Steven Rose is commemorating, together with Hilary Rose, the 50th anniversary of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science.
Aristotle affirmed the essential difference between the sexes: men’s brains were bigger, women were more inconstant, emotional and compassionate, at least in part because they do not produce semen – whence men’s and women’s different behaviour and place in the social order. Symbolically, at least, biology’s long, continuing and often lamentable history of using...
Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate this, C.H. Waddington imagined what he called an ‘epigenetic landscape’ of rolling hills and valleys. Place a ball at the top of the hill and give it a little push. Which valley it rolls down depends on chance fluctuations; some valleys may converge on the same endpoint, others on different ones.
Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly...
Astronomers have penetrated billions of light-years into space, explained the changing states of stars from their birth to their death, postulated the existence of black holes in which matter...
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