Lawrence Auster, in a post commenting on the idiotic and occasionally dangerous fad known as “planking” (in which people take photos of themselves stretched out horizontally in odd locations), suggests that plankers deserve a Darwin Award. So far, so good, and I quite agree. But Mr. Auster, who has an intellectually unfortunate antipathy to Darwinism, […]
A couple of days ago, David Brooks wrote a column about the evolution of morality by group selection, an idea that is finally gaining broader acceptance. I’m glad to see that happening; the group-selection model provides such a solid foundation for an evolutionary account of the origins of religion and morality that I was persuaded […]
When it comes to thinking about human consciousness and reason, people divide, broadly speaking, into two camps: those who see consciousness and reason as primary features of reality, and those who see them as emerging from the activity of suitably configured physical systems (in particular, human brains). For those in the first camp, consciousness is […]
April 25, 2011 – 10:58 pm
It’s another busy spell for me; I haven’t had much time to comment on the passing scene since putting up that brief eugenics post last week, and I’ve had no time for writing today. But don’t touch that dial! I have something I’m sure you’ll enjoy: Ants As Fluids.
April 14, 2011 – 10:11 am
In a timely follow-up to our previous post, here’s an article from Science Daily: Cultural Differences Are Evident Deep in the Brain of Caucasian and Asian People The lead paragraph: People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the […]
March 30, 2011 – 10:30 pm
In a recent study of psychological “priming”, boffins at two universities have turned up an unsurprising result: anxiety about death can incline people more favorably toward belief in supernatural agency and purpose, in particular “intelligent design”. (The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking […]
In the hugely popular sci-fi video game Halo, humans do battle with something called the Flood — a disgusting parasitic fungus that takes over the bodies of its victims, converting them into mutilated zombie soldiers. When that happens to one of our boys, the result looks like this: According to Wikipedia’s account of the Halo […]
February 7, 2011 – 11:57 pm
In the comment thread of our previous post, we’ve been looking at Sam Harris’s claim that there can be a prescriptive natural science of human morality, one that uncovers objective normative truths. This would rebut, it seems, the idea that there are no “oughts” in nature. People do want there to be absolute moral truths, […]
January 26, 2011 – 11:47 am
There’s an interesting item in today’s Science Daily: a paper by University of Wyoming researcher Qin Zhu et al., suggests that the human size-weight illusion — which makes us think, if holding two objects of equal weight, that the larger one actually weighs less — is an evolved adaptation that helped us find objects of […]
December 23, 2010 – 10:49 pm
With the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, Richard Dawkins raised a lively debate about which level of life’s organization is the right one for understanding natural selection. Previously the assumption had been that selection could only be understood to act upon discrete individuals, but Dawkins shook things up by suggesting that selection pressures […]
December 3, 2010 – 10:30 am
The “big news” from yesterday, about a new form of arsenic-based life found in Mono Lake, seems, from what I’ve read today, to have been a bit exaggerated. The bacterium in question was taken from an arsenic-rich environment — one to which it had presumably adapted by developing a tolerance for the stuff — and […]
December 2, 2010 – 1:41 pm
This could be very big news: the discovery of a new life-form, in California’s Mono Lake, with a significant difference in its most basic biochemistry. (Having turned up in California, chances are it will soon be demanding in-state tuition rates.) Story here.
November 3, 2010 – 8:21 pm
“To err is human.” When it comes to what we do, there’s usually plenty of room for improvement. But when it comes to what we are, it turns out that isn’t always the case. Natalie Angier explains.
Our friend Dennis Mangan is a rising star in the conservative blogosphere, and in addition to his continuing work at Mangan’s he has begun contributing articles to the new conservative website Alternative Right. His latest is about the biological causes of the male-female “wage gap”. Read it here.
April 19, 2010 – 10:45 pm
Of all the conceptual tar-pits into which discussions of Darwinian naturalism often sink, none smothers its victims so prolifically as the concept of “design”. We reserve it jealously for the foresightedly purposeful efforts of conscious agents, which leaves us fumfering about for a word to describe the beautiful machinery of living things, and the powerful […]
February 23, 2010 – 11:39 pm
In a post over at VFR, Lawrence Auster comments on an essay by Stanley Fish in which Professor Fish remarks on the inability of pure “secular” reason, bereft of normative bedrock in the Divine, to provide any “oughts”. This is catnip to Mr. Auster, who is, despite having various admirable qualities, a crusading anti-Darwinist. The […]
December 14, 2009 – 9:54 pm
Making the rounds today is some marvelously entertaining footage that some biologists think is evidence of tool use amongst invertebrates. I think it’s safe to say you’ve never seen this before; see for yourself here.
October 1, 2009 – 1:00 am
In the paper the other day there was an item about Pope Benedict’s recent remarks to the people of the Czech Republic. The Pope, speaking to one of the most secular societies on Earth, sought earnestly to persuade them of the dangers of a society without God. On a superficial level this is easy enough […]
September 28, 2009 – 9:37 pm
There was an amusing anecdote in my family about my long-departed Scottish grandmother, who, in the course of helping to potty-train one of her grandchildren (indeed I think it might have been yours truly), attempted to stimulate the “wee bairn” by running the water in the sink. The plan, however, immediately backfired, and she ended […]
September 14, 2009 – 10:32 pm
Lawrence Auster is a very smart fellow, and I admire his formidable presence on the ramparts of Western culture. But he has curious blind spots, for one so intelligent, and one of them has to do with Darwinism. Have a look at this exchange with a reader, one who patiently tries to explain, as I […]
In grappling with persistent questions regarding key aspects of human existence and the natural world — intentionality, free will, morality, and so on — it is very easy to become entangled in terminological difficulties. Here’s a particularly contentious example.
We are still on vacation, but I did find some time for the blogosphere this evening. I spent it, though, reading and commenting on a fascinating thread about free will over at Bill Vallicella’s place. Here.
From number 720, in the Krailsheimer edition: Ethics and language are particular, but also universal, branches of knowledge. In this illuminating insight the great Pascal anticipates moral philosophers and evolutionary biologists such as John Rawls and Marc Hauser by over 300 years. As homo sapiens we all share an innate moral faculty and finite ethical […]
In what may be an enormously important piece of scientific work, chemist John D. Sutherland of the University of Manchester has discovered a reaction path by which RNA nucleotides can have been assembled from molecules likely to have been present in the Earth’s early environment.
March 29, 2009 – 11:19 pm
An item at the CNN website reports that a study from Queen’s University, Belfast suggests that crabs “feel” pain. The study, by researchers Bob Elwood and Mirjam Appel, examined the behavior of hermit crabs subjected to electric shocks. Hermit crabs, as I am sure you know, live in the abandoned shells of other animals, and […]
Diligently doing its part to undermine America’s intellectual respectability and competitiveness, the Texas Board of Education is taking up an amendment this week that seeks to smuggle religious myths, such as the transparent Creationist fraud known as “Intelligent Design”, into the science classroom in the name of “academic freedom”. Were this dispute taking place only […]
February 28, 2009 – 12:25 am
In today’s email, a friend has sent me some photographs of angry Muslims demonstrating on the street in what appears to be London. They are carrying signs, glowering menacingly, brandishing their fists, and shouting. The messages they carry are clear enough, if rather unimaginatively monotonous: SLAY THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM. BUTCHER THOSE WHO MOCK ISLAM. […]
February 12, 2009 – 10:45 am
If Charles Darwin were alive, he’d be 200 years old today, and there has been an enormous outpouring of ink commemorating the great man’s bicentennial. From reader JK comes a link to a Pew Research Center article on the degree to which acceptance of his “dangerous idea” — in many people’s opinion the most important […]
February 10, 2009 – 11:48 pm
It being the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on the 12th of this month, this week’s Tuesday science supplement in the New York Times offered an engaging crop of Darwin-themed articles. Have a look here, here, here, here, here, and here.
February 5, 2009 – 11:23 pm
February 12th being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has written a substantial essay on the status of science and religion in American culture 150 years after the publication of On The Origin Of Species, and on just how compatible the two really are. His […]
February 2, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We’ve all heard of spelling bees. Now it turns out they can count, too.
January 9, 2009 – 11:52 pm
We’ll get back to weightier matters before long, but the demands of the workplace press heavily just now, and there will be scant time over the next few days for serious posts. Tonight, though, I have an interesting little item for you natural-history buffs.
January 4, 2009 – 11:20 pm
I have said often in these pages that it seems likely that the human propensity for religion is a cognitive adaptation that has flourished because it tends to improve the cohesion of social groups, thereby increasing the fitness of those groups in competition against others. As David Sloan Wilson argues in his book Darwin’s Cathedral: […]
September 15, 2008 – 10:24 pm
After a century and a half, it appears the Anglican Church may finally have got round to apologizing to Charles Darwin for its sneering reception of The Origin of Species. Better late than never, I suppose, though at this point it hardly matters; the approval of this archaic institution hardly seems relevant any longer. Story […]
A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work […]
Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is back in harness after a month-long layoff from blogging. I’m glad he’s back on the job: he is as interesting and provocative as always. I’d like to weigh in on this post in particular, in which he argues that meaning, in particular the meaning of life, must either […]
It is far too hot to write, or even think cogently. New York’s infrastructure is collapsing under the strain: the power grid is failing, and subway service is becoming chaotic as outdoor sections of track begin to buckle in the heat. Broken-down vehicles are clogging the streets and highways, and after waiting to cross Madison […]
March 31, 2008 – 12:35 am
Like may others I am an admirer of Winston Churchill, and have lately been reading an excellent book by the managing editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham. It’s called Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, and as you can imagine from the title, it chronicles the enormously important friendship between Churchill and […]
March 27, 2008 – 11:41 pm
The lawyer, actor, writer, economist, professor, former Nixon speechwriter, and game-show host Ben Stein is starring in a new movie, called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, that challenges the Darwinian account of life’s history. It was given a screening in Minneapolis on March 20th, and among those attending were Richard Dawkins, who had actually consented to […]
February 7, 2008 – 12:48 pm
Here’s Richard Dawkins, opening a conversation with J. Craig Venter at a recent conference in Germany: I thought I’d begin by reading a quotation from a famous philosopher and historian of science from the 1930s, Charles Singer, to give an idea of exactly how much things have changed. And Craig Venter is a leader, perhaps […]
January 17, 2008 – 1:22 am
In his recent New York Times Magazine article on the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of morality, Steven Pinker acknowledges the nihilistic shadows nearby, and, like other popularizers of Darwinian naturalism, reassures us that we needn’t worry. I think he’s right — we needn’t — but not for the reasons he suggests.
January 13, 2008 – 10:52 pm
As promised, Steven Pinker has written what I think will be seen as a a fairly important article for the New York Times Magazine about human morality. Having banged on the topic of morality a great deal myself lately, I encourage all of you to read it. I found little to disagree with, though his […]
January 6, 2008 – 10:31 pm
A little while ago I ran across an interesting, if rather sad, item in the Physorg.com daily newsletter, having to do with the small stature of pygmies. Previous notions had been that having such wee bodies better adapted them to food shortages, or to moving about in dense forests, but neither of these explanations has […]
December 5, 2007 – 12:58 am
In Daniel Dennett’s most important book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he makes with brilliant clarity the case that Darwin’s great insight — arguably, I think, the greatest ever had by anyone, so far at least — is, as Dennett calls it, a “universal acid”, eating at the foundations of many of Man’s smugly cherished notions about […]
December 2, 2007 – 11:46 pm
Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam […]
November 7, 2007 – 12:59 am
The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.
October 21, 2007 – 11:17 pm
A couple of days ago the Nobel laureate James Watson was all over the news: he had expressed, in an interview for the London Times, his opinion that scientific results indicated that black Africans were, on average, less intelligent than white Northerners. In a subsequent article, we read: Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s […]
October 18, 2007 – 12:42 pm
I’ll chalk it up to natural selection That we won’t see Sam in the next election.
September 12, 2007 – 11:39 pm
Here is some interesting reading for you all, courtesy of Edge.org. First up is an essay called Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, in which he takes the “new atheists” to task for failing to develop a subtle enough appreciation of the adaptive underpinnings of religion, and of morality. He draws […]
Today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I enthusiastically recommend as an excellent source of news about all branches of science) had an interesting item about social hierarchies in fish. As is so often the case with discoveries of organizing principles in nature, the research is likely to help us understand not just the particular system under examination […]