Some fundamental principles of colour vision, deduced from perceptual studies, have been understood for a long time. Physiological studies have confirmed the existence of three classes of cone photoreceptors, and of colour-opponent neurons that compare the signals from cones, but modern work has drawn attention to unexpected complexities of early organization: the proportions of cones of different types vary widely among individuals, without great effect on colour vision; the arrangement of different types of cones in the mosaic seems to be random, making it hard to optimize the connections to colour-opponent mechanisms; and new forms of colour-opponent mechanisms have recently been discovered. At a higher level, in the primary visual cortex, recent studies have revealed a simpler organization than had earlier been supposed, and in some respects have made it easier to reconcile physiological and perceptual findings.

This article is freely available (with registration).

The machinery of colour vision

Failure is a Good Thing.

A number of advocates have supported the establishment of an oath for life scientists as a way to address concerns about potential future bioterrorists.

Should life scientists make an oath ... that they will "do no harm" once they utter the hallowed words?

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The main obstacle to becoming a physician is acceptance into medical school. Once accepted, students can perform poorly and still make it through the system, emerging on the other side to practice medicine on unsuspecting patients.

Unlike medical students who can repeat failed exams and courses many times, life sciences graduate students ... can fail ...

Failure makes you safer.

A code of conduct for the life sciences?

This is an edited version of a longer interview.

Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University recently interviewed Freeman Dyson about his views on science, hope and the future.

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Dyson: The principle of maximum diversity says that life evolves to make the universe as interesting as possible.

The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut.

Examples of things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.

-- Freeman Dyson, “Infinite in All Directions”

Peiser: How can young scientists develop intellectual independence and autonomy in a bureaucratic world of funding dependency?

Dyson: I like to remind young scientists of examples in the recent past when people without paper qualifications made great contributions. ... Amateurs and small companies will have a growing role in the future of science.

Peiser: How do you feel belonging to a tiny minority of scientists who dare to voice their doubts openly?

Dyson: I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable.

Dyson: Yes, the western academic world [today] is very much like Weimar Germany ...

Dyson: I see the discovery of HAR1 as a seminal event in the history of science, marking the beginning of a new understanding of human evolution and human nature.

Dyson: My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system.

That last one is an interesting comment ...

Check out this RAND report:

Antisocial behavior is a costly and growing concern in the United Kingdom, with Britain’s Home Office logging around 66,000 reports of antisocial behavior each day. Vandalism alone is estimated to cost victims and the criminal justice system around £1.3 billion ($2.5 billion) annually. Other commonly reported forms of antisocial behavior include intimidation, drunkenness, begging, drug dealing, prostitution, rowdiness, graffiti, littering, and dumping rubbish in public places.

Rebel with a Cause: The Optimistic Scientist

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

This psychologist is by no means alone. A few months ago, in the Harvard Coop, a 20-something customer explained to her friends as they all walked past the cash registers, "I have such a crush on Noam Chomsky!"

A plethora of new findings, however, suggest that the experience of desire may be less a forerunner to sex than an afterthought, the cognitive overlay that the brain gives to the sensation of already having been aroused by some sort of physical or subliminal stimulus ...

Seeking the Keys ...

Nicholas Humphrey's latest book on the mystery of consciousness travelled with me to Crete, Latvia and America. And the intellectual journey it took me on has half-persuaded me that his evolutionary approach will one day provide an answer

'The mystery of consciousness' by Paul Broks | Prospect

The new science of metagenomics, where the DNA of entire communities of microbes -- most of them previously unknown -- is studied simultaneously, promises to revolutionize understanding of the microbial world, says a new National Research Council report. It calls for a Global Metagenomics Initiative to drive advances in the field.

See a Scientific American-level article, Metagonemics: The Science of Biological Diversity.

Also: Focus on Metagenomics from Nature:

Metagenomics has emerged as a powerful tool that can be used to analyze microbial communities regardless of the ability of member organisms to be cultured in the laboratory. Metagenomics is based on the genomic analysis of microbial DNA that is extracted directly from communities in environmental samples. This technology — genomics on a huge scale — enables a survey of the different microorganisms present in a specific environment, such as water or soil, to be carried out. By integrating the information gleaned with information about biological functions within the community, the structure of microbial communities can potentially be probed. Metagenomics could also unlock the massive uncultured microbial diversity present in the environment to provide new molecules for therapeutic and biotechnological applications.

See also this conference, Metagenomics 2006, for a selection of presentations (with video) on the subject. For example, see "Cyber metagenomics":

The explosion of both genomic and environmental data requires that their union in environmental metagenomics utilize the latest in emerging capabilities of cyberinfrastructure. Recent developments such as the emergence of the National LambdaRail, service-oriented software architectures, and commodity clusters for scalable computing, storage, and visualization have made a new approach to these data-intensive science projects possible. The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has been building teams in these areas for the last six years.

Earlier this year, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funded Calit2 to bring into being a Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA). This project is a partnership with J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD, UCSD’s Center for Earth Observations and Applications (centered at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography), the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a number of key UCSD centers. This talk will explore the cyberinfrastructure underpinnings at Calit2 that enable and extend the implementation of the vision behind CAMERA and other metagenomics cyberinfrastructure.

Metagenomics Will Transform Modern Microbiology

We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse

The big question

George Johnson reviews Hofstadter's new book -- first announced here almost a year ago.

To get into a properly loopy mind-set for Douglas R. Hofstadter's new book on consciousness, I plugged a Webcam into my desktop computer and pointed it at the screen. In the first instant, an image of the screen appeared on the screen and then the screen inside the screen. Cycling round and round, the video signal rapidly gave rise to a long corridor leading toward a patch of shimmering blue, beckoning like the light at the end of death's tunnel.

Giving the camera a twist, I watched as the regress of rectangles took on a spiraling shape spinning fibonaccily deeper into nowhere. Somewhere along the way a spot of red--a glint of sunlight, I later realized--became caught in the swirl, which slowly congealed into a planet of red continents and blue seas. Zooming in closer, I explored a surface that was erupting with yellow, orange and green volcanoes. Like Homer Simpson putting a fork inside the microwave, I feared for a moment that I had ruptured the very fabric of space and time.

Johnson doesn't really do much to review the book. He describes it as a "condensed" GEB, and it's clearly personal. Are there other reviews now? Yes!

Publishers Weekly gives it a Starred Review:

Hofstadter —— who won a Pulitzer for his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach —— blends a surprising array of disciplines and styles in his continuing rumination on the nature of consciousness. Eschewing the study of biological processes as inadequate to the task, he argues that the phenomenon of self-awareness is best explained by an abstract model based on symbols and self-referential "loops," which, as they accumulate experiences, create high-level consciousness. Theories aside, it's impossible not to experience this book as a tender, remarkably personal and poignant effort to understand the death of his wife from cancer in 1993 —— and to grasp how consciousness mediates our otherwise ineffable relationships. In the end, Hofstadter's view is deeply philosophical rather than scientific. It's hopeful and romantic as well, as his model allows one consciousness to create and maintain within itself true representations of the essence of another. The book is all Hofstadter —— part theory, some of it difficult; part affecting memoir; part inventive thought experiment —— presented for the most part with an incorrigible playfulness. And whatever readers' reaction to the underlying arguments for this unique view of consciousness, they will find the model provocative and heroically humane.

Booklist also gives it a starred review:

For more than 25 years, Hofstadter has been explaining the mystery of human consciousness through a bold fusion of mathematical logic and cognitive science. Yet for all of the acclaim... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Scientific American: A New Journey into Hofstadter's Mind

If you don't already own this book, the new edition is a good reason to check it out.

Updated for the first time, the classic book on why cooperation is not only natural but also the best survival strategy

The Evolution of Cooperation addresses a simple yet age-old question: If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. This unexpected victory proved that cooperation--one might even say altruism--is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations.

The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod (Updated!)

Publishers Weekly concludes: "This superb tale of scientific discovery is required reading for everyone interested in the nature of human morality."

In a world supposedly governed by ruthless survival of the fittest, why do we see acts of goodness in both animals and humans? This problem plagued Charles Darwin in the 1850s as he developed his theory of evolution through natural selection. Indeed, Darwin worried that the goodness he observed in nature could be the Achilles heel of his theory. Ever since then, scientists and other thinkers have engaged in a fierce debate about the origins of goodness that has dragged politics, philosophy, and religion into what remains a major question for evolutionary biology.

The Altruism Equation traces the history of this debate from Darwin to the present through an extraordinary cast of characters-from the Russian prince Petr Kropotkin, who wanted to base society on altruism, to the brilliant biologist George Price, who fell into poverty and succumbed to suicide as he obsessed over the problem. In a final surprising turn, William Hamilton, the scientist who came up with the equation that reduced altruism to the cold language of natural selection, desperately hoped that his theory did not apply to humans.

Hamilton's Rule, which states that relatives are worth helping in direct proportion to their blood relatedness, is as fundamental to evolutionary biology as Newton's laws of motion are to physics. But even today, decades after its formulation, Hamilton's Rule is still hotly debated among those who cannot accept that goodness can be explained by a simple mathematical formula. For the first time, Lee Alan Dugatkin brings to life the people, the issues, and the passions that have surrounded the altruism debate. Readers will be swept along by this fast-paced tale of history, biography, and scientific discovery.

Read the first chapter online:

This book is about one of Darwin’s problems. It began as a small difficulty with honeybees. At first glance, it did not seem like the sort of complication that could sink a theory that many have characterized as the most important one that biology has ever produced. But it turned into a problem that troubled biologists, fascinated naturalists, engaged popular writers and the general public, and even worked its way into political discourse for the next 145 years.

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The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness