Eva Jablonka asks if there is more to heredity, natural selection, and evolution than genes and DNA?:
Growing evidence indicates there is more to heredity than DNA, that heritable non-DNA variations can take place during development, sometimes in response to an organism’s environment. The notion of soft inheritance is returning to reputable scientific [...]
Lincoln Stein updates his 2003 prediction that bioinformatics would be dead in ten years:
In February 2003 I gave a keynote address for the second annual O’Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference called ‘Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012′ in which I predicted that bioinformatics as a discipline separate from mainstream biology would be gone in ten years. My [...]
Chris Mooney in Slate says that the “war on science” is over… but now what?
Scientists are ecstatic about (…) Obama’s recent promise to listen to them “even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient.” But it would be the gravest of errors for researchers to simply return victorious to their labs and fall back [...]
Marlene Zuk in the New York Times attacks a core belief of Evolutionary Psychology:
Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry [...]
The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy’s personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.
Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists.. [...]
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No [...]
