What sorts of people 14 May 2008 In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t! The third line gave Aldous Huxley the title of his future dystopia, Brave New World. Somewhere between Miranda’s naive optimism and Huxley’s sardonic pessimism lies What sorts of people should there be? a venture by Canadian academics to investigate the effects of the modern world on our sense of self and “to address concerns around human variation, normalcy, and enhancement”. They also have a blog. It is run by the illustrious and lustrously hirsute Rob Wilson, an Australian philosopher in exile at the University of Alberta. Since we’re discussing philosophical blogging, go check out the 69th Philosophers’ Carnival at Possibly Philosophy. And Sciblings Jason Rosenhouse and James Hrynyshyn get stuck into the incoherent blatherings of David Brooks in the New York Times, in which he seems to argue that we are abandoning the “materialist” view of the mind in favour of a new respect for “spiritual” states (an assertion contrary to all the research I know, at any rate). Evolution History Politics
Australian stuff Australian scientists resign from Murray-Darling Water commission due to a lack of heed 21 May 2011 I don’t usually post these announcements, but GetUp are reliable and on target. Today it was revealed that key scientists have walked away from the government’s Murray Darling Basin Authority process in protest. Right now the Murray Darling Basin Authority is in the final stages of recommending how to deal… Read More
Epistemology Modus Darwin and the *real* modus darvinii 2 Feb 2011 Elliot Sober has published a claim (Sober 1999, Sober 2008: §4.1, 265ff) that Darwin used, and we should too, a particular syllogism: similarity, ergo common ancestry. This cannot be right, for several reasons: logical, historical and inferential. First the logical, as this is rather vapid, and can be guarded against… Read More
Evolution God and evolution 6: Is Darwinism atheism? 24 May 201324 May 2013 Many Christians and Muslims, and to a lesser extent Jews, think that Darwinian evolution requires or implies atheism, a charge first brought when Darwin was still alive. The Princeton theologian Charles Hodge argued this in his What is Darwinism? (1874). But Darwin himself, and many of his followers such as… Read More
I wasn’t aware ‘scientists’ had gotten rid of the idea of free will in the first place, let alone that we are inherantly fair or empathic. Does this man have children? Because just on an unjusticied anecdotal note, children very much seem to learn fairness, while ‘mine’ comes inherantly. I feel slightly ‘straw-manned’… (Can I verb that? Its all the rage to go around verbing things)
I don’t know why anyone thinks there’s any problem with verbing things. I certainly don’t … as long as you don’t do it so often that your writing becomes a whole blungtrop of neologisms. Are there any real arguments against it?