For example, when infants who are first learning to crawl and walk are presented with a possibly dangerous slope, they look to their mothers’ facial expressions for cues. They attempt to descend the slope only when their mothers offer an encouraging smile; they refuse when their mothers discourage them from going.
Similarly, toddlers avoid new toys when mothers pose a fearful facial expression toward them. But they happily approach new toys when mothers show a smiling face.
.. Perhaps even more surprising is that infants prefer the faces of their own race by three months of age, and have trouble distinguishing between faces of other races by nine months.
Researchers call this phenomenon “perceptual narrowing”: it means that newborns’ brains are flexible enough to distinguish between a variety of different faces (even faces of different species) right from birth.
But as they become experts at identifying the faces they see most often, they lose the ability to differentiate between faces that look different from the ones that are most familiar to them. In other words, they begin to have trouble deciding whether two faces of a different race are the same person, or two different people.
.. The good news is that exposure to people from other races on a daily basis can erase this effect.
The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene
How a woman whose muscles disappeared discovered she shared a disease with a muscle-bound Olympic medalist.
Jill was 25, and a lab director at Johns Hopkins University had heard through the medical grapevine about the young woman who diagnosed her own Emery-Dreifuss. Wanting both a dogged intern and — why not? — a real-life lamin mutant in her lab, the scientist offered Jill a summer internship. Jill’s job was to sift through scientific journals and find any references to diseases that might be caused by a lamin mutation.
.. she showed photos to doctors and told them she thought she had partial lipodystrophy. Just like before, they assured her it wasn’t the case. They jokingly diagnosed her with something a lot more common: intern syndrome. “Where you have a medical student being introduced to a lot of new diseases,” Jill says, “and they keep thinking they have what they’re reading about.”
.. she showed photos to doctors and told them she thought she had partial lipodystrophy. Just like before, they assured her it wasn’t the case. They jokingly diagnosed her with something a lot more common: intern syndrome. “Where you have a medical student being introduced to a lot of new diseases,” Jill says, “and they keep thinking they have what they’re reading about.”
.. Even Garg was startled by what Jill had done. “I can understand a patient can learn more about their disease,” he says. “But to reach out to someone else, and figure out their problem also. It is a remarkable feat there.”
.. For example, research on a rare gene mutation, which gave people such low cholesterol levels it was a wonder they were alive, led to a treatment for high cholesterol. An Alzheimer’s treatment may one day come from ongoing research on a small group of people in Iceland who have a version of a gene that protects their brains in old age.
.. Recently, Rehm and a group of scientists started something called the Matchmaker Exchange, it’s a kind of OkCupid for rare diseases, where people with uncommon conditions can be matched with other people with similar diseases and gene mutations, in the hope that it will spark new discoveries.
.. “Because I had no idea of what I can do with genetic diseases before she contacted me. Now I have changed the path of my team.”
Since Jill first contacted him, he has learned that lamin proteins — which the body creates using instructions from the lamin gene — can interact with SREBP1.
Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals
Many liberals, after all, have convinced themselves that it’s conservatives who attack science in the name of politics, while they would never do such a thing. Galileo’s Middle Finger corrects this misperception in a rather jarring fashion, and that’s why it’s one of the most important social-science books of 2015.
.. he has long believed that human behavior and culture can be partially explained by evolution, which in some circles has been a frowned-upon idea. Perhaps more important, he has never sentimentalized his subjects, and his portrayal of the Yanomamö included, as Dreger writes, “males fighting violently over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualized drug use, and ecological indifference.” Dreger suggests that Chagnon’s reputation as a careful, dedicated scholar didn’t matter to his critics — what mattered was that his version of the Yanomamö was “Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed, naturally peaceful, environmentally gentle rain-forest Indian family.”
Positivism
Positivism asserts that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific.[2] Thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857) believed the scientific method, the circular dependence of theory and observation, must replace metaphysics in the history of thought.[citation needed] Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) reformulated sociological positivism as a foundation of social research.[13]
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), in contrast, fought strenuously against the assumption that only explanations derived from science are valid.[9] He reprised the argument, already found in Vico, that scientific explanations do not reach the inner nature of phenomena[9] and it is humanistic knowledge that gives us insight into thoughts, feelings and desires.[9]
.. German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for pioneering work in quantum mechanics, distanced himself from positivism by saying:
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.[16]
.. In historiography the debate on positivism has been characterized by the quarrel between positivism and historicism.[10] (Historicism is also sometimes termed historism in the German tradition.)[17]
Arguments against positivist approaches in historiography include that history differs from sciences like physics and ethology in subject matter and method.[18] That much of what history studies is nonquantifiable, and therefore to quantify is to lose in precision. Experimental methods and mathematical models do not generally apply to history, and it is not possible to formulate general (quasi-absolute) laws in history.[18]