Monthly Archive for January, 2011

The Moral Landscape

Published on January 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

Sam Harris

From Sean, Discover

Last year we talked a bit about Sam Harris’s attempts to ground morality on science:

  • The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate
  • Sam Harris Responds
  • You Can’t Derive Ought From Is

See especially the third one there, where I try to be relatively careful about what I am saying. (Wouldn’t impress a philosopher by a long shot, but by scientist/blogger standards I was careful.) Upshot: concepts relevant to morality aren’t empirical ones, and can’t be tested by doing experiments. Morality depends on science (you can make moral mistakes if you don’t understand the real world), but it isn’t a subset of it. Science describes what happens, while morality passes judgments on what should and should not happen, which is simply different.

By now Harris’s book The Moral Landscape has appeared, so you can read for yourself his explanations in full. In a different world — one where I had access to a dozen or so clones of myself with fully updated mental states, willing to tackle all the projects my birth-body didn’t have time to fit in — I would read the book carefully and report back. This is not that world.

Happily, Russell Blackford has written a longish and very good review, in the Journal of Evolution and Technology. He also blogged about it, and Jerry Coyne blogged about Russell’s review. As far as I can tell, Russell and I basically agree on all the substantive points, and he’s more trained in philosophy than I am, so you’re actually doing a lot better than something one of my clones would have been able to provide. It’s an extremely generous review, always saying “I liked the book but…” where I would have said “Despite the flaws, there are some good aspects…” So you’ll find in the review plenty of lines like “Unfortunately, Harris sees it as necessary to defend a naïve metaethical position…”

To Read More…

Royal Society – Brain Waves: Neuroscience, Society and Policy

Published on January 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Daniel Lende, Plos Blogs

The Royal Society has just put out the first module of its Brain Waves project, which provides a primer on the state of art in neuroscience and how neuroscience intersects with society. The ten essays cover a range of relevant topics for neuroanthropology, with an introduction written by Prof. Colin Blakemore.

The first section covers the scope and limits of neuroimaging, neuropsychopharmacology, neural interfaces, consciousness, and reward.

The second section focuses on neuroscience and society, with takes on benefits, risks, neuroethics, and governance.

All the essays, which generally range from 8 to 12 pages and are written in clear prose and have citations for further exploration, have been written almost entirely by prominent British experts. They are freely available as pdfs.

I’ve just started to explore, and based on the quality, I am sure to look at them all. Wolfram Schultz’s essay on Reward, Decision Making, and Neuroeconomics is obviously one that immediately caught my eye. Steven Rose’s Risks raises some of the critical questions relevant to many anthropologists.

To Read More…

The Truth Wears Off

Published on January 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

The Challenge of Feeding Scientific Advice into Policy-Making

Published on January 11, 2011 in News. 2 Comments

From Roland Schenkel in Science:

Both the United States and the European Union are facing new challenges in terms of how science is viewed and used. There continues to be tension between scientific information and societal and political priorities. How can we explain the gap between science and policy-making while confronting misperceptions and promoting positive views of science among the public?

The United States and the European Union have recently undergone major political changes, reflected in a reevaluation of the role of science in the policy-making apparatus. The Obama Administration has focused on science as a central component of the policy agenda. Concrete measures include reinvigorating the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST); increasing investment in research and education; and appointing respected scientists, such as John Holdren and Stephen Chu, to senior-level positions. Similarly in Europe, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, has initiated the Europe 2020 agenda, which has research and innovation at its core. Perhaps less trumpeted but also important has been President Barroso’s announcement of the creation of a Chief Scientific Adviser position.

However, our governments are currently faced with a significant financial crisis. Will they continue to take a long-term view and invest in the future? Or will they succumb to pressures and cut funding for science? Likewise, will the scientific community be modest enough to accept that science is just one important consideration on the table when decision-makers have to make choices? What follows is a plea for a more frequent and more issue-driven dialog between policy-makers, the scientific community, and all relevant stakeholders, based on observations that have shaped my career in providing scientific advice.

For more (subscription required)…

Published on January 4, 2011 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

From Emma Graves Fitzsimmons in The New York Times:

DARIEN, Ill. — When one team’s model helicopter broke before a recent science competition here, the students made a replacement at the last minute using a pizza box and a rubber band.

Things do not always go as planned at the competition, which one teacher called a “track-and-field event for nerds.” But a high school sophomore, John Hickernell, said he was happy just to be at the event, the Illinois Science Olympiad, after one team had to back out at the last minute because members could not raise enough money to attend.

“I’m upset about my event,” John said. “Imagine not even getting to compete at all.”

Securing financing for these competitions and for the time-honored local science fair has become increasingly difficult because of the poor economy, organizers say. Sponsors have dropped out of local science fairs, while some schools are scaling back extracurricular activities, including science programs, because of state budget cuts.

For more…