some thought to possibilities for regeneration experiments over the weekend. If anyone has any suggestions, I would be pleased to read them.

References:

Kenneth D. Poss, Lindsay G. Wilson, Mark T. Keating. Heart Regeneration in Zebrafish. Science. 13 December 2002. Vol. 298. no. 5601, pp. 2188 – 2190

Dimple H. Bhatt, Stefanie J. Otto, Brett Depoister, Joseph R. Fetcho. Cyclic AMP-Induced Repair of Zebrafish Spinal Circuits. Science. 9 July 2004. Vol. 305. no. 5681, pp. 254 – 258

My colleague in the philosophy department here at UMM, Tamler Sommers, has a couple of interesting interviews online, one with Frans de Waal and another with Jonathan Haidt. de Waal is good — there’s some cool stuff in there about altruism and politics. Haidt … well, again, I find myself with mixed feelings about his work. The “social intuition” model, where people make emotional judgments and then makes intellectual rationalizations after the fact, sounds reasonable to me. But then, he goes on to make these arguments about “four pillars of morality” — harm, fairness, purity, and duty — that sound like intellectual rationalizations after the fact, too. He justifies some behaviors, such as female genital mutilation, because within a particular culture they may well be supported by a moral pillar like purity or duty, and suggests that people who lack those particular pillars (as many in the West do) cannot then criticize those behaviors.

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One of the requirements for PZ’s neurobiology class is reading Carl Zimmer’s book Soul Made Flesh. While reading this book, I am continually struck by how religion resists change in science. Why? Science and religion don’t even address the same issues in a culture. Robert Boyle seemed to think they should be separated as well. Perhaps that is why he managed to make some significant advances in science and the scientific method. Any thoughts?

Larry Moran gives his take on the Nisbet AAAS panel. I suspect Matt is getting a little more controversy than he anticipated.

That’s good, right? It’ll stir up more interest in the discussion!

Atheists don’t get credit if we give to religious charities. We don’t get credit if we give to simply secular causes. Now, though, we’ve got a new explicitly godless charity that works to improve education and knowledge of science: the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. It’s my kind of place — and best of all, money going there isn’t going to be mistaken for support for ignorance and superstition.

Read the announcement. It’s cleared all the legal hurdles in both the US and Great Britain and has been granted charitable, tax-exempt status, and is going to be my favored choice of a charity from now on.