Carl Sagan on science and spirituality

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

The Magic Income Number - NYTimes.com

The Magic Income Number - NYTimes.com: "September 9, 2010, 9:30 am
The Magic Income Number
By FREAKONOMICS

What’s the magic income number? According to Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, it’s about $75,000, at least when it comes to day-to-day happiness. “As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness.” Income above $75,000, however, does improve people’s overall “life assessment.” ”Giving people more income beyond 75K is not going to do much for their daily mood … but it is going to make them feel they have a better life,” says Mr. Deaton.

The end of feminism?

Research conducted in the London School of Economics ("Women’s ‘double shift’ of work and domestic duties a myth finds new research") has some surprising results:

If we consider the hours spent doing both paid work and unpaid household, care and voluntary work together, men already do more than their fair share, argues LSE sociologist Catherine Hakim in a special issue of Renewal: a journal of social democracy."

Dirac: Elegance is more important than empirical fit

Scientific American has re-printed a 1963 article by Paul Dirac, The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature, in which he says: "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." The sentiment expressed here by Paul Dirac, the celebrated quantum physicist, isn't that surprising to those who recall Einstein's famous quote:

Reporter: What would you do if the measurements of bending starlight at the 1919 eclipse contradicted his general theory of relativity?

Einstein: Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.

In all, the article provides an enjoyable glimpse into the mind of a great scientist, showing that scientists do not always think and operate the way we expect them.

Microcephaly genes associated with human brain size

Fresh from Science Daily are news on the genetic mechanism determining the size of the cerebral cortex:

Microcephaly genes associated with human brain size

ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2009) — A group of Norwegian and American researchers have shown that common variations in genes associated with microcephaly ... may explain differences in brain size ...

In relation to body size, brain size has expanded dramatically throughout primate and human evolution. In fact, in proportion to body size, the brain of modern humans is three times larger than that of non-human primates. The cerebral cortex in particular has undergone a dramatic increase in surface area during the course of primate evolution. ...

mutations in [The microcephaly] genes can reduce brain size by about two-thirds, to a size roughly comparable to our early hominid ancestors. There is also evidence that four of the genes -- MCPH1, ASPM, CDK5RAP2 and CENPJ -- have evolved rapidly and have been subject to strong selective pressure in recent human evolution....

The most statistically significant associations were consistently found with the areal expansion measure, which has implications also for future studies...

Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. ...

"One particularly interesting feature of this new discovery is that the strongest links with cortical area were found in regulatory regions, rather than coding regions of the genes," said Andreassen. "One upshot of this may be that in order to further understand the molecular and evolutionary processes that have determined human brain size, we need to focus on regulatory processes rather than further functional characterization of the proteins of these genes. This has huge implications for future research on the link between genetics and brain morphology."

This is from The Telegraph, not The Onion:

Chief drugs adviser sacked by Home Secretary

Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, has sacked his chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, after he criticised the reclassification of cannabis and said alcohol and cigarettes were more dangerous than ecstasy.

Read it for yourself if you don't believe it.

It's less funny further on:

This week he called for the current drug classification system to be replaced with a "drug harm ranking" including legal substances such as alcohol and tobacco.

...

Prof Nutt said: ... Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, "makes completely irrational statements about cannabis being 'lethal', which it is not".
...

He said:"I'm not prepared to mislead the public about the harmfulness of drugs like cannabis and ecstasy," he said.

"I think most scientists will see this as a further example of the Luddite attitude of this government, and possible future governments, towards science."