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Tumblr Don’t be a Materialist, be a Heroic Materialist

January 31 2012, 6:05am | Comments

Twitter Links The God gap

Religion may have lost much of its power to explain our modern world but we still crave its emotional satisfactions

January 28 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Link Nature, nurture and liberal values

Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses

January 25 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Female Orgasm: An Evolutionary Journey

Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, among others, has described female orgasm as the female equivalent to male nipples, anatomy that one sex needed, while the…

January 23 2012, 9:21am | Comments

Findings quote from High Techne - Rutsky

The position of human beings in relation to this techno-cultural un-conscious cannot, therefore, be that of the analyst (or theorist) who, standing outside this space, presumes to know or control it.It must in-stead be a relation of connection…

January 6 2012, 8:52am | Comments

Link It’s Only Humanist

To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines. The art of the Greeks has been…

January 4 2012, 10:16am | Comments

Link The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes…

December 22 2011, 1:24pm | Comments

Link Trials and Errors: The limits of reductionism &…

This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern…

December 20 2011, 5:31am | Comments

Twitter Links The Dark Sides of Our Digital Self

To many, the internet holds great promises of freedom, wealth, power, and opportunity. One great example of this is the dot com bubble. When…

December 18 2011, 4:51am | Comments

Link Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab…

"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory…

December 13 2011, 1:34pm | Comments

Link Human Brain Is Limiting Global Data Growth

Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce

December 9 2011, 9:35am | Comments

Instapaper It Does Take a Village

It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That…

December 1 2011, 4:37am | Comments

Twitter Links What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age?

We live in a world where in the past few years the nature of facts has been called into question. You have political entities…

November 29 2011, 7:37am | Comments

Link The Mystery of the Five Wounds

Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St.…

November 21 2011, 1:07pm | Comments

Link Neanderthal Neuroscience

As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and…

November 21 2011, 3:09am | Comments

Link The King of Human Error

The paper that resulted five years later, the abovementioned “Prospect Theory,” not only proved that one of the central premises of economics was seriously flawed—the so-called utility theory, “based on…

November 10 2011, 8:36am | Comments

Twitter Links Threshold science

How walking through a doorway increases forgetting

November 2 2011, 6:51am | Comments

Link Is mental time travel what makes us human?

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional…

October 28 2011, 10:32am | Comments

Twitter Links Atheists, theists, and gnostics, oh my!

There’s a popular idea that being an atheist involves sharing the exact ideas of all non-believers, a notion I would argue is extremely misguided.…

October 24 2011, 4:36pm | Comments

Link The Roots of Religion: Myth, Play and Human…

Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page…

October 19 2011, 3:17am | Comments

Twitter Links Delusions of Peace

Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray

October 6 2011, 2:37am | Comments

Video

October 2 2011, 2:40pm | Comments

Twitter Links A History Of Violence

Steven Pinker Edge Master Class

September 29 2011, 2:52am | Comments

Link The ancient cloud

The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all.…

September 24 2011, 8:50am | Comments

Link Can religion tell us more than science?

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and…

September 21 2011, 3:52am | Comments

Link Can religion tell us more than science?

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and…

September 20 2011, 3:12am | Comments

Link Steven Pinker on the History and decline (and…

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment,…

September 20 2011, 3:05am | Comments

Link The Battle Over Zomia

Over the past two millennia, "runaway" communities have put the "friction of terrain" between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a…

September 5 2011, 5:20am | Comments

Twitter Links Implications of 'uplifting'

Is it Ethical to Make Animals as Smart as People?

August 30 2011, 5:52am | Comments

Link Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago.…

August 15 2011, 2:45am | Comments

Link Humanism / After Humanism

n this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like…

August 11 2011, 11:30am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

“The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever…

August 9 2011, 4:27pm | Comments

Link Secularism and Its Discontents

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that…

August 9 2011, 3:57pm | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Michel Serres, The Natural Contract

“Suppose two speakers, determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be, as long as they are willing to continue the discussion they must speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take…

August 9 2011, 5:36am | Comments

Link Traces of humanity

What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the…

August 7 2011, 3:32pm | Comments

Twitter Links A Trick of the Mind - Reason Magazine

The Believing Brain: From alien intervention to federal conspiracy http://t.co/G5KcJN7 #conspiracy #religion #belief #human #culture #mm

August 6 2011, 5:02am | Comments

Link Information Wants to be Consumed

Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what…

August 3 2011, 6:00am | Comments

Link What's human? What's animal? And what of the…

Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on…

July 25 2011, 3:20pm | Comments

Tumblr The Objectuals

July 22 2011, 1:47am | Comments

Link Regulations proposed for animal–human chimaeras

The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with…

July 22 2011, 1:30am | Comments

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