A quote for the day 3 Aug 2008 Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of the advantage of cooperation in the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to, and their differences from, human society are alike instructive. [T . H. Huxley, Prolegomena to Evolution and Ethics, IX.] Just because John Lynch mentioned that work… Social evolution
History Google Books, the last, worst, library? 30 Aug 2009 Geoff Nunberg over at Language Log gets stuck, justifiably, into the incredibly bad classification of books being scanned at Google Books. Give that this is, as he says, the likely last ever scan of all pre-electronic, pre-Mickey Mouse Amendment copyright, books, it means we have given up good libraries for… Read More
Ethics and Moral Philosophy Morality and Evolution 6: Moral dispositions 21 May 201422 May 2014 [Morality and Evolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7] In any field that has statistical variation, it is necessary to isolate the variables. Biology is all about statistical variation of populations, and so we must expect that any account of morality that is based upon biology will have variation along a number of axes. Here… Read More
Politics Haneef again 31 Jul 2007 Sorry to bother you all with internal Australian politics, but this has to be discussed. Now the minister for immigration is saying that the Australian Federal Police intercepted a chat room conversation in which Haneef was told to leave Australia by (they say) his cousins before his knowledge of the… Read More