September 21, 2009 – 11:19 pm
Today marks the 143rd anniversary of the birth of H.G. Wells, and Google has marked the occasion with one of those curious UFO banners they’ve been featuring lately. Wells is best known today for his immortal contributions to science-fiction — such classics as The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man […]
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 […]
August 26, 2009 – 2:53 pm
While everyone else is moping about the death of Ted Kennedy (well, maybe not everybody; Mary Jo Kopechne, for one, could not be reached for comment), here at waka waka waka we are enjoying some good news, courtesy of our friend and esteemed colleague The Stiletto. We all know, of course, that binge drinking is […]
August 17, 2009 – 11:56 pm
Now and then a blip appears on the screen that just might be something awfully big headed our way; on reading about this just now, I’m wondering if the name “Tim Palmer” mightn’t be a lot more familiar ere long.
Dennis Mangan calls our attention to an article in Newsweek, by Sharon Begley, that takes aim at the burgeoning science of evolutionary psychology. Begley effectively pronounces the field dead, which will certainly be news to its practitioners. Anthropologist Dan Sperber writes that the evo-psych community knew this broadside was coming, and that its publication in […]
In the news lately has been a New Zealand climatologist who has been looking askance at received opinions regarding anthropogenic global warming. His name is Chris de Freitas, and he is a member of the faculty of the University of Auckland. I recently ran across an article of his, in which I read the following: […]
Recently President Obama, in what he must have known would be a controversial choice, selected the geneticist Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is an eminent scientist, and a capable administrator — indeed, his professional qualifications for the post are unimpeachable — but he has also […]
A few days ago we remarked on a CNN item about the differences between men and women. Might some of these differences be innate (as I think is almost certainly the case), or are they all just the result of cultural conditioning? This has has been an enormously contentious issue of late, so it would […]
At CNN today is a pop-science puff piece that breezily summarizes some of the natural underpinnings of what we all know to be true: men and women are different. The article touches, blithely and matter-of-factly, on differences in body chemistry, brain anatomy, emotions, and cognition. You’ll certainly get no argument from me; I’ve always thought […]
An engaging item in today’s Physorg Newsletter reported on a recent study, published in Nature Geoscience, that examined the Earth’s carbon chemistry during a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM. During this torrid interval, which took place about 55 million years ago, the Earth’s average temperature shot up by 7° C. over […]
There’s an item in the news today about “neurosecurity”: the need to protect “neural devices” — computerized electronic machinery designed to interact directly with the human brain — from unauthorized manipulation. The creation of technology to provide direct interfaces betweens computers and brains is a rapidly evolving field, but the effort so far has concentrated, […]
Today we offer a heaping helping of heresy, cooked up by some of our hardest-hitting, highest-profile heathens. First, as a little amuse-bouche, we have a recent editorial by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, in which the author argues that, despite conciliatory efforts to get “militant” atheists to stop being such party-poopers, the fact is that religion […]
Readers will have noticed that output has fallen off drastically here lately; the demands of the workplace have continued to press heavily upon me. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, and in fact I am actually spending this weekend doing things other than writing and debugging program code — […]
I am working late once again, and have as yet been unable to return to normal operations around here. So for tonight here’s a little item about physicsists and mysticism.
Some years ago, anthropologist Donald Brown compiled a list of “Human Universals”: cultural traits that seem to be instantiated by all human societies. The list is broad, and contains almost all the things you’d expect to see: the collection includes belief in supernatural/religion, for example, as well as sucking wounds and language employed to misinform […]
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.
There was a brief item in the Times today about a court ruling against one James Corbett, a California schoolteacher who, it was ruled, violated the Establishment Clause by dismissing creationism in class as “religious, superstitious nonsense”. This offended the sensibilities of a student of his, Chad Farnan, who sought legal remedy, and got it […]
The news has been chock-full of exciting and interesting items lately. Today we learn that Harvard researchers, after careful study of video clips of Snowball the Cockatoo, have concluded that we humans are not the only species capable of rhythmic movement. (Indeed, this precious gift does not even extend to all members of our own […]
April 20, 2009 – 12:22 pm
We note with alarm that Dr. Stephen Hawking is, apparently, gravely ill, and has been taken to a Cambridge hospital. Dr. Hawking, the extraordinarily gifted mathematician, physicist and cosmologist who holds the same Lucasian Chair of Mathematics previously occupied by such luminaries as Isaac Newton and Charles Babbage, has battled motor neuron disease for decades, […]
I’ve written a few posts lately about Ray Kurzweil’s notion of an impending technological “Singularity“, a sort of “omega point” at which exponentially accelerating technological trends will converge, with world-changing effect. Now Dr. Kurzweil and several others have founded, at NASA’s Ames Research Center, an institution called the Singularity University (modeled on the International Space […]
March 30, 2009 – 11:47 pm
It is a truism these days that any claim relating the statistically varying abilities and aptitudes of human beings to, say, skin color, or “gender”, is a shocking and benighted atavism, a pernicious throwback to the bad old days of racism and sexism. If such correlations emerge, as they occasionally do, from a “scientific” study […]
March 10, 2009 – 10:52 pm
You may have heard of a physicist and mathematician by the name of Stephen Wolfram, a man of remarkable gifts who was doing important work in particle physics by age 17, had his doctorate from Caltech by 20, and who went on to build an enormously successful business venture around a software product called Mathematica.
In the wake (perhaps too ominous a word) of my little medical adventure last summer, a highly regarded New York cardiologist, noting that my total cholesterol was, at 248 (with a cholesterol/HDL ratio of 3.4), too high for his liking, put me on a low dose (7.5 mg/week) of the statin drug Crestor. I was […]
February 21, 2009 – 4:04 pm
Every now and then I am reminded of just how exotic the most ordinary scientific notions seem even to the average “educated” American. For example: in Thursday’s New York Times, there was a story about some feeble little earthquakes along the Ramapo Fault.
February 2, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We’ve all heard of spelling bees. Now it turns out they can count, too.
January 16, 2009 – 11:31 pm
There is a fascinating item making the rounds today. It seems that mysterious noise in an exquisitely sensitive gravity-wave detector may in fact be an indication that our instruments are now sensitive enough to detect the granularity of spacetime itself — and the argument is a very interesting one. The last time physicists announced that […]
January 13, 2009 – 10:53 pm
We’ve been hearing for years how dangerous it is to talk on cell phones while driving, and many states have made doing so illegal. While I can easily see how distracting it can be to fumble with the device itself behind the wheel, I’ve always thought that merely talking on a cell phone, particularly a […]
January 8, 2009 – 11:31 am
From reader JK, who never wearies of sending our way nourishing morsels he has plucked from the Web, comes this intriguing item: a new cosmic mystery.
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: […]
December 7, 2008 – 8:41 pm
Reader JK, who has his ear to the ground at all times, alerts us to some worrisome news. Apparently the prevalence in the environment of certain chemical pollutants has reached such high levels that a broad assortment of vertebrate species are producing increasingly “feminized” males.
November 19, 2008 – 11:56 pm
It has been a long day: it is almost midnight, and I’ve only just got home from the Manhattan hospital where my frail and elderly mother-in-law was admitted for tests. She is not so well. My lovely wife Nina is still there with her. So, nothing long-winded tonight, I’m afraid. Although there are in fact […]
November 8, 2008 – 7:20 pm
Last night we had friends over for dinner, a lovely couple we know from Wellfleet. They are both academics: she is a sociologist and associate professor at Harvard. Naturally we were discussing the recently transformed political landscape, and the conversation turned to Mr. Obama’s possible choices for the composition of his cabinet. Among the names […]
October 23, 2008 – 11:24 pm
A while back we offered a link to videos of a conference called Beyond Belief. It featured talks by an outstanding panel of thinkers — most of them Godless heathens — about the growing scientific understanding of religion as a biological and anthropological phenomenon, and about the alarming role still played by faith and superstition […]
October 7, 2008 – 11:13 pm
Things may be falling apart here on Earth, but humanity’s nobler impulses have found a worthy expression today, with the release of a gallery of images from the MESSENGER project’s flyby of Mercury. Here.
September 17, 2008 – 10:41 pm
I try to keep my ear to the ground, which may account for my having missed an outré little story. Scientists from the Supernova Cosmology Project, who have been using the Hubble Space Telescope to scour the heavens for faraway stellar cataclysms, stumbled across something very odd.
September 13, 2008 – 10:43 pm
As always, there is a provocative exhange of views taking place over at the website Edge.org. It began with an essay by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt entitled Why Do People Vote Republican?
September 10, 2008 – 11:05 pm
As you have probably heard, the folks at CERN have fired up the Large Hadron Collider, and it seems to be working: at least, the lights came on, the clock started blinking “12:00”, and so forth. By some miracle, we are all still here, and have not been gobbled up by a strangelet, or yanked […]
September 7, 2008 – 12:06 am
In a comment to a recent post, reader David Brightly asked if I was worried that naturalistic accounts of morality “might lead to less good and more harm being done.” It’s a good question, and I am not sure about the answer.
September 5, 2008 – 10:49 pm
Glaciers are melting in Europe. Alpine valleys that have been blocked by rivers of ice for as long as anyone can remember are now passable on foot. This is due to the maleficent influence of human activity, we hear: in particular, due to humans of the gas-guzzling American entrepreneurial capitalist white male sort. But there […]
August 13, 2008 – 10:37 pm
According to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, fascinating things are afoot at the University of Reading. Researchers are growing little biological brains made of rat neurons, and training them to control robots by way of a Bluetooth connection. The scientists have in fact created several of these wee brains, which even seem to have their own personalities. […]
August 10, 2008 – 10:19 pm
I do hope to resume normal operations before too much longer, and to get back to the fascinating and important topics we’ve been looking at recently. A lingering ennui and lack of mental focus have hampered my attempts to get properly back in harness just yet; I look forward to the salutary effects of sea […]
August 5, 2008 – 10:55 pm
The subset of our behavior, dispositions, reactions, and so forth that happens with our conscious awareness and endorsement is trivially small, and one of the areas where we respond most automatically and unconsciously is our interaction with others. We react subliminally to an enormous variety of cues: posture, gesture, tone of voice, choice of words, […]
August 4, 2008 – 10:50 pm
This is a giddy week for particle physicists: very soon now the Large Hadron Collider, the most potent instrument ever built for the investigation of nature’s most private parts, will be brought on line. (How soon? Have a look here.) [Note: the LHC countdown site now (August 18th 2008) seems to be down. -MP] There […]
We’ve been giving morality, and the universality of moral intuitions, a good going over lately (particularly in this discussion, which now has over 100 comments). Readers with an interest in this topic might like to have a look at Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test. Feel free to share your thoughts here. Note: Don’t read the […]
Our reader JK continues to deliver: in this case a highly unsettling article about the possibility of a devastating collision with an asteroid or comet. Because such objects often strike the ocean, or detonate in the air, leaving no crater at all (as in Tunguska 1908), our estimates of their frequency may be far too […]
With a hat tip to Bill Vallicella for the link, we direct you to the current issue of the American Physical Society’s newsletter Physics and Society, in which this august body announces its wish to get to the bottom of the hotly debated issue of anthropogenic climate change.
In today’s Times, John Tierney calls our attention to the possibility that the government may soon be imposing “Title IX” requirements on university science departments, because there aren’t “enough” women going into fields like physics and engineering. This is dangerous territory, of course; we all remember the shameful pillorying of Harvard president Lawrence Summers for […]
Tomorrow, June 30th, marks the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, an immense cataclysm that occurred, mercifully, in a remote and mostly uninhabited region of central Siberia. Its cause is still debated, but it is generally agreed to have been an “air burst”, equivalent to 10 or 15 megatons of TNT, that occurred at an […]
In yesterday’s post we looked at the possibility of an impending “Singularity”, a convergence of various accelerating lines of progress in a number of technical and scientific fields that futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks will be an unparalleled historical disruption. When a sort of critical mass is reached, Kurzweil suggests, the result will be a colossal […]
In today’s New York Times is yet another mention of a notion that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately: Ray Kurzweil’s idea of an impending technological “Singularity”. The concept is simple enough: if we look at the history of the world, we see a consistently accelerating rate of progress — first biological, […]