Tag: science

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How can you tell if someone is prejudiced? By looking at the shape of his face, of course…?

Facial width to height ratio indicates high level of endorsement of prejudicial beliefs.
Facial width to height ratio indicates high level of endorsement of prejudicial beliefs.
Narrow face, clearly not a bigot

Facial Structure Is Indicative of Explicit Support for Prejudicial Beliefs

Eric Hehman, Jordan B. Leitner, Matthew P. Deegan, and Samuel L. Gaertner       

Can you tell whether someone has prejudicial beliefs based on their facial structure? In the last of three experiments, White and Black participants were shown pictures of White male faces and were asked to rate how prejudiced they thought each target was. Not only were pictures of targets with greater facial width-to-height ratios (fWHR) judged to be more prejudiced, but participants’ ratings of the targets correlated with the targets’ reported endorsement of prejudicial beliefs. Greater fWHR has been found to be related to higher levels of dominance and testosterone in men. It could be that men with a greater fWHR are less inhibited and are therefore more willing to report their racial prejudices.

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Jurassic Park for humans

How could you work this into a murder mystery?

SPIEGEL: Wouldn’t it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?

Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it’s not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal?

Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop a human genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an “extremely adventurous female human” could serve as the surrogate mother.

Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.

SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology.

Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were too realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).

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Addio, Rita Levi-Montalcini, age 103

Her niece, Piera Levi-Montalcini, told La Stampa newspaper that she had died peacefully “as if sleeping” after lunch.

Her aunt had continued to carry out several hours of research every day until her death, she said.

A Nature article on the occasion of her 100th birthday is here.

 

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Exercise doesn’t make you live longer, but it does help you deteriorate less rapidly.

“Typically, the most aerobically fit people lived with chronic illnesses in the final five years of their lives, instead of the final 10, 15 or even 20 years.”

Of course they can’t disentangle cause and effect, as  “aerobic fitness is partly determined by genetics, and to that extent, the luck of the universe.”

Still, “much of a person’s fitness, especially by middle age, depends on physical activity, Dr. Berry says speculates”

Women's gymnastics at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. The last Olympics at which solid gold medals were awarded

Fortunately, a moderate (rather than an insane) amount of exercise is best.

Thinking about this is exhausting.  I’m going to go lie down now.