Archive for the ‘My Blog’ Category
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Obesity is unnatural, but it’s natural to try for it.
This morning I sat on a panel for medical students; the subject was obesity. Nationally, as anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock knows, the picture is not pretty-in fact it’s pretty ugly. By the standard definition, obesity means a Body Mass Index (BMI; weight in kilos over height in meters squared) above 30, and in about 15 years starting in 1990 we went from 22 percent to 33 percent obese.
Now, I don’t care what you call it or (more…)
Tags: Add new tag, BMI, diabetes, diet, disease, epidemic, evolutionary psychology, health, health habits, human nature, hunter gatherers
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Saturday, August 14th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Statesmen understand human nature. Why not psychologists and social scientists?
Most psychologists don’t like human nature, or at least not the idea of it. Clinicians, life coaches, and corporate motivators dislike it because it implies unchangeability. Anyone who took college psychology knows how to modify behavior, from direct instruction to manipulative advertising.
And then, what fool surveying the huge variety of human personalities, needs, and tastes would dream of trying to characterize all that as one thing? Well, some fool might, but not the philosophers, evolutionists, historians and political leaders who have long used the phrase. They’ve always meant something complex, varied, and big-but not limitless.
Barack Obama, for instance. (more…)
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Darwin, evolutionary psychology, George Washington, human nature, Obama, Politics, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, war, Winston Churchill
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Sunday, August 8th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Note: By invitation, I’ve started a blog on the Psychology Today website, and my latest post can be read there or here, although different (and likely more numerous) comments will be posted there. This entry resembles and updates one I posted here in March 2009, which was followed by an interesting exchange on “insatiable widows” and other cross-cultural myths.
We hear a lot about sex differences, and arguments rage over which are real. Evolutionary theorists weigh in about why this or that difference should be expected, while some anthropologists say cultures vary so much that generalizations are folly. But of all Darwinian predictions about la différence, few are as logical as the one about sex differences in sexuality. Here’s why.
(more…)
Tags: evolutionary psychology, gender, sex, Sex differences, sex drive, sexual desire, sexuality
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Friday, July 23rd, 2010 by Mel Konner
It’s not creation, but it’s a technical achievement full of promise.
To say that Craig Venter’s latest contribution is garnering hype would be one of the understatements of the year. The paper, whose title begins “Creation of a Bacterial Cell…” was published in the print version of Science on July 2—Daniel Gibson was the first of many authors, Venter the last—but it had already appeared online on May 20 and generated a lot of comment, not least of all by Venter himself. (more…)
Tags: Add new tag, bacteria, bioethics, creation of life, genetics, genomics, reprogramming life, science and religion, synthetic life
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Saturday, June 19th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Some thoughtful comments, and some attempted answers.
The comments on my last posting, “We Can’t All Be Mozart,” were so thoughtful and interesting that I decided to post another blog on this. To my general claim that innate talent matters, I opposed a fact close to home that seems to contradict it: I have two grown daughters, (more…)
Tags: Add new tag, behavior genetics, genes, genetics, talent
Posted in My Blog | 8 Comments »
Monday, May 31st, 2010 by Mel Konner
Genius may be 90 percent perspiration, but it helps to have the right starting point.
A comment by Jack Davis on my last blog entry leads me to write something about talent, genes, environment, and how we succeed. Jack asks about a new book by David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. (more…)
Tags: behavioral genetics, genes, genetics, genius, human nature, nature vs. nurture, talent
Posted in My Blog | 11 Comments »
Monday, May 24th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Can genes explain brain disorders? Yes. Sometimes.
Over the past few weeks two articles have shown the promise and the difficulty of studying brain genes. One appears in the New England Journal of Medicine of May 20, and zeroes in magnificently on a gene for Tourette’s Syndrome. (more…)
Tags: brain, brain disorders, disease, genes, genetics, genomics, molecular genetics, multiple sclerosis, Tourette's syndrome, twin studies
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010 by Mel Konner
Is Barack Obama an evolutionary psychologist?
Since I criticized President Obama’s speech last year in Cairo (and even “rewrote” it) and later pointed out the names and deeds of those who did not get the Nobel Peace Prize because he did, I think it’s only fair that I resume this blog after a long hiatus by writing about his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in December.
I have to say that it stunned me. (more…)
Tags: Darwinian views of violence, evolutionary psychology, human nature, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Obama, Oslo, peace, sociobiology, violence, war
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Sunday, November 29th, 2009 by Mel Konner
My friend and colleague Alice Schaerr Rossi, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women and one of the leading sociologists of her generation, died on November 3 at age 87.
For a few years in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I worked with her and Jane Lancaster, a distinguished anthropologist now at the University of New Mexico and editor of the journal Human Nature, on a committee of the Social Science Research Council, and both of them affected my thinking about gender. (more…)
Tags: Alice Rossi, difference feminism, gender, menstrual cycle and mood, mothers, parenting, Sex differences
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Sunday, November 15th, 2009 by Mel Konner
A couple of weeks ago I posted some musings about “the self” in anticipation of being on a panel with Steven Pinker (author of The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought) and Noga Arikha (author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours) at Tufts University. The panel, convened by Jonathan Wilson, was titled “The New Biology and the Self,” and what follows was my contribution. The graduate student referred to is Monica Chau of Emory University.
I told a very smart neurobiology graduate student named Monica yesterday that I’d been asked to speak on “The New Biology and the Self.” She said, “What’s the new biology?” I said, “I don’t know, but that’s the least of my problems. What’s the self?” (more…)
Tags: bioethics, brain, brain imaging, enhancement drugs, evolution, evolutionary psychology, genes, genomics, human nature, philosophy, sociobiology, the self
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