Not only is humility a virtue, but a methodological assessment of that which we have evidence for and what we don’t, can help us search for possible explanations that we might not have searched for because we
is taboo in academia, but the assumptions behind this taboo are faulty. Advances in biology have rendered the notion that complex life is rare in our Galaxy improbable. The objection that no ETC would come to Earth to hide from us does not consider all possible...
Her parents would collect their pay checks, but eat nothing before coming back in the evening, hungry and tired. She wondered at their ability to be in town, in the midst of all the best foods, with money to purchase that food, but choose not to spend it on themselves so that Esther ...
was published by an imprint of the National Academy of Sciences, and argued that MTF sex changes are motivated primarily by erotic interests and not by the problem of having the gender identity common to one sex in the body of the other. Dissatisfied...
But here I stop–short of any deterministic speculation that attributes specific behaviors to the possession of specific altruist or opportunist genes. Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors–from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoard...
On a more general level, transcriptional analysis tells us only about the current status of gene expression, but it is equally (and often more) important to determine which genes can rapidly be induced in these populations, for example following TCR stimulation—understanding whether certain gene lo...
Science tells us that the sun will rise tomorrow (for the next few billion years – after which it will evolve into a red giant and, Cronus-like, engulf the inner planets). We don’t need to rip war captives’ hearts out to ensure sunrise, nor do we need to burn humans and ...
Today our science tells us that the last glacial maximum (coldest period) peaked about 20,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago as we entered the current interglacial cycle warming period. That means that 12,000 year ago from our time the Atlantean culture would be facing a ...
The idea of mitochondrial Eve shook science to its lunchtime Twinkies, because it implies a couple of things about human history. First, there was a time (or several) when our population must have been very small, maybe on the verge of extinction. For only one woman’s genetic imprint to...
Sleep plays a crucial role in our waking lives, and we need to start paying it more attention. The latest research tells us that it's essential for learning and…