Apologies for not posting anything recently. I have something in the works at BigThink and a few more in the pipeline but it has been hard finding the time to blog recently. I hope to be back to it in a couple of weeks.
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Free will is in the air. Among neuroscientists at least, the question of whether we are in control of our actions has been attracting renewed attention of late, driven in large part by the successes of the field in laying bare the neural machinery of behaviour. It’s thus not a total coincidence that two books by neuroscientists on this topic – Determined , by Robert Sapolsky, and Free Agents , by yours truly – have been published so close together (both in October, 2023). What may be more surprising to readers is that we reach such divergent conclusions on the topic. With thanks to Bill Sullivan That we can survey the same evidence and interpret it so differently may suggest to some that the question of free will is not really an empirical one at all. Of course many of the issues are metaphysical, but both Prof. Sapolsky (Sapolsky hereafter) and myself think that the science of decision-making is at least relevant to these philosophical discussions. In short, he thinks that sci...
Can molecular memories of our ancestors’ experiences affect our own behaviour and physiology? That idea has certainly grabbed hold of the public imagination, under the banner of the seemingly ubiquitous buzzword “epigenetics”. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is the idea that a person’s experiences can somehow mark their genomes in ways that are passed on to their children and grandchildren. Those marks on the genome are then thought to influence gene expression and affect the behaviour and physiology of people who inherit them. The way this notion is referred to – both in popular pieces and in the scientific literature – you’d be forgiven for thinking it is an established fact in humans, based on mountains of consistent, compelling evidence. In fact, the opposite is true – it is based on the flimsiest of evidence from a very small number of studies with very small sample sizes and serious methodological flaws. [Note that there is, b...
What if we’ve been thinking about the genetics of intelligence from completely the wrong angle? Intelligence (as indexed by IQ or the general intelligence factor “ g ”) is clearly highly heritable in humans – people who are more genetically similar are also more similar in this factor. (Genetic variance has been estimated as explaining ~75% of variance in g , depending on age and other factors). There must therefore be genetic variants in the population that affect intelligence – so far, so good. But the search for such variants has, at its heart, an implicit assumption: that these variants affect intelligence in a fairly specific way – that they will occur in genes “for intelligence”. An implication of that phrase is that mutations in those genes were positively selected for at some stage in humanity’s descent from our common ancestor with apes, on the basis of conferring increased intelligence . This seems a fairly reasonable leap to make – suc...
Looking forward to seeing your BigThoughts :)
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