Sources: science

Thoroughly entertaining review of The Family that Couldn’t Sleep, a work of epidemiological history focusing on the history and science of prion diseases — from Kuru to Mad Cow Disease. Disturbing problem in science with some intriguing proposed correlations to other diseases; good read.

Amazing story about the giant fungi library at Kew Gardens and research on the relationship between fungi and soil carbon sequestration.

Nicely written very personal engagement with several recent-ish works on the remarkable activities of and relationships between funghi and trees.

Article describing research done on mice that sees them consistently breaking trained patterns of behaviour in a way the researchers come to see as strategic. “Mice are surprisingly using higher-order approaches to learn even simple tasks” — as usual, the question is: why is this surprising? Why isn’t it the initial assumption to test in the hypotheses relating to animal cognition? Good read.

Another amazing essay by Maria Popova, this one on Johannes Kepler and his remarkable, tragic story. Great description of his contributions to modern cosmology but most interesting in organizing the story around his work of fiction, The Dream, intended to help show common readers the intuitions supporting Copernican cosmology, but which inadvertantly lead to his mother’s trial for witchcraft.

Excellent and highly readable review of the rise of remarkable and controversial challenges to the standard model of evolution.

Short, slightly reductive, but useful summary of basic positions in philosophy of science on what science is doing.

Reflections on the idea of nature as something other than human; something in which humans intervene. The thesis is that we can’t make sense of nature by removing ourselves from it, nor make sense of ourselves by removing nature from us. Pleasing anecdotes and a refreshing engagement with the problem of our moral interpretations of animal behaviour beside instances of animal behaviour that seem to make no sense without a moral interpretation.

Striking summary of science/western culture’s prioritizing of vision, therefore light, over hearing and sound and the consequences of that priority for our ways of thinking about things. In contrast, the article presents some interesting stories about sonification in science as a way of revealing patterns in data ‘overlooked’ by standard visual methods of interpretation.

This is a 3 part exploration of connections between quantum indeterminacy and Gödel’s incompletenes theorem (and Turing’s uncomputable number theorem…). Engaging and interesting but important for getting at the way branches of thought are uncomfortable with relationships they can’t control. The third installment has a gripping refutation of Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis on the grounds of quantum state randomness and world state incomputability via Cantor’s diagonal method… Provocative and fun.

Part 2 and part 3

Having heard many times that the right side of the brain connects to the left side of the body and vice versa, I had never really thought to ask why, and I had no idea it was ubuquitous throughout the brain-possessing animal population. This article provides an intuitive explanation, though for those of us with spatial dyslexia the illustrations can be a bit bewildering.

Feel overwhelmed by questions? Looking for questions? This may be the antidote: Gwern’s Open Questions — a collection of so many questions. Irresistable, immersive interogative landscape with infinite relational popups.

Excellent introduction to a trend in science away from computational/representational theories of mind — also away from Cartesian/Aristotelian, human/brain-centric assumptions — and toward more active, environmentally-embedded theories that, refreshingly, focus on things other than humans first, like plants.

An extensive and compelling review of two new works on the history of science that challenge the traditional Eurocentric view and the tendency to reduce the path of modern science to a story about a few Great Men. These books cut through the complex relationships of global knowledge creation in the age of European colonialism, on the one hand, and the role of indigenous peoples and common people constructing knowledge through craft and experience, on the other. A nice summary question from the article, attributed to Peter Dear, is the question “what is the history of science the history of?”

Reviewed are the books Horizons: the Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett, and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World by Pamela H Smith.

Interviewed by Claudia Dreifus, Naomi Oreskes talks about the role of “market fundamentalism” in subverting education, culture, science, and public knowledge on critical issues for policy, from banking to climate change. She describes the agenda of Chicago School economists and neo-liberal conservatives to promote anti-government sentiment and ultimately undermine public mechanisms for representing reality.

This is a really good introduction to a whole cluster of urgent problems covered in her books, written with Erik Conway, The Merchants of Doubt and, more recently, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

A delightful story about the author’s obsession with slime molds. An unlikey subject revealed to be more fascinating than one might imagine. Poetic and compelling writing, fantastic and beautiful photographs.

Although The Structure of Scientific Revolutinos, his most popular work, was published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s ideas still permeate a lot of talk about scientific knowledge and history. It always seemed to me that a lot of representations of his idea of a ‘paradigm shift’ couldn’t possibly be accurate as they often sounded too simple and metaphysically naive — this review goes some way toward addressing that sense and seems mostly to agree with it.

A good overview of the intellectual and political life of French philosopher-sociologist Bruno Latour, who died late in 2022.

His work covers so much ground even this wide ranging review can’t really cover it. From work on the sociology of science to his later focus on environmentalism, it is a remarkable career remembered. A quote from his book Pasteruization captures the character of his thinking that most aligns with my own: “nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.”

A helpful, short introduction to a way of thinking about consciousness that seems to be growing in popularity. Short video composed of clips from interviews with scientists and philosophers.