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Many people have strongly held opinions about the matter that don’t rely much on evidence. Animal rights people make “Being boiled hurts!” buttons. People associated with fisheries say things like, “No brain, no pain.”We are not claiming that crustaceans do not feel pain.
And now, the continuing backstory of our new PLoS One paper (previous post here)...
“Origin” means beginning. So it’s unfortunate that the best known book on the subject of evolution is On the Origin of Species. Because the theory of evolution by natural selection is not, strictly speaking, about the origin of life.(S)tudents often hold more tightly to a supernatural account for the origin of life than they do to a supernatural account for how the diversity of life arose(.)
This sounds dangerously like self-censorship.(A)ll living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. ... Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.
Weta is not just the name of a special effects studio; it’s the common name for one very large insect (pictured) that is found in New Zealand. Like many animals on New Zealand, it’s under a bit of pressure from introduced mammals, so there are definitely conservation implications if you can understand the mating system of the animal.
Wetas make an interesting case study for studying body size and mating, because they are large for their lineage, and there’s also a big size difference between the males and the females. In this particular species of weta (Deinacrida rugosa), females are about twice as heavy as males.
As an undergraduate, I helped my supervisor, Jennifer Mather, prepare a talk, “Ethical treatment of invertebrates: how do we define an animal?” Jennifer wanted to speak on this partly because Canadian Council of Animal Care guidelines had listed experiments with invertebrates at the same ethical level of concern as vertebrate tissue. Interestingly, that’s where most invertebrates remain to this day (see Appendix XV-B), although there are increased concerns for “cephalopods and some other higher invertebrates.”
In 2001, Ed Kravitz wrote an article for the International Society for Neuroethology newsletter. He described the experience of being interviewed on TV as part of a story about the ongoing question of whether boiling lobsters is inhumane.In response to the question of whether lobsters feel pain, I said that we didn’t know.
I added that since pain is a perception we often don't know whether people feel pain either, unless we ask them, and that pain thresholds vary greatly among individuals. I mentioned that pain is a higher cortical function in humans and that there is no structure resembling a cortex in the lobster brain. In response to questions about the many minutes of suffering and struggling by lobsters to get out of pots of boiling water, I mentioned that neurons in the lobster brain cease to function at temperatures above 27° Celsius (about 80° Fahrenheit) and that in boiling water the brain would quickly reach that temperature. I felt it highly unlikely, therefore, that the banging around in the pot was struggling to escape and instead suspected that heat-induced contractions of the massive tail and limb musculature of already brain-dead animals was the cause. In case people were still worried about the suffering issue, however, I mentioned that after cooling an animal on ice to anesthetize it, the brain of a lobster could be immediately destroyed with a scissors cut between the eyes.
Today, my co-author, Sakshi Puri, and I have a new paper out in PLoS One that has had a very long fuse. It’s related to a problem that I’ve addressed multiple times on this blog (see links at bottom): the “lobster in the pot” problem, or, “Do crustaceans feel pain?”
Wired asked some neural specialists, “What will transform our understanding of the brain in the next decade?”Nothing.
This won’t be due to lack of effort, but due to a lack of a coherent theory of mind. How brains make minds is what people want to understand. Understanding neural circuitry or synaptic transmission better won’t transform how most people think of brains if they don’t illuminate mental states. The next decade will see large accumulations of facts waiting for a theory to unify them. I don’t think that theory is going to come next decade.
People in the military are highly trained to perform at high levels under horrible situations. It’s a reasonable hypothesis to think that these individuals would have different cognitive performance and brain activity than civilians.
The authors recruited veteran Navy SEALs, and compared their behavioural and neural responses to emotional faces. They showed pictures of people who were showing angry (maybe a little like the one shown right), scared, or happy faces, and the subjects had to match the emotion shown to another picture on a screen. The subjects did this task while the research team was scanning their brains.
The title claims to show “enhanced threat detection” in the SEALs. But “detection” is a description of behaviour, not brain activation. If SEALs do not outperform controls on the behavioural task, then the title is a bit misleading. 
The sudden end to the case will strengthen the campaign for reform of the libel laws, which Jack Straw, the justice secretary, is considering. It is also a specific pledge in the Liberal Democrat manifesto.
Recently, I talked about a wasp that is able to use its venom to turn a cockroach from a freely moving individual into a soulless zombie. It’s a feat that stretches your imagination of how one animal could exert that much control over the nervous system of another.
The fungus is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, here pictured growing out of a very, very dead ant. Andersen and colleagues wanted to test one of Richard Dawkins’ famous ideas: that the idea of the “extended phenotype.” After infection, how precise is the ant’s subsequent change of behaviour? And can it be shown that this actually benefits the infecting agent in a way much greater than chance?
The joke around some beach communities is that you can never be too thin, too rich, or too blonde. I don’t know about the first two, but a new paper suggests being blonde on a beach may be good, but you can be too blonde – if you’re a mouse.
The team went to northern Florida, the scampering grounds of a field mouse (Peromyscus polionotus; pictured) that shows two distinct fur colours. They needed to go there not for the mice, but because that’s where the mouse predators live.
In other words, it was possible for mice to be “too blonde.” 
Mind control sounds impressive. But if you qualify that by saying, mind control of a cockroach, you might think, “Dude, it’s a roach. How hard can controlling its mind be?”
The wasp stings near the front end of the cockroach, where there are two major cluster of neurons: the brain (which gets called the supra-esophageal ganglion here) and the sub-esophageal ganglion (or, as some countries foppishly call it, the sub-oesophageal ganglion). The brain sits ahead of the “throat,” as it were, and the sub-esophageal ganglion sits just behind it.
(a) English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee.
(b) These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to discuss matters of genuine public interest (including public health!).
(c) Our laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws are so hostile to responsible journalism. (Again, it is exactly because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome signatories to the petition from around the world.)
(d) Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically runs to over £1 million.
(e) Two separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and Peter Wilmshurst, and we are both raising concerns about medical treatments. We face losing £1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar concerns when our libel laws are so brutal and expensive? Our libel laws mean that serious health matters are not necessarily reported, which means that the public is put at risk.
From a purely rational economic point of view, it would be blindingly stupid of me to be publish anything this year.One of my recent posts on brain size and bird migration was a runner-up for the PLoS ONE blog post of the month.
All of this makes me think three basic things about how we name ourselves:
- It’s personal. Even if you think you have the way to define who is an artist or a scientist or an expert, each individual may still choose to affiliate (or opt out) based on his/her own standards.
- It’s relational. The things we call ourselves and each other do impact the way we see and treat each other.
- It could be much richer and more expansive. A word like “artist” is a heavy hammer to impose on every nail. If the Eskimos have fifty words for snow, can't we have fifty words for artist? (Or scientist. - ZF) If we can add more nuance to the ways we name ourselves, we can move from debate to dialogue about the opportunities inherent in a diverse and complex world.
