I try to get away from the nature-nurture debate, but it keeps dragging me back in.

Last Tuesday Nicholas Wade, the Science Times Gene Guy, had an entertaining article with the headline above about a long-term animal-breeding study in Siberia. Beginning in 1959, the Russian geneticist Dmitri K. Belyaev showed that he could rapidly make foxes, otters, minks and rats mean or placid through selective breeding. Belyaev (who died in 1985) and his successors produced two populations of rats that have caught the attention of scientists worldwide. “Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like,” says the animal behaviorist Tecumseh Fitch (love the name).

The geneticists Svante Paabo and Frank Albert of the Max Planck Institute in Germany are now trying to identify specific genes underpinning niceness and nastiness in the rats. If the scientists succeed, they will then look—can you guess?–for similar genes in humans, and especially domesticity genes. Wade quotes Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, suggesting that genes for nastiness have been selected out of humans, because we are “a domesticated form of ape, the domestication having been self-administered as human societies penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive.”

Huh? There was severe cognitive dissonance between this quote and all the stories elsewhere in the New York Times about the carnage that we “domesticated” apes are wreaking in Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. Also, Wrangham himself argued in his lurid 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence that natural selection favored tough aggressive males.

One of the implicit hopes of studies of genes and aggression is that we can become nicer through selective breeding or even genetic engineering. But consider: George Bush did not pursue contact sports or indeed any sports in college–he was a cheerleader!—and he successfully avoided fighting in Vietnam. If there are genes for innate aggression, this man almost certainly lacks them, and yet he has no qualms about dispatching others to commit violent acts.

The link between innate male aggression and modern warfare is too tenuous to be of much help. We must look for solutions elsewhere.

But of course you knew that.

I’d like to follow up on “The Bell Curve Revisited” first by applauding Jim Weatherall’s comments on “the debate about women and science” and second by pointing out a finding—called the Flynn effect–that undercuts the genetic determinists’ view of IQ. I first wrote about the Flynn effect for Scientific American in 1995.

James R. Flynn, a political scientist in New Zealand, stumbled upon the Flynn effect in the early 1980’s when he was studying the use of intelligence tests in the military. IQ scores are ordinarily calculated by comparing an individual’s performance with that of others in the same age group. A score of 100 is average by definition. But Flynn found that the military had to keep recalibrating its scoring methods–or introducing new tests–to take into account a strange fact: each new generation of recruits performed better on the same test than previous generations. Soldiers who were merely average when compared with their contemporaries were above average when compared with older recruits. Put crudely, each new generation seemed to be smarter than its predecessor.

Investigating further, Flynn found that scores on virtually every kind of IQ test–administered not only to soldiers but also to students and others of all ages in at least 20 different countries–had risen roughly three points per decade for as long as such tests have existed. Similar increases have occurred in all of the 20 or so countries from which sufficient data were available. The gains ranged from 10 points per generation, or 30 years, in Sweden and Denmark to 20 points per generation in Israel and Belgium. The upward surge tended to be greatest for tests designed to minimize cultural or educational advantages by probing the ability to recognize abstract patterns or solve other non-verbal problems. One of the most respected tests is Raven’s Progressive Matrices, invented by the British psychologist J.C. Raven in 1942 and administered to people of widely varying ages since then. People tested in 1992 scored 27 points higher on average than people of the same age had scored in 1942.

Flynn’s data undermines some supposedly well-established claims of the intelligence-testing community. For example, many investigators believed that the elderly suffer a progressive and inevitable decline in intelligence, because when they take modern IQ tests their scores are lower than the scores of modern 20-year-olds. But if the average 70-year-old takes a test that was used 50 years ago, he or she will usually score as well as the average 20-year-old of that period did on the same test. Similarly, some experts have claimed that the academic success of Chinese-Americans, relative to their Caucasian contemporaries, is correlated with higher intelligence; after all, tests have shown that Chinese-Americans score higher on IQ tests. Flynn found that the reported IQ disparity resulted in part from the administration of old IQ tests to young Chinese-Americans.

The Flynn effect cannot be explained by genetic evolution. As Flynn once explained, “Over one or two generations, only a fanatical eugenics program could have made a significant contribution to IQ gains, and if anything mating trends have been dysgenic.” The question is, what could the non-genetic cause be? Every hypothesis put forward so far has flaws.

One theory is that children have become more adept at taking tests because such tests are increasingly common. But IQ tests have actually become less common in recent years; moreover, studies have shown that practice has little or no effect on IQ scores, particularly for the highly abstract, non-cultural tests that exhibit the strongest Flynn effect. Attempts to correlate IQ growth with time spent in the classroom have also failed; moreover, Scholastic Achievements Tests and other measures of academic accomplishment have remained flat or declined in the U.S. even as IQ scores rose.

Some pundits—notably the journalist Steven Johnson in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You–attribute the rise in IQ to childrens’ increased exposure to television, computer games and other media, the very forces that others have blamed for the “dumbing down” of modern youth. But IQ scores began rising well before the advent of television in the early 1950’s. The psychologist Arthur Jensen has proposed that the IQ gains are linked to improvements in nutrition. If that were true, the upward creep of IQ scores should have stalled or reversed in countries struck by famine during World War I and II.

The Flynn effect highlights the vital (if mysterious) role that culture plays in intelligence, at least as it is measured by IQ tests. It also suggests that, contrary to The Bell Curve, environmental interventions may close the gaps in IQ scores between different groups.

The Flynn effect, in short, shows that the genetic determinists don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Is the pendulum swinging back to nurture over nature in the bitter, protracted debate over race and intelligence?

In their 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued that intelligence is largely fixed by genes and hence interventions such as Head Start and affirmative action—which attempt to narrow gaps in school performance and income between blacks and whites–are wastes of taxpayer money. Many scientists, including those who reject the policy prescriptions of Herrnstein and Murray, nonetheless accept their claim that intelligence is something you’re more or less born with.

But new research contradicts this view, according to “After the Bell Curve,” an essay by David L. Kirp in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. The evidence for the high heritability of IQ stems for the most part from studies of twins adopted by relatively affluent parents. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley (obviously a sentimental liberal), notes that studies including twins and parents from a wider variety of backgrounds show that poverty can suppress IQ scores and affluence can boost them. Kirp concludes that “the prospects for remedying social inequalities may be better than we thought.”

I’m happy with this confirmation of what common sense tells us. But I must confess that research on race and intelligence–no matter what its results–makes me queasy. As I wrote in my book The Undiscovered Mind:

Although I believe that in general science cannot and should not be stifled, the kind of science represented by The Bell Curve–whether its specific assertions turned out to be right or wrong–seemed to me to have no redeeming value. Quite the contrary. The claims of Murray and Herrnstein could easily become self-fulfilling by convincing black children, their parents, and their teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate questions such as these? What good could come of it? This position–that theories linking race and IQ should be treated not as right or wrong but simply irrelevant–was spelled out by Noam Chomsky in Language and Problems of Knowledge:

“Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like.” [Italics added.]

Journalistic duty is hectoring me to denounce George Bush’s veto of the stem-cell bill, or a recent Times piece about how AI is finally living up to its hype (right) or a flurry of articles making ridiculous claims for brain scans (detecting lies, relieving depression, etc.).

But instead, I’d like to offer a followup to “My Daughter: Smarter Than World-Famous Scientists.” In that post I claimed that my 11-year-old daughter Skye had solved the physicist Andrei Linde’s dancing-match trick, which I first observed during a cosmology conference in Sweden in 1990. Skye put two matches on her palm and made the top one tremble simply by blowing on it.

James Randi then wrote to inform me, “That is NOT the way the ‘jumping match’ trick is done.” He added, “It’s very complicated to explain, though very easy to do.”

I had to take this claim seriously. James “The Amazing” Randi is a world-famous magician, skeptic and debunker, head of the James Randi Educational Foundation, who has a standing offer of $1 million to anyone who can prove that he has ESP or other “supernatural” powers. (See Randi’s entertaining website at www.randi.org.) Randi sent me the photograph below, along with the following explanation:

“The trick either produces a rattling/trembling of the loose match, or the loose match jumps up into the air. It depends on how you do it, and also on the dryness of the fingernails, and your skill…

“Examine the photo attached.

“There are two matches used, the operating match – “O” – and the moving match – “M.” My right thumb is pushing hard against the head of “O” in the direction “A.” (The head of “O” can just be seen peeking out at the tip of the “A” arrow.) My right index finger pushes hard the opposite way, in direction “B” against “O”. This produces force “F” against the nail of my middle finger at position “X.”

“Match “M” rests freely on the end of “O.” To make “M” move, I allow “O” to slide up along the fingernail at “X” in VERY small jumps – perhaps a hundredth of an inch at a “jump.” Since the fingernail is rough, it doesn’t allow it to slide, but makes it go in a jerky fashion. The force “F” on “O” is re-directed upward along the surface of the fingernail. The very small movements of “O” can’t be seen, but the resulting movement of “M” is very obvious. A strong though tiny upward “bump” against “M” either throws it up into the air violently, or makes it jump up and down in tiny increments – a “tremble.” I can get about 8 or 10 “jumps” while the match “O” moves only about a total of an eighth-inch up the fingernail, then I re-set it for another sequence of jumps.

“Try it… But you may find it works better for you with really strong tooth-picks…”

Did Andei Linde do it this way, or Skye’s way? I’m going to try to get Linde, who is now at Stanford, to reveal his secret (although I suspect he’ll stick with “kvantum fluctuation”). Either way, I hold by my statement that Skye is smarter than world-famous scientists.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think this new version of the website for the Center for Science Writings looks great–elegant and inviting. I have Jim Weatherall to thank for it—and for lots of other things, too. As you know if you’ve read the CSW staff bios, Jim is Assistant Director of the CSW. He just graduated with degrees in physics and philosophy from Harvard, where he helped to found two new journals, one for creative writing and the other on cinema, and rubbed shoulders with big-time thinkers like the physicist Lisa Randall and philosopher Peter Gallison. He is a technical and intellectual whiz, troubleshooter, idea man, sounding board. He designed and set up the original CSW website early this year, and he launched this new version early this morning after pulling an all-nighter (!). Just last week he video-recorded my first two interviews with authors, one of which, with the journalist David Berreby, he has already edited—hopefully making David and me sound much pithier than we really are–and posted. Jim and I agree on some things, such as string theory and religion, but fortunately we disagree on lots of other things, especially whether science can achieve absolute truth (guess who stands where?). His recent critiques of my “No More Nukes!” post and of my inclusion of Karl Popper in the “Greatest Science Books” list give you a sense of how smart and well-informed he is, as does his personal homepage. I hope he keeps sharing his views with readers of this site.

Thanks again, Jim!

If you have any suggestions for improving our site, please pass them on below.

I’d also like to point out an important new announcement on our homepage. The CSW is creating an annual prize for the best science book of the year. Just yesterday a national magazine agreed to co-sponsor the award: Details to come. In the meantime, please nominate your candidates for the prize in the allotted space. Our minds are more malleable than they might seem.

This morning, I ran through the woods behind my house here in Garrison to what we call The Lookout. From this hilltop, you can look south and see the twin domes of the Indian Point power plant squatting on the banks of the Hudson, about four miles away. On a clear day, if you raised your eyes a little, you used to see the Twin Towers rising above a distant ridgeline.

The Lookout gives me a grim perspective on all this recent talk about a revival of nuclear power, most recently in a cover story in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. “For the first time in decades,” Jon Gertner states in “The Nuclear Option” (that’s the cover headline, the one inside is the too-clever “Atomic Balm?”), “increasing the role of nuclear power in the United States may be starting to make political, environmental and even economic sense.”

As the article states, the U.S. has 103 reactors that supply 20 percent of our energy needs. These reactors are aging, and a dozen utilities around the country are planning to apply for permits to build the first new nukes in 30 years. Many energy experts, economists and even greenies—notably Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, and the Gaia guru James Lovelock—support a resurgence of nuclear power, which could help counteract global warming by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

Five years ago, I might have considered climbing aboard this bandwagon, even though Indian Point has an imperfect safety record, but not any more. In fact, I want to whack the neo-nukers and the Times Magazine for irresponsibly downplaying the immense security risks posed by nuclear power.

On September 11, 2001, one of the hijacked jets flew down the Hudson River right past Garrison. A woman I know was gardening that morning outside her house on the river when she was startled by a huge jet roaring overhead, just a few hundred feet above her. Moments later the jet passed over Indian Point before continuing to its fatal destination.

As “60 Minutes” pointed out in a terrifying report just one month after 9/11, the jet could have caused even more death and destruction if it had plowed into Indian Point, in effect creating a dirty bomb. (In 2004 the 9/11 Commission reported that Mohamed Atta, one of the pilots who flew into the Twin Towers, considered attacking a nuke in the NYC region, almost certainly Indian Point.) There are 300,000 people within 10 miles of Indian Point, and millions more within 50 miles.

After 9/11, officials declared the airspace around Indian Point a no-fly zone, and the plant’s operators installed an antiaircraft battery. This was in addition to the heavily armed National Guard troops patrolling the perimeter of the plant in helicopters and boats. But preventing a determined terrorist from attacking the site by air would still be difficult.

Government officials threw together an evacuation plan for our region that even the state acknowledged was a joke, because the narrow two-lane roads leading north from our town would quickly become clogged with traffic. We were alarmed rather than reassured when our local school distributed potassium iodide pills, which supposedly prevent your thyroid from absorbing the radioactive isotopes released in a reactor accident. In the event of a radioactive release, the best hope for those of us living just north of Indian Point would be for the wind to blow south toward Westchester and New York City.

Obviously, these vulnerabilities are not unique to Indian Point. The Times Magazine article, incredibly, does not discuss the vulnerability of nuclear plants to air attacks. And it barely mentions the closely related issue of nuclear waste, beyond noting that construction is scheduled to begin on a waste repository in Nevada in 2011. I started following the debate over the Nevada repository in the 1980s. Given the immense technical and political problems entangling the repository, I would be surprised if it opens within 20 years.

Even if the Nevada site were already open, you still have to transport the spent nuclear fuel there. You can’t fly it—an explosion in the air would be too catastrophic–and no states are going to want the literally hot fuel passing through on trains or trucks. So for the foreseeable future—and conceivably forever–the waste will remain in storage pools at 64 sites in 32 states. Each of these storage pools represents another potential target for terrorists, in addition to the active reactors.

We’re stuck with the existing reactors and storage sites. But given the volatility of world affairs—with more U.S.-hating suicide bombers being created every day–it would be insane to create still more targets. To my mind, these security issues trump economic and even environmental considerations.

Let me shout it from The Lookout: No more nukes!

That was the headline for Andrew Pollack’s page-one story in the New York Times yesterday on Matthew Nagle, a paralyzed man who by means of “a small sensor in his brain was able to control a computer, a television set and a robot using only his thoughts.” The online version of Pollack’s story has links to papers and videos in Nature by the group—led by John P. Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown–that designed the brain device, which consists of an array of 100 microelectrodes implanted in the motor cortex.

This field, called neuroprosthetics, is one of the most fascinating–and hyped–of all scientific endeavors. Pollack deserves a pat for carefully pointing out several limitations of the technology (although only after the jump from the first page). The wires from the electrodes pass through the skull, posing a risk of infection. The patient’s control over a cursor is slow and unreliable. Technicians have to recalibrate the device every day, and even with recalibration, Pollack notes, “the electrodes’ ability to detect brain signals begins to deteriorate after several months, for reasons not fully understood.”

Tellingly, Nagle decided to have the device removed from his brain, in part because he had another operation that would allow him to breath without a ventilator, but also because he could control a computer with voice-recognition technology.

For more background on this field’s limitations and potential, see my Discover articles “The Myth of Mind Control” and “The Bionic Age Begins.” The former focuses on software issues, the latter on hardware ones, including the difficulty of maintaining good connections between electrodes and brain cells.

Also, keep in mind this fact: The Pentagon is a major funder of work on neuroprosthetics and “brain-machine interfaces.”

When the masses start buying a stock, it’s time to sell. The old investing rule of thumb came to mind when I spotted the cover of the July 17 New York magazine, which sports a big yellow smiley face and the headline “How to Be Happy: What the burgeoning field of happiness studies can teach us here in the most misery-loving city* in America.” [*Scientifically proved!”]

When a scientific field inspires a cover story in a life-style magazine like New York, you know the hype has gotten out of hand.

I flipped open the issue expecting something whack-worthy, but the article, by Jennifer Senior, is terrific, a comprehensive survey of the major players (except for Richie Davidson, star of Brains, Buddhism and Bullshit, Part 2) and perspectives in the field, narrated with wry irony (foreshadowed by the asterix in the headline). Sometimes outsiders—that is, journalists who don’t specialize in science—do a better job than pros, because they approach the science with just the right stance of amused detachment rather than taking it too seriously.

The article was chock-full of fun facts, including one in particular that struck this father of two: Children, although they provide moments of transcendent joy, represent a net source of unhappiness for parents. “In fact, surveys of parents invariably find a clear dip in happiness after the Blessed Miracle of Childbirth, which continues unabated for twenty years—bottoming out during adolescence—and only returns to pre-birth levels when the child finally leaves home.” The problem is, by the time my kids leave home, I’ll probably be senile.

The ultimate goal of the science of happiness–and in fact of religion and science in general, if you think about it—is to help us transcend suffering and thereby achieve total happiness, bliss, peace, grace, nirvana, an unending peak experience. This goal poses two questions: First, is it feasible? Second, it is desirable? Senior’s sardonic answer to both questions is, Probably not. She quotes Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst, saying that “anyone who could maintain a state of happiness, given the state of the world, is living in a delusion.” George Bush is cited as an example of such a creature.

And yet who, given the choice to be totally happy, would turn it down? Our current methods for achieving happiness, whether cognitive therapy, Prozac, meditation, long-distance running or microelectrode stimulation of the septal region of the brain, are crude. But what if scientists discover a way to give us permanent, blissful self-transcendence with no side effects? How would such an invention affect us?

I remember an episode of the defunct TV comedy Ally McBeal that dealt with this issue. The main character was a miserable, Scrooge-like businessman who was transformed by a benign brain tumor into a blissful Santa Claus who raised his employees’ salaries so they could share his happiness. When his partners took him to court to prove he was incompetent, the businessman argued that his behavior was perfectly rational. After all, what could be irrational about being happy, and wanting others to be happy?

Then the businessman’s wife died, and he felt no sorrow, even though she was the only person his old self had loved. He couldn’t even wipe the smile off his face. He was so horrified at his inability to feel grief that he had the brain tumor removed, although it meant plunging back into his previous misery.

This TV plot raises questions that will surely become more pressing as the “science of happiness” evolves and we develop better methods for manipulating our brains and minds: If we become immune to grief and heartache, are we still fully human? Have we gained something, or lost something?

Given the topic of my last post, I suppose now is the time to tell the story about Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass that I promised in “Tripping Down Memory Lane.” Like his friend Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert was a Harvard psychology professor who after discovering psychedelics morphed into the counterculture guru Baba Ram Dass. In his 1971 bestseller Be Here Now, which describes his transformation, Ram Dass recalls traveling to India and encountering a profoundly enlightened guru named Maharaji. Ram Dass gives Maharaji a huge dose of LSD—915 micrograms—“and nothing—nothing happens!” LDS had no effect on the guru because he already had such a profoundly mystical outlook. Supposedly. The implication was that spiritual practices such as meditation and yoga can induce the same powerful mystical states as drugs but in a more stable, permanent fashion. Inspired by Ram Dass’s story, hordes of young people in my generation started meditating, doing yoga, traveling to India and joining all sorts of wacky guru-led cults.

Over the years, however, lots of psychedelic figures have expressed doubts about Ram Dass’s guru story. Terence McKenna, for example, when I interviewed him in 1999 for Rational Mysticism, argued that Maharaji probably palmed Ram Dass’s LSD instead of swallowing it; the swamis McKenna had met on his travels were certainly capable of such a trick. In the June 2001 issue of High Times magazine, in the article “The Evolution of Just Plain Ram Dass,” the hippy/yippy/anarchist/comedian Paul Krassner, a self-described old friend of Ram Dass, offered an even simpler explanation. Ram Dass “now admits that he made up the story he told American seekers about the time he gave his guru in India three tablets of LSD and nothing happened,” Krassner wrote.

Being a crack investigative reporter, I don’t take anything on faith, so I called Ram Dass at his home in California to confirm Krassner’s story. Ram Dass was still suffering the aftereffects of a stroke, but he vehemently denied that he had ever told Paul Krassner or anyone else that his guru story was not true. After I emailed Krassner to inform him of Ram Dass’s response, Krassner said that to the best of his recollection the anthropologist Stanley Krippner—another veteran of the psychedelic sixties–had told him that Ram Dass had taken back the guru/LSD story. When I contacted Krippner to ask him if that was true, he said that Krassner must have misunderstood him; he, Krippner, had no reason to doubt Ram Dass’s story. I relayed Krippner’s response to Krassner, who later retracted his claim in High Times.

All of which brings to mind Robin Williams’s observation that if you say you remember the 60’s you weren’t really there.

In a previous post, “Tripping Down Memory Lane,” I mentioned the resurgence of research into the potential benefits of psychedelics. Today, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Scientist, The Independent and other media in the U.S. and Europe are now all over this heretofore underreported story. The newspeg? A report by a team at Johns Hopkins University that psilocybin triggered profound spiritual experiences in two thirds of a group of 36 subjects participating in a double-blind study. One third of the subjects said the experience was the most meaningful of their lives, two thirds said it was among their top five experiences. The Washington Post starts its story thus: “Psilocybin, the active ingredient of ‘magic mushrooms,’ expands the mind. After a thousand years of use, that’s now scientifically official.” Titled “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance,” the Johns Hopkins paper was published in Psychopharmacology along with astonishingly positive commentaries (albeit with the required warnings about risks, etc.) by four authorities on drugs, including two federal drug-war veterans: Charles Schuster, former head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse; and Herbert Kleber, formerly deputy director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy. As several pundits point out, the Johns Hopkins study recalls the legendary Good Friday experiment, in which the Harvard psychiatrist Walter Pahnke gave psilocybin to divinity students and professors in Boston’s Marsh Chapel on Good Friday, 1962. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the new study is that it was sanctioned and financed by the federal government during the most conservative regime in recent history. The Wall Street Journal warns that “the research is likely to stir controversy.” Ya think?

Case studies of brain-damaged people provide scientists, and science writers, with great material for dramatic storytelling and theorizing about brains and minds. I call this enterprise Gagian neuroscience, for reasons explained below.

One case in the news involves Terry Wallis, who was “minimally conscious” for 19 years after a severe brain injury but abruptly regained speech and awareness three years ago.Such recoveries are extremely rare. Brain scans by Nicholas Schiff of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City and colleagues suggest that new neural circuits are forming in Wallis’s brain.

A paper by Schiff’s group, “Possible axonal growth in late recovery from a minimally conscious state,” has triggered followup stories, notably “Mute 19 Years, He Helps Reveal Brain’s Mysteries,” by Benedict Carey in The New York Times; and “Rewired Brain revives patient after 19 years,” by Helen Phillips in New Scientist. The major lesson of the case, according to New Scientist, is that “the human brain shows far greater potential for recovery and regeneration then ever suspected.”

The same lesson emerges from “The Deepest Cut” in the New Yorker, in which Christine Kenneally describes epilepsy patients who survive—and thrive—after the removal of an entire hemisphere of the brain. The lesson corroborates the new received wisdom in neuroscience, that adult brains are extremely “plastic,” capable of forming new connections and even of growing entirely new neurons.

I enjoy Gagian neuroscience, particularly as practiced by Oliver Sacks, the subject of a previous post. But Gagian neuroscience has taught me a crucial meta-lesson: Each case of brain damage lends itself to different theoretical interpretations, none of which applies to brains in general.

The term “Gagian neuroscience” refers to the field’s most famous subject, Phineas Gage, who was working on a railroad line in Vermont in 1848 when an explosion blew an iron bar through the top of his head. Not only did the 25-year-old Gage live; he remained completely lucid. About an hour later, he was examined by a physician named Edward Williams. Williams recalled that during the examination Gage “talked so rationally and was so willing to answer questions, that I directed my inquiries to him in preference to the men who were with him at the time of the accident, and who were standing about at this time.” A year later another doctor pronounced Gage “completely recovered.”

Ever since, scientists have been drawing different, contradictory conclusions from Gage’s case, as the Australian psychologist Malcolm Macmillan documents in his 2000 book An Odd Kind of Fame (the conclusions of which are summarized on Macmillan’s website). Early examinations of Gage suggested (wrongly, as it turned out) that his brain had been damaged in regions supposedly dedicated to language and motor control. The fact that these functions remained intact suggested that the brain is not modular, with different regions specialized for different functions; rather, it is an undifferentiated mass that works holistically.

Twenty years after Gage’s accident, however, a physician named John Harlow reported that Gage was not “completely recovered” but had undergone profound personality changes. A previously fastidious, thoughtful and responsible man, Gage had become “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom),” Harlow wrote. Gage’s “mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage.’”

Gradually, Gage’s case came to be seen as a corroboration rather than refutation of the modularity hypothesis. The parts of Gage’s brain that had sustained the most damage were his frontal lobes, which are now believed to be the seat of such lofty cognitive functions as moral reasoning, decision-making and inhibition.

The frontal lobes were also the target of the lobotomy, one of the most notorious treatments in the history of medicine. In the 1998 bookLast Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine , the historian Jack Pressman notes that the effects of lobotomies varied wildly. Some patients seemed to benefit from the procedure; others were devastated. Some patients became uninhibited, like Phineas Gage; others were left virtually catatonic.

Pressman concluded: “Because every individual is comprised of a singular combination of physiology, social identity, and personal values, in effect each patient constitutes a unique experiment” (italics in the original).

That is is true of Gagian neuroscience in general.

Science can’t go backwards. Every advance of knowledge and technology leads, irreversibly, to still further advances through what Edward Wilson refers to in Consilience as the “ratchet of progress.” Supposedly. But sometimes science does go backwards, at least as measured against certain goals.

This curmudgeonly thought occurs to me as I ponder last week’s news that Warren Buffett is giving $31 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, already the richest philanthropy in the world. Michael Specter said in the New Yorker last fall that the Gates Foundation’s “principle goal is simple: to rid the world of disease.” Last week Gates said his immediate aim is finding cures for the 20 leading fatal diseases. “Can that happen in our lifetime?” Gates asked. “I’ll be optimistic and say, Absolutely.”

Predictions about “the end of infectious disease” were quite common several decades ago, when antibiotics, vaccines, pesticides, water chlorination and other public-health measures were vanquishing diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, polio, whooping cough, tuberculosis and smallpox, particularly in first-world nations.

In her 1994 book The Coming Plague, the journalist Laurie Garrett nicely documents this “Age of Boosterism.” She notes that as early as 1948, the U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall announced that the conquest of all infectious diseases was imminent. In 1963, in the midst of a massive Chinese campaign against infectious diseases, Mao Zedong issued an inspirational ditty:

The Fours Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,

The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring.

Away with all pests!

Our force is irresistible.

In 1967 the U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart said that it was “time to close the books on infectious diseases” (as Garrett puts it) and shift resources toward non-infectious killers such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. In retrospect, medical boosterism peaked in 1980, when the World Health Organization confirmed that smallpox—one of the deadliest of all microbial killers—had been totally eradicated.

The Age of Boosterism was brought to an abrupt end in the 1980s by the emergence of AIDS and of treatment-resistant forms of older killers such as tuberculosis and malaria, which now kill many more people than they did in the 1960s. Optimism has been replaced by growing recognition of the complexity of diseases and of the limits of medicine.

So when it comes to ending infectious diseases, science is going backwards, both in reality and in perception. If anything, perceptions have become too gloomy lately, as the media whips us into hysteria over bird flu and other potential epidemics. Let’s hope that the money of Gates and Buffett can get us moving in the right direction again, subjectively and objectively. (Thank Yaweh for rich people with consciences!)

In a future post, I’ll mention some other retrogressive scientific enterprises (feel free to guess what they are).

A true skeptic relentlessly seeks out new information that might force him to reconsider his positions.

I’m not a true skeptic. Too lazy. And my mind has slammed shut on some topics. String theory is dead to me! But last night I sought out new information that might force me to reconsider my skeptical attitude toward Buddhism, or rather, meditation.

In Brains, Buddhism and Bullshit, Part 1, I whacked Rich Monastersky of the Chronicle of Higher Education for “Religion on the Brain,” an article about scientists studying religion, and especially Buddhism. The article mentioned that some of these scientists would be meeting this summer in “a renovated monastery overlooking the Hudson River.”

I happen to live about a mile up that road from that converted monastery, which is called the Garrison Institute and was founded “to apply the transformative wisdom of the world’s contemplative traditions to systemic challenges facing the human and natural environment.” It’s a jewel, and I mean that. Last night, I drove over to listen to Richie Davidson, who was prominently mentioned in Monastersky’s article, give a talk about “the science of happiness.” Davidson is a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin who has become a leading figure in the recent convergence between Buddhism and brain science. He’s received funds from both the Templeton Foundation and the Mind and Life Institute and sits on the latter’s board.

He began meditating in 1974 when he was at Harvard, where he also hung out with Richard Alpert, the Harvard psychology professor and Leary sidekick who transformed himself into the pop guru Baba Ram Dass (if you beg me, I’ll tell you a story about Ram Dass in a future post). Davidson has been getting great press lately. TIME recently named him one of the “100 People Who Shape Our World”; the alternative-medicine mogul Andrew Weil wrote Davidson’s TIME tribute.

An article by Colleen O’Connor in the Denver Post proclaims that Davidson’s research on meditation’s positive effects—he uses PET, EEG and MRI to monitor changes in meditators’ brains and so on–“may benefit all humanity.” One of Davidson’s star subjects is the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who has spent decades on meditative retreats cultivating his compassion. Ricard “nearly soared off the chart of positive emotions–he had the highest level of happiness ever documented,” the Denver Post gushed. I would think this sort of stuff would make Davidson cringe, but he has posted the article on his website. For a more balanced appraisal of Davidson, see these articles by John Geirland in WIRED and Stephen Hall in The New York Times.

So back to last night at the Garrison Institute. Davidson, joined by his young colleague Antoine Lutz, spoke in a splendid chapel stripped of most of its Christian iconography—although not the stained glass windows, which feature doves, crosses, hearts and chalices. Behind Davidson and Lutz loomed a gilded statue of Buddha with a yellow robe draped over his shoulder and, disturbingly, red-painted lips.

Speaking to about 100 people—which my socializing and the Q&A led me to believe included lots of psychotherapists—Davidson and Lutz described how they are bringing rigorous scientific methods to bear on Buddhist concepts. Mindfulness, for example, the practice of being here now instead of fretting over your lousy sex life or job or stock portfolio. Davidson has designed an experiment in which subjects read texts with gibberish planted in them here and there; your ability to notice the gibberish is a measure of your mindfulness. To me, that sounds more like a measure of copyediting skill.

Davidson and Lutz plan to study other exotic states as well, including lucid dreaming (where you realize you’re dreaming while you’re still in the dream), lucid deep sleep (where you remain mindful even during deep, dreamless sleep; the egghead guru Ken Wilber told me he could do this) and compassion (if they find the brain region for compassion, I bet they call it the Bodhisattva spot). They also want to examine negative states, such as grasping (your pathetic attachment to your iPod, car, spouse, etc.)

My skeptical hackles bristled through this talk. Brain-scan studies are flimsy enough when addressing well-defined cognitive functions, such as spatial navigation or face recognition, let alone “happiness” and “grasping.” The emphasis on “compassion” also seemed hollow. In one experiment, Davidson found that veteran meditators reacted to a woman’s scream not with distress, like normal people, but with compassion. So what! What sort of accomplishment is it to spend thousands of hours sitting in a cave trying to feel compassion, as Matthieu Ricard did? What about actually helping someone? Davidson and Lutz also spent a lot of time dwelling on the Buddhist doctrines of impermanence and emptiness, which have always struck me as less spiritual than nihilistic.

And yet I drove home last night thinking, Maybe I should give meditation another shot. It wasn’t what Davidson said that impressed me. It was his—I hate to use the word, but I can’t think of a better one–presence. When you’re conversing with him, he looks straight into your eyes, giving you his full, eager attention in a way that makes you–well, me–feel shifty-eyed and distracted in comparison. Even when Lutz was nattering on too long in a thick French accent about some complicated time-perception experiments, Davidson remained cheerful and patient. Sure, lots of people who meditate don’t seem particularly happy or serene. Davidson’s demeanor may have nothing to do with his meditation; underneath, he may be seething with narcissistic neurosis. But still.

Maybe I’ll get the old Zen cushions out again.