"What a piece of work is a man" declares Hamlet, and indeed human beings are quite extraordinary. What other organism can organize 334 million individuals (or even 158 million) over 3.8 million square miles in a shared activity in service of an abstraction like democracy? In terms of sheer numbers, the closest would probably be an ant colony or a bacterial film, both of which can coordinate the activities of that many individuals, but via genetics and biochemistry. Only humans are socially engaged at such a scale … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Responding in Kind
transgender
Science Corner: When Normal Isn’t Normative
Although my public health training focused on infectious diseases, I care about a wide range of public health issues. My job cuts across domains, and also personally I want people to be comprehensively healthy and not merely free from contagions. So when I saw that health-improving and potentially life-saving interventions were being labeled as child abuse and used as the sole grounds for investigating parents, I was baffled and dismayed. I don't understand how providing treatments which have demonstrated health … [Read more...] about Science Corner: When Normal Isn’t Normative
Science Corner: You Are More than Your Karyotype
The United States Congress has once again taken up the Equality Act, which would explicitly extend civil rights protections to classes defined in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity. While there may be legitimate discourse on some of the finer points of the legislation, what troubles me most is how often an overly simplistic and reductive understanding of biology is dragged out in an attempt to refute the validity of some of these categories. My first instinct is to correct and clarify the science, but in … [Read more...] about Science Corner: You Are More than Your Karyotype