Science for The Rest of Us: Podcasts At a Glance

in Science | October 23rd, 2007

Today, Eliz­a­beth Green Mus­sel­man has penned a guest blog post that you’re bound to enjoy. Eliz­a­beth is a pro­fes­sor and his­to­ri­an who works on the his­to­ry of sci­ence, and she has recent­ly launched a thought­ful pod­cast on the his­to­ry of sci­ence, med­i­cine, and tech­nol­o­gy. It’s called “The Miss­ing Link” (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Below, she high­lights for us a range of pod­casts that will appeal to every­day sci­ence enthu­si­asts. (If you’re inter­est­ed in doing some guest blog­ging, drop us a line.) Thanks Eliz­a­beth and take it away:

These can seem like dark days for those peo­ple who love sci­ence but who nei­ther spe­cial­ize in the field nor can quite stom­ach the gee-whiz fac­tor that plagues so much pop­u­lar sci­ence writ­ing and broad­cast­ing. Now that Stephen Jay Gould is cavort­ing some­where in the Beyond with Charles Dar­win, and ever since the New York Acad­e­my of Sci­ences put the ax to its inspired mag­a­zine The Sci­ences, where is a lev­el­head­ed lover of the sci­ences to turn?

The pod­cast world has begun to devel­op a niche mar­ket for just such lis­ten­ers, that is, lis­ten­ers who like their sci­ence rel­a­tive­ly non-tech­ni­cal but still high-mind­ed – lis­ten­ers who think of sci­ence as a part of human cul­ture, rather than an arcane tem­ple. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, some of the best con­tent comes from radio pro­grams that have been re-released as pod­casts. These include WNYC’s Radi­o­Lab, an hour-long show whose seri­ous inves­ti­ga­tions on a theme (such as sleep or mor­tal­i­ty) take on an intrigu­ing­ly fun­house qual­i­ty through the program’s inven­tive use of sound and the humor­ous inter­ac­tion between co-hosts Jad Abum­rad and Robert Krul­wich. NPR has also released Krulwich’s solo reports in pod­cast form as Hmmm… Krul­wich on Sci­ence.

Anoth­er long­stand­ing NPR favorite, The Engines of Our Inge­nu­ity, began broad­cast­ing brief, thought­ful reflec­tions on tech­nol­o­gy and cul­ture in 1988. Writ­ten and host­ed by John Lien­hard, a retired pro­fes­sor of mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing and his­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton, the show now airs five days a week on 30 NPR affil­i­ates in the U.S. The brief pro­grams are also avail­able in pod­cast form.

On the oth­er side of the pond, the BBC 4’s long-run­ning, pop­u­lar show, In Our Time, fre­quent­ly con­sid­ers sci­en­tif­ic top­ics and can also be heard in pod­cast form. Most recent­ly, the pro­gram explored anti­mat­ter. On each hour-long pro­gram the host, Melvyn Bragg, keeps a pan­el of three schol­ars mov­ing at a pace that skirts neat­ly between brisk and con­tem­pla­tive.

Final­ly, sev­er­al pod­casts pro­duced by indi­vid­u­als have begun to appear, each of which con­sid­ers sci­ence in con­text. Explor­ing Envi­ron­men­tal His­to­ry fea­tures Jan Oosthoek’s smart inter­views with his fel­low envi­ron­men­tal his­to­ri­ans and sci­en­tists, often focus­ing on how his­tor­i­cal study can point us toward stronger envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy solu­tions. The most recent episode con­sid­ers Arc­tic cli­mate con­di­tions both today and in the Lit­tle Ice Age. My own month­ly pod­cast, The Miss­ing Link, con­sid­ers those fas­ci­nat­ing moments in the his­to­ry of sci­ence, med­i­cine, and tech­nol­o­gy, when our intel­lec­tu­al and tech­ni­cal prowess rubs up against our very human dreams and fail­ings. The most recent episode vis­its Berlin, Ger­many, where the grue­some­ness of a pathol­o­gy museum’s col­lec­tion masks a cen­turies-long his­to­ry of both inequitable med­ical care and bril­liant micro­bi­o­log­i­cal research. The pro­gram also dis­cuss­es the Berlin Phono­gram Archive, one of the first attempts to record the world’s music for pos­ter­i­ty, designed orig­i­nal­ly to demon­strate the evo­lu­tion­ary scale of prim­i­tive to civ­i­lized human­i­ty.

Information R/evolution: The New Video

in Video - Science, Web/Tech | October 22nd, 2007

Ear­li­er this year, Michael Wesch, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gy at Kansas State, released a smart video that imme­di­ate­ly went viral on the inter­net. It was called Web 2.0… the Machine is Us/ing Us and it clev­er­ly explained the often vague con­cept of Web 2.0 and why it mat­ters. Now Wesch has launched anoth­er video under the title Infor­ma­tion R/evolution (see below). Influ­enced by the recent book, Every­thing Is Mis­cel­la­neous: The Pow­er of the New Dig­i­tal Dis­or­der, Wesch’s new clip offers a cre­ative look at how the dig­i­tal age fun­da­men­tal­ly changes our rela­tion­ship to infor­ma­tion and how infor­ma­tion gets orga­nized. Have a look.

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Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa

in Books, Most Popular, Psychology, Science | October 21st, 2007

Human behav­ior is noto­ri­ous­ly com­plex, and there’s been no short­age of psy­chol­o­gists and psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries ven­tur­ing to explain what makes us tick. Why do we get irra­tional­ly jeal­ous? Or have midlife crises? Why do we overeat to our own detri­ment? Why do we find our­selves often strong­ly attract­ed to cer­tain phys­i­cal traits? Numer­ous the­o­ries abound, but few are per­haps as nov­el and thought-pro­vok­ing as those sug­gest­ed by a new book with a long title: Why Beau­ti­ful Peo­ple Have More Daugh­ters: From Dat­ing, Shop­ping, and Pray­ing to Going to War and Becom­ing a Bil­lion­aire — Two Evo­lu­tion­ary Psy­chol­o­gists Explain Why We Do What We Do. Writ­ten by Satoshi Kanaza­wa and Alan S. Miller, the book finds answers not in ids, egos and super­egos, but in the evo­lu­tion of the human brain. Writ­ten in snap­py prose, their argu­ment is essen­tial­ly that our behav­ior — our wants, desires and impuls­es — are over­whelm­ing­ly shaped by the way our brain evolved 10,000+ years ago, and one con­se­quence is that our ances­tral brain is often respond­ing to a world long ago dis­ap­peared, not the mod­ern, fast-chang­ing world in which we live. This dis­con­nect can lead us to be out of sync, to act in ways that seem inex­plic­a­ble or counter-pro­duc­tive, even to our­selves. These argu­ments belong to new field called “evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy,” and we were for­tu­nate to inter­view Satoshi Kanaza­wa (Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics) and delve fur­ther into evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy and the (some­times dispir­it­ing) issues it rais­es. Have a read, check out the book, and also see the relat­ed piece that the Freako­nom­ics folks recent­ly did on this book. Please note that the full inter­view con­tin­ues after the jump.

DC: In a nut­shell, what is “evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy”? (e.g. when did the field emerge? what are the basic tenets/principles of this school of think­ing?)

SK: Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy is the appli­ca­tion of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy to human cog­ni­tion and behav­ior. For more than a cen­tu­ry, zool­o­gists have suc­cess­ful­ly used the uni­fy­ing prin­ci­ples of evo­lu­tion to explain the body and behav­ior of all ani­mal species in nature, except for humans. Sci­en­tists held a spe­cial place for humans and made an excep­tion for them.

In 1992, a group of psy­chol­o­gists and anthro­pol­o­gists sim­ply asked, “Why not? Why can’t we use the prin­ci­ples of evo­lu­tion to explain human behav­ior as well?” And the new sci­ence of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy was born. It is premised on two grand gen­er­al­iza­tions. First, all the laws of evo­lu­tion by nat­ur­al and sex­u­al selec­tion hold for humans as much as they do for all species in nature. Sec­ond, the con­tents of the human brain have been shaped by the forces of evo­lu­tion just as much as every oth­er part of human body. In oth­er words, humans are ani­mals, and as such they have been shaped by evo­lu­tion­ary forces just as oth­er ani­mals have been.

DC: Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy por­trays us as hav­ing impuls­es that took form long ago, in a very pre-mod­ern con­text (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these impuls­es are some­times rather ill-adapt­ed to our con­tem­po­rary world. For exam­ple, in a food-scarce envi­ron­ment, we became pro­grammed to eat when­ev­er we can; now, with food abound­ing in many parts of the world, this impulse cre­ates the con­di­tions for an obe­si­ty epi­dem­ic. Giv­en that our world will like­ly con­tin­ue chang­ing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impuls­es con­stant­ly play­ing catch up with our envi­ron­ment, and does that poten­tial­ly doom us as a species?

SK: In fact, we’re not play­ing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evo­lu­tion­ary change to take place, the envi­ron­ment has to remain more or less con­stant for many gen­er­a­tions, so that evo­lu­tion can select the traits that are adap­tive and elim­i­nate those that are not. When the envi­ron­ment under­goes rapid change with­in the space of a gen­er­a­tion or two, as it has been for the last cou­ple of mil­len­nia, if not more, then evo­lu­tion can’t hap­pen because nature can’t deter­mine which traits to select and which to elim­i­nate. So they remain at a stand­still. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essen­tial­ly frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.

One exam­ple of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when some­one dies in a movie. Our brain can­not tell the dif­fer­ence between what’s sim­u­lat­ed and what’s real, because this dis­tinc­tion didn’t exist in the Stone Age.

DC: One con­clu­sion from your book is that we’re some­thing of a pris­on­er to our hard-wiring. Yes, there is some room for us to maneu­ver. But, in the end, our evolved nature takes over. If all of this holds true, is there room in our world for utopi­an (or even mild­ly opti­mistic) polit­i­cal move­ments that look to refash­ion how humans behave and inter­act with one anoth­er? Or does this sci­ence sug­gest that Edmund Burke was on to some­thing?

SK: Steven Pinker, in his 2002 book The Blank Slate, makes a very con­vinc­ing argu­ment that all Utopi­an visions, whether they be moti­vat­ed by left-wing ide­ol­o­gy or right-wing ide­ol­o­gy, are doomed to fail­ure, because they all assume that human nature is mal­leable. Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gists have dis­cov­ered that the human mind is not a blank slate, a tab­u­la rasa; humans have innate bio­log­i­cal nature as much as any oth­er species does, and it is not mal­leable. Paul H. Rubin’s 2002 book Dar­win­ian Pol­i­tics: The Evo­lu­tion­ary Ori­gin of Free­dom gives an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­cho­log­i­cal account of why Burke and clas­si­cal lib­er­als (who are today called lib­er­tar­i­ans) may have been right.

As a sci­en­tist, I am not inter­est­ed in Utopi­an visions (or any oth­er visions for soci­ety). But it seems to me that, if you want to change the world suc­cess­ful­ly, you can­not start from false premis­es. Any such attempt is bound to fail. If you build a house on top of a lake on the assump­tion that water is sol­id, it will inevitably col­lapse and sink to the bot­tom of the lake, but if you rec­og­nize the flu­id nature of water, you can build a suc­cess­ful house­boat. A house­boat may not be as good as a gen­uine house built on ground, but it’s bet­ter than a col­lapsed house on the bot­tom of the lake. A vision for soci­ety based on an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­cho­log­i­cal under­stand­ing of human nature at least has a fight­ing chance, which is a much bet­ter than any Utopi­an vision based on the assump­tion that human nature is infi­nite­ly mal­leable.

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One Formula Thinking

in Art, Philosophy, Science | October 18th, 2007

Speak­ing of Einstein–have you ever want­ed to explain the world on a nap­kin? The Edge, self-described as “an online col­lec­tive of deep thinkers,” has teamed up with the Ser­pen­tine Gallery in Lon­don to par­tic­i­pate in a month-long Exper­i­ment Marathon. The Ser­pen­tine has been ask­ing lead­ing sci­en­tists and thinkers “What Is Your For­mu­la?” and the Edge is now host­ing the fas­ci­nat­ing answers on their site. Rickard Dawkins, Bri­an Eno and Benoit Man­del­brot are just a few of the con­trib­u­tors.

Re-Organizing the Free Audiobook Podcast Collection

in Audio Books | October 17th, 2007

This is just a quick note to let you know that we “re-orged” the Audio­book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion. The list, which had become a bit unwieldy, is now bro­ken down by genre: Literature/Fiction, Non­fic­tion, and Poet­ry. And, with­in these cat­e­gories, the texts are orga­nized by the author’s name. Hope­ful­ly this all makes the col­lec­tion eas­i­er to use. Check it out.

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Animated Woody Allen Stand-Up

in Comedy, Video - Arts & Culture | October 17th, 2007

Last week, we offered you Woody Allen’s stand-up rou­tine in black & white; this week we’re doing it in ani­mat­ed col­or. (You can get more ani­mat­ed bits here and here, and note that we cre­at­ed a Com­e­dy cat­e­go­ry here.)

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Give Books Away; Get Books You Want

in Books | October 16th, 2007

This is a great con­cept & ser­vice for our read­ers. Book­Mooch is an online book swap­ping web site that has 45,000 mem­bers and 750,000 books in its inven­to­ry. What goes on here is fair­ly straight­for­ward. Users can give away books they’ve read in exchange for books they want to read — all for no mon­ey, oth­er than the ship­ping costs. That makes it easy to sup­port your read­ing habit, and it saves a few trees. The inner-work­ings of the book swap­ping are explained here and here. Have a look.

Check out our col­lec­tion of free pod­casts of free audio­books

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A New Model for Investigative Journalism

in Business, Current Affairs, Media | October 15th, 2007

As we’ve dis­cussed before on this blog, one of the major casu­al­ties in the shift­ing new media land­scape is the tra­di­tion­al inves­tiga­tive journalist–someone with the time and resources to research in-depth sto­ries. In response to this prob­lem a new group called Pro Pub­li­ca is propos­ing a nov­el eco­nom­ic mod­el: hire the jour­nal­ists into a foun­da­tion and give their work away to the pub­li­ca­tions where it will make the biggest impact.

The new ini­tia­tive, head­ed up by Paul Steiger, head edi­tor at the Wall Street Jour­nal for 16 years, will spend $10 mil­lion annu­al­ly to sup­port a news­room of 24 jour­nal­ists and 12 oth­er staff in New York City. The mon­ey comes from Her­bert and Mar­i­on San­dler, for­mer heads of Gold­en West Finan­cial Cor­po­ra­tion, a big play­er in mort­gages and sav­ings.

It seems like­ly to me that Pro Pub­li­ca will suc­ceed in attract­ing some high-lev­el tal­ent, both because of Steiger and because many jour­nal­ists have come to fear for their jobs in the shrink­ing news­rooms of tra­di­tion­al papers. The real ques­tion is how well this sys­tem will work in dig­ging up and deliv­er­ing qual­i­ty report­ing. What do you lose, and what do you gain, when your employ­er is no longer a “paper of record” but a pri­vate foun­da­tion fund­ed by peo­ple with their own polit­i­cal agen­das? On the oth­er hand, it’s easy to argue that every news­pa­per already has some kind of polit­i­cal posi­tion, so maybe Pro Pub­li­ca will be no dif­fer­ent.

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The Future of Collaborative Culture?

in Media, Stanford, Technology | October 12th, 2007

I just heard Jim­my Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speak­ing at Stan­ford Law School today. Wales is work­ing on some new projects that he hopes will har­ness the com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven col­lab­o­ra­tion of Wikipedia. He’s already had some suc­cess in branch­ing out from the ency­clo­pe­dia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion on a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent sub­jects (some of the most suc­cess­ful so far relate to video games).

What Wales spoke about today, how­ev­er, is a new col­lab­o­ra­tive search project. The con­cept is still in its ear­ly stages, it seems, but the idea would be to har­ness the intel­li­gence and ded­i­ca­tion of human beings to pro­duce search results sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter than Google’s. This rais­es a few ques­tions:

Is Google bro­ken? It’s amaz­ing what Google pulls up, but maybe we’ve all got­ten so good at work­ing with an imper­fect sys­tem that we just tune out the spam and mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions that still crop up.

Is a col­lab­o­ra­tive social mod­el the appro­pri­ate solu­tion to this prob­lem? Peo­ple are good at com­pil­ing ency­clo­pe­dias, but they may not be good at emu­lat­ing search rank algo­rithms. Also, Google is pow­ered by mil­lions of servers in dozens of data cen­ters over the world man­ag­ing petabytes of infor­ma­tion. In oth­er words, this may be a technology+money busi­ness, not a people+transparency busi­ness.

These issues aside, Wikipedia is one of the most amaz­ing things to come out of the whole Inter­net exper­i­ment, so I’m excit­ed to see what Wales comes up with. Has search become a basic ser­vice? Would it work bet­ter as an open-source sys­tem?

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Philosophers and Theorists on YouTube

in Video - Arts & Culture | October 12th, 2007

When we announced last week that UC Berke­ley had launched a new chan­nel on YouTube, we were curt­ly informed by a Euro­pean read­er that Berke­ley was­n’t the first to get into this game. Appar­ent­ly, the Euro­pean Grad­u­ate School (or EGS) has been at it for a while. The school’s YouTube col­lec­tion fea­tures talks by impor­tant con­tem­po­rary the­o­rists and philoso­phers includ­ing Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard, and Judith But­ler. (There are also some film­mak­ers mixed in — take for exam­ple, Peter Green­away and John Waters.) To be frank, much of the con­tent runs counter to what we’re look­ing to do here — to make think­ing less insu­lar and empha­size ideas that speak to a think­ing pub­lic. This is not to dis­miss the cal­iber of the think­ing pre­sent­ed here. It’s sim­ply to com­ment on where it fits (or does­n’t fit) into the kind of project that we’re under­tak­ing. How­ev­er, if the ESG YouTube chan­nel speaks to you, dig in. It’s yours to enjoy.

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