I recently completed reading one of the most stimulating books (1) on the conceptual aspects of evolution that I have read in many years. The author, Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of biology at Harvard. He has written widely on topics in the philosophy of science and is the author previously of an exceptionally thoughtful [...]
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In an 1858 humorous poem The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or the Wondeful One Hoss Shay, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. described a carriage so artfully constructed as to have no weakest link. The carriage ran smoothly for exactly a hundred years, and then one day
it went to pieces all at once, –
All at once, and nothing first, [...]
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Mouse ‘models’ for psychiatric disorders, strains of mice genetically engineered by ‘knocking out’ a specific gene that mediates expression of the disorder, provide invaluable information regarding the genetic, developmental, physiological, and neurological causes of mental diseases in humans. One of the first mouse models relevant to autism was generated via knockout of a gene [...]
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In 2005 Sarkis Mazmanian and colleagues showed that a single polysaccharide from an intestinal commensal, Bacteroides fragilis, could largely correct the subnormal and functionally distorted development of the immune system that occurs in germ-free mice (Mazmanian et al. 2005). More recently they have shown, using three different models of intestinal inflammation, that the same polysaccharide, [...]
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Death is one of the most mysterious and inexorable problems in biology. How does life end? What is the true nature of death? Is it absolute—a fundamental state? Or is it relative and a matter of degree? Can it be defined as part of some basic reality, a detail of an unknown whole rather than [...]
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Posted in History, Ideas on Jul 1st, 2008
One July 1, 1858, a pair of papers presented to the Linnean Society in London announced the discovery of natural selection to the scientific world. One was by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Wallace. Neither man was present at the meeting, which was packed with business items.
At the end of the year, the President [...]
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Posted in Ethics, Ideas, Opinion on May 29th, 2008
The President’s Council on Bioethics was established by President Bush in 2001 to “advise the President on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology.” Under the chairmanship of Leon Kass, the Council published a number of reports on subjects such as cloning and stem cell research. In [...]
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