How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity statnews.com/2021/09/13/how… - is obesity due to over-eating or dysregulated fat storage? cc @StephenORahilly
One point not commented on in article is that genes implicated in obesity (through rare or common variants) are enriched for nervous system expression and function...
Do these regulate appetite (many clearly do) or brain mechanisms controlling fat metabolism? Or both?
There are all kinds of complicated amplifying feedback loops involved, of course, between fat formation, insulin signaling, and appetite...
One interesting idea from the article is that adipose tissue itself greedily pulls resources from the rest of the body:
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Kathryn Paige Harden: ‘Studies have found genetic variants that correlate with going further in school’ theguardian.com/science/2021/s… - tricky stuff here...
It should be no surprise to anyone that children differ in ways that affect (not determine, but contribute to) how far they go in education.
Some of those differences are genetic in origin, others may be the result of variation in brain development (explaining why even identical twins may differ)
Reading here about Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories of consciousness, which make a lot of sense to me: plato.stanford.edu/entries/consci…
Basic idea is that conscious awareness (of a percept or an intention) requires a secondary representation - the recognition that you are having that percept or intention
That all fits with lots of neural and neurological findings, though there are many possible criticisms of this framework...
This book is brilliant. Incredibly precise exposition of how reasons - grounded in beliefs, desires, and knowledge - drive behavior
This is the kind of philosophy I really enjoy. No outlandish thought experiments, no semantic sleight-of-hand, no clever moves aimed to stump opponents... Just clear, rigorous analysis
One key insight: the distinction between a triggering cause (stimulus A -> action/outcome B) and a structuring cause (the reason *why* A->B)
Really excellent, insightful article highlighting crucial role of culture in understanding variation in heritability 👇 But I have a quibble... (thread below)
The article frames phenotypic variance as capable of being partitioned into a component explained by genetic variance and a component explained by environmental variance. 2/n
And it looks in detail at how environmental variance and gene-environment interactions (and therefore heritability) are all sensitive to cultural differences, clustering, sampling effects, etc. 3/n
I think @Lise_Eliot and colleagues have done a real service to the field in performing this exhaustive meta-analysis of the messy literature on sex differences assessed by neuroimaging
Longish thread: *Assessed by neuroimaging* is important here, as it’s an extremely gross level at which to look for differences, compared to what can be done in other animals (where lots of fine differences are observed).
So there could, in the first instance, be NO sex differences observed by neuroimaging and that would not have any bearing on whether differences exist in microarchitecture, distribution of cell types, synaptic connectivity, gene expression profiles, cellular physiology, etc.