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In my previous post, I talked about how my experience in changing my way of sneezing taught me how hard it is to change a habit even in instances where we know it would be better for us if we did. Habits don’t merely concern things like the way we sneeze, however.  For example, habits writ large are what define a culture, for a culture is nothing but a vast collection of shared habits that go by the more lofty designation “customs.” And though it’s not apparent at first glance, habits also deeply affect artistic style.

In my case, for example, after more than forty years of painting, I’ve developed a “mature” style (or what’s known as a “signature” style). People who have seen my pictures easily recognize one of my new paintings even when they encounter it outside my studio or gallery. All serious painters, no matter the quality of their work, inevitably end up with…

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Jenny Dyck Brian

Is it a conflict of interest for a bioethicist to work as a paid consultant for the pharmaceutical industry?

In recent weeks I have posted my conversation with Jenny Dyck Brian of Arizona State University, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on corporate bioethics boards.  (See parts one, two and three.)  Today we reach the final installment.

Q: A lot of people outside bioethics seem shocked when I tell them about academic bioethicists working for pharma.  But within the field, I don’t see a lot of pushback.

A: Within the field there is little pushback. A lot of people said they themselves wouldn’t do it (or that an interesting opportunity has yet to present itself), but they think it’s a good thing that industry is getting some good advice, or at least seeking different perspectives. …

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“Texas Cow Poke” by Clotee Pridgen Allochuku via Flickr/CC

Sometimes I find it useful to think about things that bear no obvious relation to one another. For example, I’ve recently been thinking about sneezing, cars, and cows, and a connection to the problem of climate change has occurred to me.

First, sneezing. When I was young, I was taught to cover my mouth with my hand whenever I sneezed. Good girl that I am, I followed this rule until a couple of years ago, when I read that in order not to spread germs, it’s best to sneeze into one’s elbow. (You don’t shake hands, set the table, or serve drinks to your guests with your elbow.) But it was no small matter to alter a longstanding habit that was sustained, in part, by a feeling that I was doing what my mother had told me was the right thing. With a lot…

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You have got a fever, your body aches, and you feel dreadful. What should you do? The traditional answer is: “Take two aspirin, drink lots of fluids, get to bed and call me in the morning if you don’t feel better.” Could it be that this is just the wrong advice? That the last thing you should do is reduce your temperature with aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever? Is it, to use a phrase, nature’s way of fighting illness?

This is very much the position of a small group of biologists and medics who are pushing what has come to be known as “evolutionary medicine.” Crystallized about 20 years ago by a book – Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine – authored by the distinguished evolutionist George C. Williams and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, it claims that the force that caused us all, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, does not care about human…

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I know you’re already sick of reading about MOOC’s. But I’m afraid there’s no avoiding them. In The Chronicle this morning, UCLA philosopher Pamela Hieronymi argues:

Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error. Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas.

And so forth, before concluding:

Can technology make education less expensive? College is expensive, but colleges do things other than educate. Many courses simply convey information and provide technical vocational skills. These could be automated, presumably at savings. The price tag includes the campus experience—an education of a different sort—with all its lovely, cherished amenities. But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the…

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Those of us engaged in teaching, writing and speaking about science are participating in a Great Deception – well-intended, to be sure, but a deception nonetheless. The gist of that deception is that we teach science as a list of established findings rather than what it really is: The world’s best and most rewarding process of “finding.” Students and the general public are for the most part receptive to learning about science, but all too often, this means learning what we place before them, consuming our discoveries, then waiting for the next course.

The reality, on the other hand, is that it’s the kitchen, not the dining room, where the exciting stuff happens. More to my point, it’s in the imagination of the chefs, those who try new combinations and invent new recipes.

Enough with the culinary metaphor. My point is that…

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In the most recent American Freshman Survey, the top reason for going to college was “to be able to get a better job,” with 85.9 percent of respondents rating it as “very important.” Only half of the respondents rated “to make me a more cultured person” as “very important” (50.3 percent).

No wonder the humanities now collect only around 12 percent of bachelor’s degrees, including history.  (See the Humanities Indicators project for handy compilations of data.)  According to the MLA, all the foreign languages combined (!) pull in only 1.05 percent of all four-year degrees.  Even though knowledge of Asian and Middle Eastern languages is, indeed, a potent job skill in numerous areas of business, government, diplomacy, and the military, the humanities strike ambitious 19-year-olds as merely an academic pursuit.  Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth, George Eliot . . . they seem like little …

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Iconic phrase from the old TV show, Dragnet; now reduced to an endangered species (Wikipedia)

I have a great fondness for experiences, ideas, certain people, many animals, places, even some things. And I assume you do, too. Among these sources of delight, respect, and appreciation, I would include regular old-fashioned facts, although with the full recognition that not all of them are equally verifiable, or even equally definable. Nor are they equally pleasant, although part of the pleasure comes from knowing that they have that traditional, pre-postmodernist virtue: being true. Nonetheless, I would like to think that it isn’t only practicing scientists who grant facticity a special place, and that we do so not only when it comes to comprehending and communicating about the natural world but also in our daily…

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It’s been almost half a century since Apollo 11 carried Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong to the moon. I remember running to make sure I’d catch the actual landing on television. Like many who heard Neil Armstrong’s first words when he walked on the moon, I heard them incorrectly. They are much more moving the way he actually said them: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” That a single man was walking on the moon was a magnificent idea, even though it was awfully hard to fathom. That mankind, in a historical sense, was now moving into space was unfathomable.  In effect, many of us never did much with either of these ideas. Landing on the moon became merely one of many things that marked the 20^th-century.

For me, part of the shock of watching men land on the moon came from their having done it on such a rickety-looking mechanical…

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Protesters in front of Pennsylvania Station on Aug. 2, 1962 (Photo by Eddie Hausner/The New York Times. Click on image to get to source page.)

In 1882, New York Central Railroad president William Henry Vanderbilt declared, “The public be damned.” Although one might think this sentiment an anachronism that went away with the demise of 19^th-century robber barons, it’s actually a perennial problem for democracies whenever private owners own what function as public spaces.

Here’s an example of what I mean. To get to Hofstra from where I live in Lower Manhattan, I take the train from New York’s Penn Station. I always stop first to grab a coffee at the Starbucks along the main corridor inside the station. While waiting on line, I groggily gaze at the large, black-and-white posters with images of the old Penn…

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