The neuroscience of art….

One of the many neuroX fields…all more or less dependent on fMRI data. Tom Bartlett’s piece in the Chronicle is here. Original article in New Atlantis by Roger Scruton is here. Scruton is a visiting professor at Oxford.

Money quote from Scruton:

But memetics possesses the very fault for which it purports to be a remedy: it is a spell with which the scientistic mind seeks to conjure away the things that pose a threat to it — which is also how we should view scientism in general. Scientism involves the use of scientific forms and categories in order to give the appearance of science to unscientific ways of thinking. It is a form of magic, a bid to reassemble the complex matter of human life, at the magician’s command, in a shape over which he can exert control. It is an attempt to subdue what it does not understand.

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.”