Tag Archives: Science

Jane Austen, Must Reading for Scientists

By Robin Bates | Published: February 4, 2014

Jane Austen can serve as a warning to scientists about confirmation bias.

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Using Lucille Clifton to Defend the Arts

By Robin Bates | Published: November 4, 2013

There’s a decline in English majors at elite universities. We use a Lucille Clifton poem to respond.

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The Wood Tick’s Holy Grail Quest

By Robin Bates | Published: October 1, 2013

Only an imaginative biologist like David Haskell would compare wood ticks with Camelot knights..

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Nature Red in Tooth & Claw? Maybe Not

By Robin Bates | Published: June 23, 2013

Carleton’s Ian Barbour turned to Tennyson in seeking to find connections between science and religion.

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The Deep (Not Scientific) Truth of Genesis

By Robin Bates | Published: June 16, 2013

The Book of Genesis, like poetry, captures truths inaccessible to science.

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Midwife, No Doc, at Grandson’s Birth

By Robin Bates | Published: February 6, 2012

My new grandson had the birth experience denied Tristram Shandy: one where a midwife was in charge.

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The Brainiest Detective and the Brain

By Robin Bates | Published: December 26, 2011

How well did Sherlock Holmes anticipate future studies of the brain? Not very well.

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Metaphors and the Brain

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2010

I read a fascinating article in yesterday’s New York Times on metaphors and the brain. If I understand Robert Sapolsky’s piece correctly, the insula—which is the part of the brain that processes, say, disgust with rotten food—also processes “rotten” when it is used as a metaphor (as in “the very deep did rot” from Rime […]

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Rising Again to Dance

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2010

Chidi Okoye (Nigeria)  Spiritual Sunday I refute Berkeley thus, Samuel Johnson famously said. And kicked a rock. Bishop Berkeley was the 18th century idealist philosopher who asked how we know reality is really there if we are dependent upon our senses for perceiving it. Is the rock in existence when we turn our backs? Johnson’s […]

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