Six on Geography and Science: The shape of life before the dinosaurs, on a strange planet; Black And Latino Children Are Ofte
panaritisp
"For centuries, long before ‘biology’ coalesced as a discipline in the early 19th century, scientists struggled to understand what constitutes ‘life’. Millennia ago, Aristotle’s Scala Naturae (ladder of being) described arrayed nature on a continuum that advanced in perfection from rocks to humans (the Catholic Church crowned that ladder with God and the angels; Carl Linnaeus quietly removed them from his own taxonomy). The 17th-century naturalist Athanasius Kircher believed that vitalism was impressed in different substances, with mineral forces forming some fossils in an attenuated process similar to the growth of plants and animals. German Romantics of the 19th century such as Novalis and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were captivated by caves, and thought the same individuating forces (Triebkraft) generating crystals climaxed in humans. ‘Life itself’ did not exist. All was organic.
Today’s textbooks teach high-school students that life is marked by specific capacities – reproduction, metabolism, adaptation, self-organisation, growth. But biologists and other scientists are less resolute about what makes life unique. In 1943, Erwin Schrödinger answered the query ‘What is Life?’ as a physicist – it is a negative entropic system, like any other. Such thinking influenced mid-century molecular biologists, who borrowed cybernetic theory to think of life as signalling servomechanisms and homeostats made up of molecular ‘information’. DNA is still called a ‘code’ for a reason. At the close of the 20th century, different scientists also defined life according to chaos theory, thermodynamics and other physical processes. Computer scientists believed that they could generate artificial life on a computer."
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"Don’t you wish everyone would just act more normal, like you? I know I do.
But normal is a relative state that depends on time, place, and circumstance. There’s no one right way to be a human, and that applies to mental as well as physical states. That’s why neuroscientists are advocating for more recognition of the bizarre normalcy of all complex humans in psychiatry—an argument that can help all of us take a bigger-picture view.
A new study published in Trends in Cognitive Science on Feb. 20 debunks the myth of normalcy in people and animals. “The Myth of Optimality in Clinical Neuroscience” (paywall), by Avram Holmes and Lauren Patrick of the Yale University psychology department, uses evolution to show that uniformity in our brains is totally abnormal. What’s much more common in life, during its 3.5 billion years of evolving existence on Earth, is range and change, variety in and among creatures and habitats.
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"But the simplicity of its definition belies pi’s status as the most fascinating, and most studied, number in the history of the world. While treating pi as equal to 3.14 is often good enough, the number really continues on forever, a seemingly random series of digits ambling infinitely outward and obeying no discernible pattern — 3.14159265358979…. That’s because it’s an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be represented by a fraction of two whole numbers (although approximations such as 22/7 can come close).
But that hasn’t stopped humanity from furiously chipping away at pi’s unending mountain of digits. We’ve been at it for millennia."
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"It’s difficult to look at old issues of National Geographic and not cringe. The magazine published its first issue in 1888, when America began flexing its muscles as an imperial power, and eventually employed the finest photographic talent of the day to head out and bring back stories of the noble savage back to the white world.
For example: one caption on a 1916 photo of two Australian indigenous people says: “These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.”
The magazine was, in no ambiguous or uncertain terms, racist. Until this week, it had done little to come to terms with its role in telling the white world of the 20th century of its superiority.
On Monday, National Geographic editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg, both the magazine’s first female and first Jewish editor, published an editorial declaring that it was time to set the record right on the magazine’s racist history, writing that “to rise above our past, we must acknowledge it.” The magazine’s upcoming issue on race will include a series of corrective articles exploring, for example, the construction of white identity and the history of bunk racial science. In doing so, National Geographic is setting a new standard not just for themselves, but for publications that continue to advance racist causes into the 21st century."
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