Infectious disease

The treatment of infectious diseases is often presented as one of the great success stories of modern medicine. There’s no doubt that antibiotics have the potential to kill many bacteria in life threatening situations and so have saved many lives. Antivirals don’t have as good a success rate as antibiotics (despite the strange current craze [...]

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What will change everything? – The End of Analytic Science

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s answer to Edge’s 2009 question is the view that it’s time now to start to focus on how branches of knowledge connect to, and influence each other, and to develop a new science which goes beyond the current complexity science by emphasising the relationships between phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves as discreet [...]

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What will change everything? The idea of negative and iatrogenic science

EDGE questions attract such interesting responses every year. This year the question is “What will Change Everything?“
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, poses the response that “the idea of negative and iatrogenic science” will change everything. Here’s his main point…
I will conclude with the following statement: you cannot do anything with knowledge [...]

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Bird warnings and bird life indicators of world health

You’ll be familiar with the idea the “canary down the mine” where a canary in a cage was carried down into the mine by the miners to give them early warning that the air conditions were deteriorating. Well, I just read an interesting variation on that tale in a French magazine called “Nouvelles cles”. The [...]

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Three Ages of Knowledge and Understanding

The contemporary French philosopher, Luc Ferry’s book, “What is The Good Life?” (ISBN 978-0226244532), is an interesting but quite difficult read. I’m not sure I’ve really grasped the whole of his argument, but it seems to involve developing awareness of the “singularities” in life, by which he means the unique, particular events, which draw our [...]

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The significance of metaphors

“Metaphors we live by” written by Lakoff and Johnson. (ISBN 0-226-46801-1) ……..
I often muse about what makes a human being, human? Or what makes a human being fully human? Consciousness is clearly one of the characteristics. Language is another. And imagination is a third. Perhaps it’s because I’m interested in these phenomena that some time [...]

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Hunter gatherers and farmers

Human history, as best we know, dates back around 200,000 years. For 190,ooo of those years we were hunter-gatherers and for the last 10,000 we’ve had agriculture.
I suppose I’d read about the hunter-gatherer phase long since but the significance of it never really struck me, and certainly the fact that so much of human history [...]

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Infections are about more than bugs

If someone has an infection caused by a particular bug, and the doctor prescribes the best, most appropriate drug to kill that bug, what does the drug do?
The correct answer is “it kills the bug”.
The incorrect answer is “it cures the infection”.
You see, bugs and infections are not the same thing. Certainly a bug may [...]

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How trustworthy are scientific researchers?

Can we have confidence in bankers? Can we have confidence in politicians? We have a wee phrase in Scots “A hae ma doots” (“I have my doubts”). Well in the middle of this breakdown of trust and confidence in our economic and political institutions, along comes a piece of research from Edinburgh University which has [...]

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Hubble captured “fountain of life”

This is not the usual sort of thing for me to post but I just came across this photo from the Hubble telescope and I’ve gone back to it again and again. It’s awe-inspiring. It’s amazing. It’s wonderful.
It’s a couple of galaxies interacting 200 million light years away from here. Between them is this “fountain” [...]

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