Video: A cement cast of an entire ant colony

I just came across probably the single coolest science video I have seen in ages: a six minute excerpt from the documentary Ants: Nature's Secret (which won the special jury prize at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in 2005). The documentary itself focuses on the work of Bert Hölldobler (who co-wrote the Pulitzer-prize winning The Ants with E. O. Wilson), but the excerpt (embedded below, or click here to go to YouTube) features Walter Tschinkel's amazing cement cast of an entire ant colony. (The cement technique itself seems to have been pioneered by Moreira et. al.). I highly recommend watching the video - it gets especially interesting after about 2 minutes.



(See also: ABC's article on Tschinkel's work, BLDG Blog's fantastic entry on Nest-Casting, and Ask a Biologist's podcast interview with Hölldobler in which he discusses the documentary [click here for the mp3]).

Research blogging

I have been participating in the Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting (BPR3) initiative, which attempts to highlight serious, thoughtful blog entries on peer-reviewed research (using icons). The aggregation system I mentioned before has now gone live on the great site Researchblogging.org. Basically, whenever a blog author wants to make use of the new system, they go to the Researchblogging site, enter citation meta-data into a form which then spits out code that gets included in the relevant blog entry. Then Researchblogging.org aggregates all the blog entries that contain the code, lists them on the website and categorizes them into subject-areas.

Have a look at the site, it's a fantastic way to discover more academic blogs and entries on serious research.

Skeptics Circle #78

Sorry I'm late on this... The 78th edition of the Skeptics Circle is out at The Skeptical Surfer. There are a bunch of great articles but my favorites are: Greta Christina's post on how alternative medicine is untested by definition, Knudsen's News' great satirical piece and The 327th Male's thoughtful "How to be a nice skeptic" (also see the follow-up).

Embodied cognition in the popular press

This is by now quite stale, but the Boston Globe recently published a pretty good article on embodied cognition. The article covers the idea itself, its history, its possible practical applications and some criticisms. My view on the matter (by no means original, of course) even gets echoed:

"I think these findings are really fantastic and it's clear that there's a lot of connection between mind and body," says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. He remains skeptical, though, that the roots of higher cognition will be found in something as basic as the way we walk or move our eyes or arms.

"Any time there's a fad in science there's a tendency to say, 'It's all because of this,"' Markman says. "But the thing in psychology is that it's not all anything, otherwise we'd be done figuring it out already."

Pravda silliness

The Russian online newspaper Pravda (ironically, "The Truth"; a distant descendant of the Pravda of the Communist era) is well known for being, well, crazy. My two favorite recent examples are "Centaurs appeared after copulation between humans and animals" and "Dolphins used to look like humans and lived in Atlantis". As I said, crazy. Now, oh the shock!, Pravda has published an embarrassingly naive article in defense of intelligent design. Frankly, the piece simply does not deserve a rational response - it rehearses the well-worn arguments we've heard hundreds of times from the evolution-deniers. My favorite part:

Trust me, Dawkins and all the evolutionists put together can't hold a candle to the scientific genius of Dr. Gish. Just read one of Dr. Gish's books and you'll see why. Dr. Gish has successfully debated hundreds of evolution scientists in secular colleges and universities across the nation over the past two decades, and students have consistently voted him the winner in all of those debates. Don't try looking for this news in the main stream media. You won't find it there anymore than you'll find a half-evolved chipmunk running around in your backyard!

Oh, we should 'trust him'! Right...

Andy Clark and the Problem of Advanced Cognition

I just presented a paper on Andy Clark at the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa's annual conference. Basically my argument in the paper is that the voguish notion that "embodied cognition" is sufficient to account for all human mental feats has not been demonstrated.

The abstract of the paper (which will hopefully get published in the conference proceedings):

Andy Clark (1989, 1993, 1997) is a leading philosophical exponent of a new view of mind as an "associative engine", or connectionist pattern-completer, composed of multiple special-purpose modules (composed of neural networks) that communicate in only limited ways and eschew detailed forms of internal representation. The modules, Clark and his allies argue, are both coordinated and integrated by the environment whilst 'off-loading' onto it by calling on external computational resources ("external scaffolds") to reduce cognitive load. Defenders of this position further maintain that even examples of sophisticated and distinctively human cognition such as long-term planning or running a multi-national company emerge from connectionist pattern-completing brains in the "constraining presence of public language, culture and institutions". This constellation of ideas, Clark argues, amounts to a completely new science of mind that radically reforms "our whole way of thinking about intelligent behaviour". Unfortunately, this rhetoric far outstrips the evidence: while a reasonable case can be made that external scaffolds are necessary for many types of cognition, the assertion that pattern-completion plus external scaffolding (etc.) is a sufficient explanation of all human cognition has not been demonstrated. The insufficiency of the Clarkian view is particularly evident in the case of advanced cognition.

Shermer on economic irrationality

Pinker isn't the only one who has a popular article out today that plays on an earlier book title, Michael Shermer (author of Why People Believe Weird Things) has an LA Times op-ed out entitled (wait for it...) "Why People Believe Weird Things About Money". Reflecting the fact that he's now a fan of evolutionary psychology (as I reported earlier), Shermer argues that various examples of irrational economic behavior (such as loss aversion) are the product of evolution. The article is a worthy read on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Shermer, by the way, has a new book out, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics.

The Moral Instinct

Channeling the younger self who wrote The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker has written an article for the NYT entitled "The Moral Instinct", a fantastic survey of the moral sense and its various quirks. Although some of the material appeared in The Blank Slate, it's certainly still worth the read.

(Hat tip to Mind Hacks).