People are too big. If we want to save the planet, we must shrink ourselves.

That’s the message of a recent Atlantic article entitled “How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change.”

The piece reports on a proposal—to be published soon in an environmental ethics journal(1)—to meet the challenge of climate change (if such it be), not by transforming the earth and its climate, as some have suggested, but rather by reengineering human beings themselves.

In a nutshell, the reasoning in this essay goes like this:

Continue reading “Mad Scientists, Then and Now” »

In “Credentialism, Part I: How much of your education do you really need?,” I looked at the relationship between the amount of information you really need to do a job and the other qualities that make—or break—success.

The nurse practitioner needs a high level of medical science information as well as skill and rapport with patients. The sales rep who develops great rapport with her clients can get by with a much less demanding body of technical information. There is a wide spectrum in the middle.

“Credentialism” means creating barriers to entering the work force by padding and lengthening courses, raising fees, and marketing prestige or exclusivity. The usual explanation is that more and better education results, which helps students, prospective employers, and society in general.

Continue reading “Credentialism, Part II: The less well-advertised reasons why credentialism is so popular today” »

In a recent article in New Criterion , Charles Murray, whose book, Coming Apart, I have been considering here, offers another scholar’s view that expertise in a field requires  50,000 chunks of information:

Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload. Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 “chunks” of information about the subject over about ten years of experience—simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment. Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, and labor.

But surely this calculation does not apply across the board.

In many fields, information and interaction are not easily divided into 50,000 chunks in the same way that $50,000 can be divided into 50,000 chunks of one dollar each. That fact bears on the problem of credentialism as a barrier to getting a job.

Credentialism? It means an emphasis on acquiring academic credentials in a field before one can be hired.

Before I go any further, let me make clear what it does not mean: Continue reading “Credentialism, Part I: How much of your education do you really need?” »

Technology and education go hand in hand.

With recent technological advances, students utilize online resources and other tools in order to supplement the classroom experience, earn an online bachelor degree, pursue professional development credits, or simply satisfy curiosity.

Whether used to enhance the educational experience or to replace the traditional classroom, students and educators realize that classroom technology integration is here to stay.

Continue reading “Familiarity Breeds . . . Opportunity: New Wave of Understanding in Ed Technology” »

In Part I, we looked at how images are obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), as well as a history of brain-scan technology and where we got the idea that blood flow relates to brain function.

In this installment, we are going to look at some of the accomplishments and some of the limitations of fMRI. Then, we will look at some of the assumptions behind fMRI and how they affect our interpretation of brain scans.

Clinical Uses

Perhaps the biggest advantage of fMRI is that doctors can obtain an image of the brain through a non-invasive technique.

Continue reading “Brain Scans: Modern-Day Phrenology or Analytical Tool? Part II” »

Why is it that so many people offer students straight talk about stuff that they can get straight talk about anywhere, but not about stuff they can’t?

Sex? It’s the best sales tools in history, as my Grade 7 teacher pointed out in 1962. Aren’t we all overwhelmed with straight talk about sex from the marketplace?

Here’s some straight talk you won’t hear from the student loan industry: A student loan is just as likely to get you a debt you can’t shed as it is to get you a job. All too many students graduate and then go back to living with their parents.

Like nothing ever happened in their lives since they graduated from Grade Eight.

Continue reading “Straight talk about student debt and jobs” »

A molecular biologist at the University of Chicago by the name of James A. Shapiro (left) recently published a masterly synthetic work which constitutes the most substantial contribution to date to post-Darwinian thinking in contemporary biology.(1)

The volume in question is entitled Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (FT Press, 2011), and it is simply stunning in every respect.

However, Shapiro’s masterpiece is packed with technical detail, and for that reason it may not be as widely read as it ought to be outside of academia. That is why it is so encouraging that Professor Shapiro has decided to publicize the core insights of his work through an ongoing series of short essays—comprising some 15 pieces to date—on Huffington Post’s science blog.

Continue reading “Seeing Past Darwin II: James A. Shapiro” »

What can brain scans—functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—tell us?

To state my biases up front, magnetic resonance is one of my favorite analytical tools.

When I worked in an organic synthesis lab, I used nuclear magnetic resonance at the end of each reaction to identify my compound. I owed a debt to NMR for saving my tail in this regard.

But I also have a fascination with the theory behind magnetic resonance because it was one of the first analytical techniques whose theory was based on quantum mechanical principles.

Magnetic resonance comes in many forms based on the sample type that you wish to study. Nuclear magnetic resonance is used to study molecules and is so named because it is investigating how particular nuclei in particular environments behave in the presence of a magnet.

Continue reading “Brain Scans: Modern-Day Phrenology or Analytical Tool? Part I” »

The gradual crumbling of the Darwinian consensus, and the rise of a new theoretical outlook in biology is one of the most significant but underreported news stories of our time.*

It’s a scandal that science journalists have been so slow to pick up on this story. For, make no mistake about it, the story is huge. In science, they don’t come any bigger.

The story is this:

The official explanation of the nature of living things—and therefore of human beings—that we’ve all been led to believe in for the past 60 or 70 years turns out to be dead wrong in some essential respects.

What have we been so wrong about? It’s complicated, but in a phrase, it’s this:

The machine metaphor was a mistake—organisms are not machines, they are intelligent agents.

Continue reading “Seeing Past Darwin I: The Machine Metaphor” »

And why shouting profanities won’t change that fact.

When Jenifer Stefano, state director of Americans for Prosperity-Pennsylvania, was on Sean Hannity’s “Great American Panel” (Fox TV) with commentator Bob Beckel, Beckel did something unusual: He lost his temper and began using profanity while insulting her. He was apparently unaware that his mike was live. “Panel” is not the kind of show where the audience was expecting that .

What would cause a veteran broadcast journalist to get so upset as to make such an elementary mistake? As Stefano tells it,

I told Bob about a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report released in January 2010 called the “Head Start Impact Study.” While the report acknowledges that four-year-olds enrolled in Head Start showed modest short-term gains in some subject areas as a result of the program, those gains disappeared after a few years, and “no significant impacts were found for math skills, pre-writing, children’s promotion, or teacher report of children’s school accomplishments or abilities in any year.”

In fact, according to University of Maryland professors Douglas Besharov and Douglas Call, children who are enrolled in normal day care programs receive the same educational benefits as children enrolled in Head Start, and for less than half the cost ($9,500 a year per child vs. $22,600 a year per child).

Head Start, a venerable program dating from 1965, sought to improve the learning strategies of poor and minority children by providing enrichments they were probably not getting at home. Beckel’s outburst certainly focused attention on the failure, but didn’t shed any further light.

Why doesn’t the program achieve lasting gains? Besharov and Call offer: Continue reading “Why the Head Start programs have been such an abysmal failure” »