Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Following the money….

The private money that is…going into science here in the US from very wealthy people, story here, thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

The question from my standpoint is–does that get us the best science? I’m not sure. My worry is that scientists taking big bucks from billionaires will tend to find they own the confirmation biases of their sponsors.

Craig Venter redux….

His latest venture with Peter Diamandis is of course aimed at massive scale sequencing, story here. All in service of the larger goal: extended life.

I first met Craig in the late 1980’s and learned quickly to never underestimate his ability to deliver the goods, so we wish him well in the new enterprise.

The evolution of human culture was about heterogenous responses to infectious disease….

Ethan Watters excellent long piece in Pacific Standard is here. The basic notion: our cultural mores result from different behavioral solutions to societal stress from infectious disease.  The author of this idea is University of New Mexico’s Randy Thornhill who is an evolutionary biologist. Thornhill has a new book coming out soon: The Parasite-stress Theory of Values and Sociality: Infectious Disease, History and Human Values Worldwide New York, NY: Springer. It looks like it’ll be a good read.

Bad news for fusion energy…

And it’s on the management side. Story here. The New Yorker’s website has the executive summary of a very damning report here. This is an example of Big Science, gone awry as a result of:

“a lack of strong project management culture …[that led to] protracted debates and impeded rapid progress. There has been too much focus on achieving organizational “harmony” instead of tangible project management results. The MAT was unable to observe a sense of urgency, a “passion” for success, a commitment to rapidly finding solutions for every problem, or an agile and nimble project organization. Too often, the culture lacked a “constructive confrontation” component between staff and management, and even between managers. As a result, many of the best ideas were never heard nor expressed and key decisions lacked ownership.”

Elephants and their brains….

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution, the Scientific American link is here. Money quote on how Elephants get their high cognitive capabilities without the sheer numbers of neocortical neurons that we have:

Benjamin Hart of the University of California Davis has speculated that the elephant cortex derives its intellectual prowess not from local density but from widespread interconnectivity. He suspects that, whereas the human and chimpanzee brains have evolved many tight-knit networks of nearby neurons throughout the cortex—akin to states packed with highly populous cities—the elephant brain has favored lengthy connections between far-flung brain areas, building the equivalent of an extensive cross-country railroad system. For now, though, this is mostly hypothetical.

This relates to some of my own work with my graduate student David Cooper, see here [pdf].