Links of interest

The Washington Post has a good review of Mario Livio's new book, Brilliant Blunders, a look at important mistakes in the history of science. As the article notes, Livio argues that “The blunders of genius are often indeed the portals of discovery.” This book seems a good remedy to one of the most common flaws of history of science books: to tell the story of science as a chain of one success after another. Besides introducing success bias into the story, this conventional view really misrepresents the nature of scientific and indeed all intellectual work, which does a real disservice to both science and history.

An interesting New York Times editorial on How Intellectual Property Reinforces Inequality, with special attention to patents on genes.

At io9, an article entitled The Rise of the Evolutionary Psychology Douchebag.  The writer, Annalee Newitz, does not condemn the entire field of course, but points out that a certain segment of the field seems to get a lot of glee and a lot of press out of spouting shoddy science that just happens to reinforce negative stereotypes of women, people of size, and non-white races. According to the author, "Miller's work is a more erudite version of a lot of what you see in the pickup artist (PUA) and men's rights scenes. In both groups, the common sense belief is that sexuality is based on a very old game that isn't terribly different from clubbing women on the head and dragging them back to an anthropologically inaccurate cave. Other kinds of human relationships aren't much better. I guess you could say that evopsych douchebags are the academic version of pickup artists."

At Ask a Korean!, Culturalism, Gladwell, and Airplane Crashes, an explanation of why Malcolm Gladwell gets it all wrong when he tries to generalize about how different cultural traditions contribute to better or worse airline safety. The author links Gladwell's false assumptions to the "culturalist" impulse, the tendency to make cultural difference the most significant factor even when it's not.