Recently over dinner, a friend of mine spoke of the 90s as an era of political correctness, arguing that the 21st century would consequently unfold into a period of differentiation. She listed a mainstream interest in cultural psychological disorders/ phenomenona as evidence of the emerging differentiation.
Harper's ran a rather funny article on Nigerian dismemberment experiences:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/0082063
The same cultural shift calls for a more individualized and isolated scientific method. This is the September 07 NYT articles, in which Gary Taubes criticizes cohort and associative logic of observational studies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html?ex=1349236800&en=35a89fdbf32b401d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
In fact it’s the same cultural current that feeds blogs! Look at that…
Friday, June 20, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Olivia Judson of the NYT, recently blogged about the upcoming year of Darwin. She provides a short and sweet summary of his "coming of intellectual age" based on Janet Brown's biographies.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/enter-the-cybrids/
Thank you Ariel!
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/enter-the-cybrids/
Thank you Ariel!
Monday, June 16, 2008
Dichogamy- the temporal separation of gender expression and maturation. From the little information I could find on this term, it is first found in Darwin's 1862 paper to the botanical society. The author immediately declares the phenomenon a contrivance and justifies it as a scheme to reduce inbreeding. The staggered, cross-gendered maturation binds time and form thus exemplifying a biological gender continuum
In the end of his Origin of Species, Darwin expressed admiration for a "grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved;" the beauty and brilliance of the theory stems from the simplicity of its origins and multiplicity of its results.
I've been thinking about the nature of a continuum; in particular the continuum of knowledge- Truth can be re-formated to fit another discipline, methodology and set of assumptions, but remain closely related to its antecedent "kernel." How to define similarity: Are two explanations the same if they stem from similar observations and follow a similar logic? Or isthe only valid indicator of a continuum, the content of the knowledge/ the form observation and logic take on?
In the end of his Origin of Species, Darwin expressed admiration for a "grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved;" the beauty and brilliance of the theory stems from the simplicity of its origins and multiplicity of its results.
I've been thinking about the nature of a continuum; in particular the continuum of knowledge- Truth can be re-formated to fit another discipline, methodology and set of assumptions, but remain closely related to its antecedent "kernel." How to define similarity: Are two explanations the same if they stem from similar observations and follow a similar logic? Or isthe only valid indicator of a continuum, the content of the knowledge/ the form observation and logic take on?
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