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Tag Archives: New Yorker

Schizophrenia and Heredity

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Biblical Counseling, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Biblical Counseling, genetics, Heredity, New Yorker, Schizophrenia

Sekar and McCarroll soon launched a series of collaborative experiments with Beth Stevens to determine how C4A might be involved in synapse editing, and how synapse editing, in turn, might be linked to schizophrenia. They were joined by Mike Carroll, an immunologist, who had long studied C4’s role in immune diseases. In human-brain tissues and in neurons cultured in flasks, they found that the C4 protein accumulated abundantly at synapses; in mice, this accumulation occurred almost precisely at the time that pruning begins. Mice that lacked the C4 gene underpruned the synapses in parts of their brain, which suggested a direct connection between the gene and pruning. Sekar confirmed that the C4A was more abundant in the brains of schizophrenic patients than in normal brains. The increase in C4A levels in schizophrenic patients was most significant in the parts of the brain involved in cognition, planning, and thinking, the functions that are most impaired in people with schizophrenia, and less noticeable in parts of the brain that control balance, posture, and speech, aspects that remain relatively intact in those with the disease.

A magnificently simple theory began to convulse out of the results. Perhaps C4A, like the other immunological factors that Stevens had identified in synapse pruning, marks neuronal synapses destined to be eliminated during normal brain development. During the maturation of the brain, microglia recognize these factors as tags and engulf the tagged synapses. Variations in the C4A gene cause different amounts of the C4A protein to be expressed in the human brain. The overabundance of C4A protein in some people contributes to an excessively exuberant pruning of synapses—thereby decreasing the number of synapses in the brain, which would explain the well-established fact that schizophrenic patients tended to have fewer neuronal connections. That the symptoms of schizophrenia break loose during the second and third decades of life makes sense, in retrospect: adolescence and early adulthood are periods when synaptic pruning reaches a climax in the regions of the brain that govern planning and thinking.

Schizophrenia, as McCarroll put it, “may be a disease of overpruning.” Synapses that should have been preserved get cut, like a garden that has been sheared back too aggressively in the winter. “The C4A paper is one of the most important papers in schizophrenia in our times, because it identifies a pathway and provides a mechanism,” Lieberman said. “It opens a black box. Now we have to figure out how overpruned synapses cause all the diffuse symptoms of the disease—the psychosis, the cognitive collapse, the emotional emptiness, and the withdrawal.”

Runs in the Family New findings about schizophrenia rekindle old questions about genes and identity.

Science and the Beauty of God

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, Art, Vern Poythress

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Beauty, law, nature, New Yorker, Physics, Redeeming Science\, Science, Surfing the Universe, Vern Poythress

In “Surfing the Universe,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells, of physics as a search for beauty:

Physicists have long looked to higher math for insights into the workings of the universe. “If a figure is so beautiful and intricate and clear, you figure it must not exist for itself alone,” John Baez, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Riverside, said. “It must correspond to something in the physical world.” This instinct—the assumption that beauty will stand in for truth—has become a habit. Some physicists now worry that string theory’s mathematics have grown permanently unmoored from the real world—an exercise in its own complexity. And so modern theoretical physics has become, in part, an argument about aesthetics.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/21/surfing-the-universe

Interestingly, Poythress explains that seeing such beauty is right, because such beauty is a disclosure of God:

Scientific laws, especially “deep” laws, are beautiful. Scientists have long sifted through possible hypotheses and models partly on the basis of the cri­teria of beauty and simplicity. For example, Newton’s law of gravitation and Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism are mathematically simple and beauti­ful. And scientists clearly expect new laws, as well as the old ones, to show beauty and simplicity. Why?

 

The beauty of scientific laws shows the beauty of God himself. Though beauty has not been a favorite topic in classical expo­sitions of the doctrine of God, the Bible shows us a God who is profoundly beautiful. He manifests himself in beauty in the design of the tabernacle, the poetry of the Psalms, and the elegance of Christ’s parables, as well as the moral beauty of the life of Christ.

 

The beauty of God himself is reflected in what he has made. We are more accustomed to seeing beauty in particular objects within creation, such as a butterfly, or a lofty mountain, or a flower-covered meadow. But beauty is also displayed in the simple, elegant form of some of the most basic physical laws, like Newton’s law for force, F = ma, or Einstein’s formula relating mass and energy, E = mc2. Why should such elegant laws even exist? Beauty is also dis­played in the harmony among different areas of science, and the harmony between mathematics and science that scientists rely on whenever they use a mathematical formula to describe a physical process.

 

Poythress, Vern S. (2006-10-13). Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Kindle Locations 369-377). Crossway. Kindle Edition.

 

The Essential Battle is the Meta-Battle

26 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Uncategorized

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law, Lawyering, Meta-Battle, Narrative, New Yorker, Sun Tzu, Ted Cruz, Toobin

“In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative,” Cruz told me. “As Sun Tzu said, Every battle is won before it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought. So in litigation I tried to ask, What’s this case about? When the judge goes home and speaks to his or her grandchild, who’s in kindergarten, and the child says, ‘Paw-Paw, what did you do today?’ And if you own those two sentences that come out of the judge’s mouth, you win the case.

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