Popular Science | Platypus

Heredity, Genealogy, and Popular Knowledge: An Interview with Carl Zimmer

 David Gerstle  August 7, 2018

For three decades, Carl Zimmer has researched and written on both professional and popular understandings of science and technology for readers of Discover and The New York Times, as well as contributing regularly to NPR’s Radiolab and This American Life. His books and articles on evolutionary theory and microbiology have covered the winding histories of scientific revolutions and the broad impacts of expert knowledge entering into public discourse. In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Zimmer turns to the troublesome science of heredity, tracing its changing manifestations, from Gregor Mendel to the eugenics movement, from the Double Helix to 23andMe. (read more...)

Modern Lives and Stone Age Minds: The Ambiguous Rhetoric of Evolutionary Mismatch

 David Gerstle  July 10, 2018

Over the last three decades, popular science authors have used evolutionary mismatch theory to shed light on a vast number of modern social problems, pointing to differences between contemporary environments and those of humanity’s distant ancestors. These authors argue that the majority of Homo sapiens’ existence took place in the Pleistocene (approximately 2 million to 10,000 years BCE), and so this epoch presented the greatest adaptive challenges to the species’ survival and reproduction. These were the contexts that shaped modern human physiology and sociality through natural selection. Large-scale civilizations, they argue, no longer resemble this so-called “environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” even though the humans that inhabit them retain the genetic and psychological makeup of their Pleistocene precursors. Many contemporary problems of Western social life, the story goes, can thus be attributed to this mismatch between the evolved human-animal and the novel problems of the present. As evolutionary psychologists John Tooby (read more...)

Busting Myths of Human Nature: An Interview with Dr. Agustín Fuentes

 David Gerstle  March 1, 2018

Many of our most enduring social problems are propped up by equally enduring beliefs in the inherent, biological nature of human beings – our perceptions, behaviors, and potentials are ‘hard-wired’ through genetics and evolution. This is particularly true in matters of racial and gender inequality, as well as beliefs in humans’ supposedly innate aggressiveness. In the past, professionals in the human sciences helped to perpetuate these myths, lending their voices and authority to assertions that lacked evidence and allowing stereotypes and biases to stand in for genuine research. Dr. Agustín Fuentes, biological anthropologist and primatologist at Norte Dame University, takes on these assertions in his book Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths About Human Nature. (read more...)

Killing Comments: Back to the Future with Web 1.0

 Patricia G. Lange  October 2, 2013

Two new strategies for dealing with online comments have set the interwebs a-buzzing. The first is the decision by Popular Science to shut off comments on articles on their website, arguing that they are bad for science. The second is Google’s announcement that it will significantly modify YouTube’s comment system by featuring more “relevant” comments up front, and providing new tools to moderate comments. While some people expect these decisions to usher in a new public sphere, others see them as harbingers of a return to the age of “Web 1.0” (if you’ll forgive that term), which still holds the connotation of highly-restricted forms of online participation. According to Popular Science, although many insightful comments are posted, studies show that people experience more negativity toward certain announcements about science after seeing rude—even if substantively unrelated—attacks. In fact, “even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of (read more...)