The study of cognition and theory of mind is an emerging field of science that receives its inputs from psychology, neuroscience and behavioural biology. Children are known to develop a theory of mind around the age of three to four years, and many experiments have been conducted to test this development in young children, and test the apparent absence of theory of mind in toddlers. If you know that I know something, you are said to have cognition, while if you know that I do not know something, you would have a theory of mind. Sounds fuzzy? An illustration might…

Mr. D. is one of those guys who is just nice. He’s far from gregarious, but everyone who meets him likes him. He’s quiet, reserved, and hates to complain. He’s had his share of medical problems over the last 80 years—emphysema, lymphoma, prostate cancer—all of which he’s treated as inconveniences. When he came into my office with his wife, he looked miserable. His back was hurting so badly that he couldn’t get comfortable. It had been like that for two weeks, but he didn’t want to bother me about it. I asked him the usual questions—any fevers, weakness, incontinence—all negative.…

As many scientists and science educators are aware, the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank based in Seattle, Washington, maintains a list of signatories — the Institute calls them scientists, and calls the list “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism” — under the following claim: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” In short, it’s a list of people with advanced science degrees that think evolution isn’t true.[1] Not to be outdone, the National Center…

It is early on a rainy March morning. My daughter, Klara, and I stand together – holding hands in the midst of a circle of people we do not know. Rain drips off the tip of her nose and she catches it with her tongue as she waits for the formalities to end and the fun to begin. The formalities in this case consist of everybody in the circle introducing themselves, but for a six year old ready to romp in the woods this small act might as well be measured on a geologic time scale rather than passing minutes.…

When I look out my office window, I see two sets of nucleotide bases – guanine and cytosine. I don’t mention this as an admission of psychotic delirium. The building where I work just happens to have a DNA molecule emblazoned on its windows. Admittedly, it’s an odd workplace view, but in my case it fits. I’m a molecular geneticist—genomics, gene expression, cloning, and the rest of that good stuff – and these little guys are some of the fundamentals of what I study. In many ways, my field is actually about the flow of information in genes; how a…

You come to hate airports. And the juggling act forced on you by Christmas mayhem. And the thousand other tribulations that you’re heir to when you and your partner have been living apart for more than two years. Two years. The post-doc opportunity of a lifetime took my wife to MIT in August 2005, leaving me in Vancouver with only a couple years of my doctoral degree under my belt. We weren’t even married at that stage. Engaged before she left, we distracted ourselves during our first year apart by planning our nuptials. W-day was in July 2006, including a…