The Last Word

By: | August 4, 2012

July 30 – August 3

I was wrong. It looks like you can expect a penis every Friday, thanks to the wild popularity of LWON’s Penis Fridays. This week, guest poster Erik Vance tackled dolphin penises. No, he didn’t. But he explained them to us.

Ginny and Michelle reopened the case of whether it’s ever okay to kill goats, in an interview with Scientific American‘s Jason G. Goldman.

Christie compared doping scandals to Jonah Lehrer’s predicament and suggested that once you get successful enough, the people around you push you — both well-meaningly and unfairly — to be superhuman.

Ginny helpfully torpedoed the neurobollocks behind Baby Einstein.

And Michelle explained why, when you win the Mountain Fair’s wood-chopping contest in Colorado, your prize is a tiara.

Have a great weekend!

TGIPF: Sex When You Can’t Hang On

By: | August 3, 2012

The fifth in the occasional series, Thank God It’s Penis Friday.

In the winter of 1996, I was inducted into the research team at Marine World Africa USA’s Marine Research Center like everybody else – with a clipboard. On it was a list of dolphin behaviors that I would spend the next three months watching. Maternal, aggressive, sexual, feeding, sleeping, etcetera. Of course, my first question was obvious.

“Uh, how do you know if it’s sexual?”

“Oh, you’ll know,” was all I got in return.

So we set to work. The tank I was watching was populated by four adolescent males: Avalon, Norman, Brisbee, and Liberty. It started the first day, just after feeding. The boys were tumbling around, wrestling and nipping at each other when suddenly, what can only be described as a cross between a pink cigar and the baby creature from Alien emerged from Avalon’s pelvis. Continue reading →

What Americans Don’t Get About the Brain’s Critical Period

By: | August 2, 2012
Toddlers living in a Romanian orphanage

On April 17, 1997, Bill and Hillary Clinton organized a one-day meeting with a long and lofty title: The White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children.

The meeting featured eight-minute presentations from experts in public policy, education and child development, and one neuroscientist. They discussed, among other things, how 6-month-old infants learn to discriminate the sounds of their native language, and how, if a kitten’s eye is patched during early development — and therefore deprived of light inputs — it will go permanently blind in that eye, even after the patch comes off. The First Lady gave the gist of the meeting in her opening remarks: The first three years of life, she reportedly said, “can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached parents themselves.”

Behind the hyperbole of that statement is an important idea based in solid science. The first few years of life are a “critical period” for brain development, during which experiences — strong parental attachments, exposure to written and spoken language, social interactions — sculpt brain circuits in a way that’s difficult to un-sculpt. When a developing brain isn’t adequately stimulated, as often happens to children living in poverty, for example, or in the foster care system, this deprivation can lead to problems in cognition, attention and social behaviors.
Continue reading →

Chop Like A Girl

By: | August 1, 2012

 

ast weekend, my friend Sarah Gilman won the women’s woodsplitting competition at the 41st annual Mountain Fair in Carbondale, Colo., out-chopping several close rivals — including a local county commissioner — and taking home a championship tiara and an six-pound splitting maul. It was Sarah’s second tiara, and second prize maul; she first won the contest when she entered on a whim in 2009. (She also owns a fancy splitting axe from Sweden, a gift from an admiring but anonymous spectator.)

Sarah learned how to swing a sledgehammer during several summers building mountain trails for the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, then honed her axe skills splitting firewood for cold rural winters. Splitting wood is fun, she says, and meets both tangible and intangible needs. Its satisfying physics once helped her through a breakup, and have long since cured her of a recurring dream in which she frantically tried to build her strength by doing pullups inside a moving bus.

For aspiring woodsplitters who feel a wee awkward around swinging tools (Okay, people, I can hear you. No more sniggering until the end of this post!), Sarah offers these tips. Continue reading →

Can cheaters repent?

By: | July 31, 2012

 

 

On Saturday, 38-year-old Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan won the gold medal in the men’s Olympic cycling road race. Not everyone was cheering. As one cycling fan commented on twitter, Vinokourov’s win was, “Not good for cycling, sport or “Olympism.’” The reason for this grumbling? “Vino” is a former doper, and an “unrepentant” one by some accounts. In 2007, Vinokourov dropped out of the Tour de France after testing positive for blood doping. When he was caught, he insisted that the test was a mistake and tried to attribute the result to a surplus of blood in his legs. He served a two year ban and returned to the sport in 2009. But he never confessed to doping, and as far as I can tell, has never expressed much remorse.

I was thinking about Vinokourov yesterday when I heard that Jonah Lehrer had resigned from the New Yorker. Lehrer had been a fast-rising star in the science journalism world, and suddenly his secret was out—his unbelievable output was attributable in part to his habit of recycling his own work without attribution (some called it self-plagiarism) and in at least one case, lifting material from another writer. The final straw came yesterday, with news that reporter Michael C. Moynihan had discovered some dubious Bob Dylan quotes in Lehrer’s latest book. When Moynihan questioned Lehrer’s sourcing, he “stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied” to Moynihan.

You might assume that Lehrer’s journalism career is over, but if history is any indication, it’s perhaps just as likely that, like Vinokourov, he’ll return. “As it turns out, not many publications force journalists to pay their debts to their profession and their readers. Often, they don’t even send the bill,” Jack Shafer wrote in 2007 while commenting on the return of Michael Finkel, a confessed fabricator who defended his behavior to New York Magazine by explaining that, “…this was an attempt to reach higher — to make something beautiful, frankly.” (Finkel just so happens to have a feature in this month’s issue of National Geographic.) Continue reading →

Galápagos Redux: When Is It OK to Kill Goats?

By: | July 30, 2012

Two weeks ago, I wrote about scientists who intentionally killed 80,000 feral goats on one of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago. The effort was in the name of biodiversity and conservation, sure, but was it right? The post spurred some fascinating questions and comments, particularly from Jason G. Goldman, who writes The Thoughtful Animal blog at the Scientific American Blog Network. I put Jason in touch with LWONian Michelle Nijhuis, who just wrote a feature for Scientific American about how conservationists decide which species to save. Below you’ll find their conversation.

 

Michelle: So what was your first reaction when you read Ginny’s post about the “Judas goat” and the extermination of feral goats in the Galápagos?

Jason: I thought it was actually a fairly clever method of addressing the problems caused by this invasive species. But what was in some ways more interesting to me was the comment made by one of Ginny’s co-travelers: “I really enjoyed the trip, but the one big downer for me was the extermination of the goats and the donkeys and their very anti-Darwin approach…” My assumption was that the phrase “anti-Darwin approach” was meant to suggest that this is a case of humans unfairly intervening in a situation, or “playing God.” But it strikes me as an extremely anthropocentric view of evolution and natural selection. Isn’t human behavior – whatever drives it – itself a selection pressure?

Michelle: That caught my attention, too. We as humans have applied selection pressure to the Galápagos by bringing the goats in, and now we’re applying – or releasing – a different sort of pressure by taking them away. I’m wondering about your perspective as a cognitive neuroscientist – when I read about an effort like this, my logical brain supports the effort to restore ecological processes and biodiversity – but my emotional reaction to the killing of so many goats is different than the reaction I’d have to killing a bunch of invasive cockroaches, or, say, getting rid of a flu virus. Do we feel more concerned about goats and other mammals partly because their brains are more similar to ours?
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 28, 2012

July 23 – 27

Penis Friday got violent this week with Brooke Borel‘s guest post about the bedbug penis, whose shape makes me freeze in terror. They use this thing to engage in what researchers call “traumatic insemination“. Aw, and bedbugs used to be so cute, too.

Speaking of dicks, turns out Walt Whitman was quite a superior species, as Ann reveals in her usual lovely contextualisation of Abstruse Goose’s lament for the Mars budget.

Guest poster Amanda Mascarelli disentangled the vastly more complicated reality behind the old saw about left-brain/right-brain creativity and learning.

Jessa’s answer to the recent flap about internet addiction is a fascinating look at the alarmist history of media addiction: back when the hot new medium was the humble book, scholars wrung their hands over all that newfangled book-learnin’, convinced that it would cause us to break our mental fibres (think about that Newsweek cover).

And Ginny concluded her remarkable Galapagos Mondays series, wondering whether the Galapagos’ economy is eating itself. Tourists mean money for conservation but they also mean destruction of the environment they’re paying to see. The question, she finds, goes far beyond the Galapagos: is it ever possible to square conservation with economic development?

See you next week.

TGIPF: The Bed Bug and His Violent Penis

By: | July 27, 2012

Behold the bed bug penis. Entomologists call it a lanceolate paramere, where lanceolate means “shaped like a lance head” and paramere, the “copulatory hooks formed from outer subdivision of primary phallic lobes.” Put more simply, it curves out from the tip of the male’s abdomen and ends in a wicked point, like a dagger.

This shape is no coincidence. The bed bug penis is adapted to stab. Continue reading →