Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

Missouri may have opened a creationist Pandora’s Box

Missourians have voted overwhelmingly for a ‘right-to-pray’ constitutional amendment that creationists may use to let students opt-out of certain topics in science class. When I voted on Tuesday in my St. Louis suburb (against this amendment, of course), the ballot described the proposed amendment with a single, innocuous sentence that basically nobody could disagree with (except maybe Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne). No wonder the thing passed with 83% in favor – you can make anything sound good if you’re not constrained by honesty, which, when it comes to prayer, one would think ought to be a constraint.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

In the months leading up to the vote, Amendment 2 prompted unsuccessful lawsuits over its ballot wording, which its critics argued oversimplified the issue to the point of deceit. Continue reading “Missouri may have opened a creationist Pandora’s Box”

Pursue ignorance, learn science

Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. – Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

Dr. Stewart Firestein, a Columbia University neurobiologist is a scientist after my own heart. A former actor and theater manager, he went to graduate school in his mid-thirties, and despite the late start, has pursued a successful career understanding olfaction. He teaches a class on ignorance in science, and he’s written a book based on the ideas in the class, Ignorance: How It drives Science.

The basic message of the book is that facts are boring, while ignorance is (or can be) interesting, and we need to teach and practice science with this in mind. In this brief, genial book, Firestein gives advice on how to have an interesting conversation with a scientist – ask any of the following questions:

Continue reading “Pursue ignorance, learn science”

This is terrible career advice:

From Stewart Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science:

The poet John Keats hit upon an ideal state of mind for the literary psyche that he called Negative Capability – “that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason”…Scientists do reach after fact and reason, but it is when they are most uncertain that the reaching is most imaginative. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the great philosopher-scientists, says, “In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period”… Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.

Continue reading “This is terrible career advice:”

“Lectures on Chemical Reaction Networks”

A classic set of lectures by Martin Feinberg:

The occasion was a semester-long in-gathering of people interested in the behavior of complex chemical systems. At the end of that period there was a large meeting, the proceedings of which were published by Academic Press in a book, “Dynamics and Modeling of Reactive Systems,” edited by W. Stewart, W. H. Ray and C. Conley. My chapter amounted to a summary of some of the things I talk about during the course of the nine lectures.

It was an exciting time, which began when Charles Conley called me at the University of Rochester. He explained the MRC plans for 1979 and asked if I could spend a semester in Wisconsin. He said that they would pay my salary, provided that my salary wasn’t too high. I told him my salary. Conley asked if I could come for a year.

These seem useful, at least based on what I see in this paper: “A Linear Framework for Time-Scale Separation in Nonlinear Biochemical Systems,” Jeremy Gunawardena.

Love art? Love science? Read The Age of Insight

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel’s book about “The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present” will keep you busy. It’s stuffed with history of Viennese Expressionism (Klimt, Kokoschka, and my new favorite, Schiele), Freud (what he got right and what he didn’t), cognitive psychology, and a fascinating discussion about how our minds, particularly our unconscious minds, respond to art.

There are a lot of neuroscience details, but the big point of the book is that Freud was right – most of our cognitive processes are unconscious. A key aspect of creativity is to facilitate the exchange between the unconscious and the conscious, and good artists take aesthetic moves that play on the unconscious responses of beholders, and to increase our awareness of the unconscious that operates in us. Kandel gives a neuroscientific justification of James Watson’s famous claim that “it’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.”

Particularly fun was the discussion of why Klimt and the Expressionists pursued particular stylistic directions. Klimt was directly influences by his contact with scientists, and many of the symbols in his paintings are inspired by microscope images of cells.