Links

I am writing a response to several of the gender and sexuality articles here but I will go ahead and link to them.

Also I am giving the link to the created petri-dish brain which is roughly equivalent to a 5 week fetal brain (minus vascular structure, etc.). I am still a little baffled on the claim they created 99% of the genes (expressed genes) and cellular types. Cellular types makes sense but I do not know exactly what the expressed genes entails and how we came up with that number. I have not found many more detailed explanations on what exactly they have done and what exactly this entity is representative of. For instance, as they grow it further are sensory systems becoming active? And how much intracellular communication is happening? (I assume a good amount)


Food for thought:

Scott Bakker gives a couple more good takes on his brand of overthrowing philosophy and embracing eliminativism and scientism.

Anne Fausto-Sterling gives a good overview of CRISPR. However, see my response to some of the more unprincipled naysaying about genome editing.

Growing (very young) brains from stem cells.

An earlier article on growing brain spheroids.


Massimo Pigliucci on nature/nurture and gender identity

A fat gene and a shift in what exactly it does.

Jay Joseph critiques more of the heritability paradigm, this time on crime genes. Focusing on how certain genetic elements contribute to whether a person is a criminal takes focus off all the far more salient environmental structures that created such a criminal. There may be genetically inclined dispositional differences in temperament, and given an exact set of social structure those with these dispositions may be the ones that take up credit card fraud. In the end, there are going to be far more robust things to say about the environmental structures that lead to the behavior of credit card frauding.

NYTimes article on gender identity.