Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/29/biggest-breakthroughs-in-biology-for-2020.html
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Wow, I am super surprised “understanding sleep deprivation” is a bigger breakthrough than the rapid development, implementation, and success of RNA-based vaccines that will have a huge effect on stopping the pandemic.
Both they and I make the point that these are BESIDES the vaccines.
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the neurobiology part helps obviate the shortsightedness of our current paradigm of STEM being “real” learning and that the humanities are superfluous, outdated whimsies.
calculation, observation, and engineering are very important but comparatively simple operations in contrast with the unique workings of the mind, which as said in the video is the most complex thing in the known universe. the fact that we have invented machines to offload the work of calculation, observation, and engineering is testament to their (relative) simplicity.
human emotional responses, unique to the human mind, are the most complex outputs of all time (again, that we know of; extraterrestrial intelligences notwithstanding.) I can mindmeld across the millenia with e.g. Homer and feel the emotions that he felt only through the humanities. something of equal complexity is so beyond the purview of STEM as to be laughable.
I love STEM and often find it fascinating, but am constantly frustrated by the shortsightedness of the diminishment and outright scorn of humanities in this current era.
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Seems like intelligent work done by intelligent people. But what was the ‘breakthrough’ here?
I see a scan of some mouse intestines and there’s a just a suggestion that a causal relationship between sleep deprivation and inferior gut health ‘plays a role in shaping evolution’?
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