My plan to become a household name continues apace!

It’s nice to see these casual references to PZ Myers, as if anyone would have heard of me:

The lab is at 101 Theory Drive, a developer’s idea of a scientific street name that Lynch found presumptuous.

It is a mark of the difficulty of life sciences — biology and its many descendants — that to call something a theory is to honor, not slight it. Theory, evolutionary biologist P.Z. Myers has written, is what scientists aspire to. Lynch, for all of his bombast, was respectful of the intellectual protocols of his science.

“I would have called it Hypothesis Drive,” he said.

The article is part of an interesting series on research into learning and memory, that is also unfortunately marred by some casual sexism on the part of its subject. See, Zuska, you just had to ruin it for me!

P.S. I think of myself as more of a developmental biologist than evolutionary biologist, but OK, I am very interested in evolutionary issues.

Your mama’s soul doesn’t love you

If it existed, it might also be profoundly autistic and … diabetic? So science cannot disprove the existence of a soul, but one thing we’re learning is how much valued human properties such as love and attachment and awareness of others are a product of our biology — emotions like love are an outcome of chemistry, and can’t be separated from our meaty natures.

The latest issue of BioEssays has an excellent review of the role of the hormone oxytocin in regulating behaviors. It highlights how much biochemistry is a determinant of what we regard as virtues.

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Brain doping can be good for you

Shelley has a good post on the biology of ADHD—the lesson, once again, is that the mind is regulated by physical and chemical processes, and we’re learning more and more about how seemingly nebulous, fuzzy, higher level functions of thought can be traced back to relatively simple material causes.

The basic story is that norepinephrine is the molecule behind ADHD, and that what the stimulants given to people do is increase the effective concentration of NE. I’ve never been a victim of ADHD — as a kid, I’d say I was more often characterized as being the extreme opposite of what we see in ADHD — but there’s an interesting comment that stimulants like caffeine can also release more NE … and that coffee addicts may be self-medicating. I confess: I am a coffee addict. Maybe I’ve been making myself worse over the years. Of course, being on the other end of the attention spectrum isn’t stigmatized like ADHD.

Coffee also doesn’t bear the stigma of Ritalin. It’s too bad; human beings have been willfully modifying their brain chemistry for millennia, and we really shouldn’t treat the more precise pharmaceuticals of today like they’re a cause for shame.

Brains are plastic, not hardwired

Cosma Shalizi has written a two part dialog that is amazingly well in line with my own thoughts on the subject of the heritability of intelligence: g is a statistical artifact, we have brains that evolved for plasticity, not specificity, and that while many behavioral traits have a heritable component, it’s not anything like what the naive extremists among the cognitive science crowd think. There are no genes that specify what you will name your dog — in fact, most of the genes associated with the brain have very wide patterns of expression and functions that are not neatly tied to behaviors: how does an allele of an adhesion factor map to your performance on a math test? It doesn’t, not directly.

Cosma has a wonderful example of the heritability of accents to illustrate the complications of trying to assign a genetic cause to properties associated with race and class and ethnicity. They may look like they’re genetically determined, but they aren’t. In my own family, I noticed a weird phenomenon: my grandparents came from Minnesota, and my mother was born there but moved to Washington state as a child. My grandparents had that Scandinavian-influenced upper midwest accent (if you’ve seen the movie Fargo, you’ve heard an amplified version of the same—most Minnesotans have only hints of that degree of an accent). My mother doesn’t have it. Oddly, though, I’ve heard bits of it in my sisters’ accents, an attenuated version of the already mild Minnesota sing-song, while my brothers and I don’t have a trace of it. I was tempted to speculate that there was a dominant Scandihoovian allele located on the X chromosome, but I suspect the more likely culprit would be sex differences in the influence of maternal and paternal families on boys and girls. That’s harder to tease apart than something as discrete as a gene, though, and it’s also a fuzzy effect that can be affected by scientific scrutiny.

Unfortunately, Three-Toed Sloth doesn’t have a comments section, so if you want to argue about it all, here’s a convenient battle ground in a Pharyngula thread.

Egnor’s machine is uninhabited by any ghost

Egnor, the smug creationist neurosurgeon, is babbling again, but this time, it’s on a subject that he might be expected to have some credibility: the brain (he has one, and operates on them) and the mind (this might be a problem for him). It’s an interesting example of the religious pathology that’s going to be afflicting us for probably the next century — you see, creationism is only one symptom. We’re seeing an ongoing acceleration in scientific understanding that challenge the traditional truisms of the right wing religious culture warriors, and represent three fronts in our future battles.

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Encephalon #18

At last, it’s time for Encephalon, the carnival of neuroscience. There were a lot of submissions, and I’ve tried to organize them into four categories: basic and cognitive neuroscience addresses the problem of understanding brains, more medically and psychiatrically inclined work tries to fix brains, a few crazy dreamers think about technological ways to improve brains, and some rare individuals wonder about how brains evolved. I should mention that brains are incredibly complex and all of these efforts are struggling against the immensity of the problems…but it’s fun to try and to watch, and sometimes we actually make progress.

I also need to complain that the last Encephalon was done pirate style, depriving me of a creative schtick I could have used. Curse you, Jake Young, you scurvy dog.

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Bird brains

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I’m teaching a course in neurobiology this term, and it’s strange how it warps my brain; suddenly I find myself reaching more and more for papers on the nervous system in my reading. It’s not about just keeping up with the subjects I have to present in lectures (although there is that, too), but also with unconsciously gravitating toward the subject in my casual reading, too.

“Unconsciously”…which brings up the question of exactly what consciousness is. One of the papers I put on the pile on my desk was on exactly that subject: Evolution of the neural basis of consciousness: a bird-mammal comparison. I finally got to sit down and read it carefully this afternoon, and although it is an interesting paper and well worth the time, it doesn’t come anywhere near answering the question implied in the title. It is a useful general review of neuroanatomical theories of consciousness—even if it left me feeling they are all full of crap—but in particular it’s an interesting comparative look at avian brain organization.

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