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The experience of Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read is strange. After all, you are reading about the science of reading. So as you read, you become more explicitly conscious of the cognitive processes which allow you to read in the first place. I encountered Dehaene first via the The Number Sense 13 years ago. Why the big gap between reading him again, despite my appreciation for this dense by accessible prose? It reflects the fact that my “book diet” has shifted away from cognitive neuroscience a lot since then. In particular, since I started on my journey toward becoming a professional geneticist I’ve been subject to a sort of tunnel vision . There’s something about academic science is sucks many people into hyper-specialization, and I’m not immune obviously. Other areas of biology outside of genetics, and in particular genomics, strike me as terra incognita now. The same problem doesn’t hit me when it comes to history, religion, philosophy, etc. Perhaps because these are less technical fields more open to generalists.
I’ve been away from the internet mostly this week, except my phone. Speaking of which, going to a child-friendly museum or park is somewhat difficult today because so many people are taking pictures with their phones. To be polite you have to stop a lot so as not to occlude the photo, but after a while it gets kind of ridiculous, as you are dodging so many lines of sight. I think “Google Contacts”, where individuals can snap photos sliced out of their day to day perception would be an improvement on this.
Finally, the Kennewick Man paper is out. It’s open access, so read it. The basic results were leaked by the press a while back. Kennewick Man seems to be ancestral to modern Native American stock. Intriguingly though he is not symmetrically related to all Native Americans, not even all “First Americans” (a la Reich lab terminology for the descendants of the first wave out of Berengia, who contributed most of the ancestry of Amerindians). Also, the morphology as reflected in skeletal features would not have resolved these issues definitively. On an individual level these phenotypes are too noisy to make robust population level inferences in many, though not all, cases.
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Here’s to hoping Gawker gets their day of reckoning. Hulk Hogan will get revenge on behalf of Razib and all its other victims!
You’re probably aware of this but in case you aren’t, and for anyone else interested, Dehaene recently put out another great book on the topic of consciousness called Consciousness and the Brain. Definitely worth checking out.
yes, i have it.
I’m wondering if you have read Rushton’s book, “Race, Behavior, and Evolution”? I liked it, but have to admit it made me uncomfortable at times. He is writing about different races of people in the same way someone would discuss different subspecies of frogs. While the r-K continuum seems a bit simplistic for fully capturing the variation across human populations, to first order it seems to work pretty well.
I’m curious what the response is of people who study other animals in the same way. EO Wilson had some positive comments, but many of the reviews I saw online were extremely scathing and dismissive.
I tend to avoid books on cognitive neuroscience for the opposite reason as you: it is too close to my research area, so I usually prefer other areas for my pleasure reading.
Curious if Razib or any of the regulars here have read the works of Vaclav Smil (“Bill Gates’ favourite writer”). I am halfway through “Creating the Twentieth Century”. It’s an interesting historical perspective but also somewhat frustrating from a science / engineering perspective. Wondering what to tackle next.
Hi Razib,
I got a quick question for you:
I have been reading Eugene Harris’ Ancestors in Our Genome (which I highly recommend) and he says that two Bushmen from the Kalahari Desert are more genetically different than a European and an Asian. Doesn’t this mean that they would have to have a Fst on the level of continental races? I know that Africans have the most genetic diversity of any population but this seems kind of surprising to me.
Thanks,
Beowulf
“The same problem doesn’t hit me when it comes to history, religion, philosophy, etc. ”
My hypothesis for this is that the basic facts/data/interpretive frameworks used these disciplines evolve much more slowly than is the case, say in Genomics or cognitive science. What you read ten years ago about history or religion is still useful. I regularly cite history books more than fifty years old and don’t feel bad about it. I cannot imagine citing a hard science paper from more than a decade or so back.
I have Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read on my nightstand, but found it a chore to read after I got in a little way. Not because I couldn’t follow the technical aspects, but something about the writing made it a slog, and it remains unfinished.