The Brain Scientists of the Qing Dynasty

On April 16, 1618, the Jesuit scientists Adam Schall and Johann Schreck (a friend and colleague of Galileo) set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, bound for China1. In Schall’s possession was a book about the human body, and it championed the radical idea that the mind is created by the brain. This book, authored by the […]

Elitism is a Threat to Science

Science is highly exclusive: the vast majority of people cannot participate in research, access research articles, influence what gets researched, or influence science-related policy-making. This exclusivity is worrisome, not only because it is unfair (and that unfairness is not evenly distributed across different groups of people), but also because it is a threat to science […]

You Don’t Have a Lizard Brain

Despite our best intentions, scientists sometimes make a very basic mistake: we look for what makes humans unique. Certainly, humans are not just unique, but extraordinary. Nothing else in the known universe has produced art, science, technology, or civilization. But, our history of searching for how, precisely, we came to be exceptional has often led to […]

Science is a Collective Human Endeavor – And That’s Beautiful

A philosopher of science once told me, “Science is like a big, ornate building. Unless you’re an Einstein or a Newton, all you can do is etch away at a little flourish on the building’s facade – and then you die.” Though bleak, his thought did speak to a curious truth about the lives of […]

On the Golden Age of Islamic Science

During what we sometimes call the “Middle Ages,” science in the Abbasid Caliphate was flourishing: scholars from diverse backgrounds gathered in centers like Baghdad, where they made fantastic advances in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and physics. When these scientific achievements eventually reached Europe, they helped spark Europe’s Scientific Revolution. As beneficiaries of their discoveries, we are […]

Ancient Greek Philosophy and the Birth of Neuroscience

We recognize today that the Ancient Greeks made significant achievements in mathematics, engineering, and astronomy, and that their achievements in these fields went unrivaled (in Europe) until the Renaissance. We know, for example, that Aristarchus proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system and offered a reasonably accurate estimation of the size of the Earth, and […]