NeuroDojo. No turning back for science. An article with a title like “Science’s dead end” seems like an active effort to troll the science blogosphere. Maybe author James Le Fanu has a point, but a quick search raise doubts as fast as you can type. He’s trained as a medical doctor, not a researcher. And he seems to be a cynical one, having written a piece with a similarly apocalyptic title, “The fall of medicine,” for the same magazine over ten years ago. The outsider’s perspective is apparent in his first paragraph. For science this is both the best and the worst of times. The best because its research institutions have never been so impressive, its funding never more lavish. Yes, it’s so incredibly lavish that funding rates for most American federal agencies are way less than one funded proposal out of ten applications, so that good researchers devote weeks on end to revising and resubmitting in hopes of finding the resources to carry out their research.
From here. Pose the question, What does it all add up to? No. Wow. Nothing but the finest...feces. There comes a moment in every biology blogger’s life when he or she must write about poop. This is one of those moments. When a paper’s title includes phrase, “fecal particle size,” sometimes, one just thinks, “Okay, I really should read that, if for no other reason than it was clearly a lot of unpleasant work for someone.” The intellectual issue here relates to the difference digestive strategies of mammals and reptiles. Mammals chew; reptiles generally don’t. This has a lot of consequences. It means mammals can spend a lot less time digesting food. This, in turn, helps to make the high-energy endothermic lifestyle that mammals enjoy possible.
The authors recovered this particular leaf from the feces of a common iguana. But this is science, damnit, not a schoolkid’s joke! So, Julia Fritz and her four co-authors collected a lot of samples from fourteen reptiles species held in European zoos. Reference Fritz, J., Hummel, J., Kienzle, E., Streich, W., & Clauss, M. (2010). Neuroskeptic. Update: Lots of stuff has happened since I wrote this post: see here for more. A major scandal looks to be in progress involving Harvard Professor Marc Hauser, a psychologist and popular author whose research on the minds of chimpanzees and other primates is well-known and highly respected.
The Boston Globe has the scoop and it's well worth a read (though you should avoid reading the comments if you react badly to stupid.) Hauser's built his career on detailed studies of the cognitive abilities of non-human primates. He's generally argued that our closest relatives are smarter than people had previously believed, with major implications for evolutionary psychology. Now one of his papers has been retracted, another has been "corrected" and a third is under scrutiny. It's not clear what exactly is going on, but the problems seem to centre around videotapes of the monkeys that took part in Hauser's experiments. The authors of the original paper were Hauser, David Glynn and Justin Wood. Neuron Culture.