Monk

The research finds that the meaning of happiness shifts as people age: Whereas younger people are more likely to associate happiness with excitement, older people are more likely to associate happiness with feeling peaceful—a change driven by increasing feelings of connectedness (to others and to the present moment) as one ages.

-- "The Meaning(s) of Happiness" from Stanford Graduate School of Business Research Paper Series #2026

This may also help to account for the greater religiosity that we see in older people. Well, what else are you going to do?

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Cornelia Dean reports on America's shaky relationship with science. If this dominance falls away, then you know the decline is setting in. You would really rather lead the world in science and innovation than in religious fundamentalism.

( article )

That Huckabee is a serious contender for the presidency is suggestive of the problem:


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John Tierney gives us some fascinating discussion analyzing how the world's cultures and religions respond to scientific advances, for example, how cloning and embryonic research is highly controversial in America because it conflicts with Christian precepts, but is perfectly compatible in Asian cultures and their ideas of reincarnation.

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By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.

Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.

-- Carl Zimmer for The New York Times

It is also noted that these findings may have implicatation for, say, how the brain makes sense of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. How living multiplicity becomes a stable and useful unity. E pluribus unum.

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The Times has a sciency story on the power of the subconscious mind, and how the conscious part of the brain may be the last to know what's up. That makes sense to me. The influence of the subconscious mind, and those who seek to influence it, is so strong that they feel moved to make this qualification:

Some scientists also caution against overstating the implications of the latest research on priming unconscious goals. The new research “doesn’t prove that consciousness never does anything,” wrote Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, in an e-mail message. “It’s rather like showing you can hot-wire a car to start the ignition without keys. That’s important and potentially useful information, but it doesn’t prove that keys don’t exist or that keys are useless.”

Maybe this helps to explain why life seems to have a mind of its own and we just its plaything. Maybe this also helps to account for the power of religious feelings, that sense of something deeper moving us.

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Empathy for another's pain is apparently not limited to the nobility of the human. Some new science suggests that even mice can register this emotion:

For instance, it's tempting to explain empathetic behavior in animals that we believe to have only rudimentary cognition, such as mice, by arguing that the sight of a suffering fellow mouse simply evokes an automatic fear reaction. This study undermines that explanation by showing that mice showed empathetic reactions only with cage mates; the mice seem to go far beyond being frightened by injury to accounting for whom the injured party is -- friend, family, foe, stranger. This response is a significant step toward human-like social feeling -- toward caring for acquaintances more than for strangers, just as our empathy for someone who is hurt differs depending on whether the person is a foreigner, a national compatriot, a school chum or an immediate family member.

However, in these mice studies, an interesting anti-empathy reaction was observed among male mice:

Male (and not female) mice showed an interesting additional phenomenon when witnessing a strange male mouse in pain: its own pain sensitivity actually dropped. The counter-empathic reaction occurred only in male pairs that didn't know each other, which are probably the pairs with the greatest degree of rivalry. Was that rivalry suppressing their reaction, or did they actually feel less empathy for a strange rival?

This gender effect reminds me of a wonderful 2006 study of human Schadenfreude by Tania Singer and colleagues. They found that in both men and women, seeing the pain of a person we have just cooperated with activates pain-related brain areas. But if a man felt he had been treated unfairly by another man, his brain's pleasure centers would light up at seeing the other's pain. Such male antipathy towards rivals may be a mammalian universal.

Well, it is still a Hobbesian kind of world.


(Source: ScientificAmerican.com)

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That brave new world keeps looking braver and nearer. Looking to treat biology like another kind of manufacturing, scientists are hoping to create living organisms that can do almost anything from solving our energy problems to curing cancer:

Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They've forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.

... Despite the opposition, the researchers who work in the field, which is known as Synthetic Biology, have a disarming casualness about their work—almost as though they were building machines, rather than living things.

Naturally, there is controversy over the religious implications, over and beyond whether this new science will even succeed, about the sacredness of life and people playing God. All that good stuff. The excerpt containing that discussion is below.


( excerpt )

(Source: Lee Silver for Newsweek)

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The Times has a fascinating article on dieting and metabolism that runs counter to the idea that fat people are just "greedy", as one young hottie put it on her profile at some webcam site that has stuck in my mind. This article covers the gamut of studies and surveys uncovering all the possible relations between a person's weight and his habits and his environment and his family tree. And it looks like people are just fated to be what they are from birth, or at least they have to work damn hard to achieve and maintain a counter-ideal.

After reading the article, I was wondering what possibly could be the answer to this problem. Moreover, it seems to me that it is fair to say that it is only recently that we have been seeing a serious 'obesity epidemic'. If this is accurate, why is that the case? According to these studies, the answer is not the popular one that we have just grown lazier and more self-indulgent as a society. Monk then darkly chuckles that maybe society has provided too good of a safety net to capture all the losers, and we have been seeing more people who otherwise would have fallen out long ago - we have removed some of Darwin's filters to weed out the undesirables, such as Monk himself. So, the only answer would seem to be to not let fat people procreate! At least Monk is in no danger of contributing to that problem.

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Got into another discussion about science and religion and the meaning of life. This is perhaps silly for an older man of rather limited intellectual facility, but that's how I get my thrills, this and violent pornography. I'll spare you the violent pornography. Anyway, in this discussion, I have come up with the metaphor of a painting, a great work of art. It's awkward, but...

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