Footnote Physicist

by Steven Gussman         In high school history class, as is often the case with issues of identity in the 21 st century, I was given the impression that a significant front opposed Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy on the grounds that he was religiously Catholic (despite his ultimately winning the election). This was presented as a mere (if somewhat tame) expression of bigotry from a country with an ugly history of such attitudes (not to mention practices and laws). In part, it surely was. It had been argued by some that J.F.K. would take his orders not from the American people, but from a foreign actor in the Pope of the Catholic Church in Rome. Ridiculous, for sure, but in reading through some of America's founding documents, I was met with a piece of philosophical history that left me with a slightly more nuanced opinion of this particular opposition to J.F.K.         The early British-American colonists are often described in terms of their religion. Oft mentione

by Steven Gussman           Our genes are ultimately responsible for the existence of our brains (to date, developmental biology is the only process capable of building this complex machine); but the genes clearly build it to be a somewhat (though by no means completely ) plastic processing unit. i And yet this degree of plasticity is itself a heritable, genetically encoded trait— the product of natural selection (which would by definition never be able to produce a genetic leash of zero percent). ii How else would we have evolved from brainless cells, to our simple hardwired ancestors, to the complex behavioral great apes? iii Neurobiologist Leo M. Chalupa points out that, “what's special about brain plasticity... is that the changes are mediated by events that are in some sense adaptive,” (what a fantastic coincidence that would be, if plastic-learning were a genuinely arbitrary process victim to the whims of, “cultural constructs”). iv Let's look at an example whic

by Steven Gussman           Despite all of the posturing about, “interactionist,” models of phenotype (to say nothing of pure, “environmentalis,”) all of the theories of biology (and much of the controversial hypotheses still being argued over) are integrally genetic. You wouldn't know it from most discussions of behavioral genetics, but there are indeed reports of, “vacuum behaviors,” in the animal kingdom (let alone the obvious cases of vacuum morphology). i Richard Dawkins writes:           The urge to feel 'grateful' in a vacuum, when there's nobody there to thank, is very strong. Animals sometimes perform complicated patterns of behavior in a vacuum – they are even called 'vacuum activities'. The most spectacular example I know is from a German film I once saw of a beaver... Beavers probably don't understand why they do it. They just do it without thinking, because they have a mechanism in the brain that goes off like clockwork. They are like