This article is interesting though hardly surprising: Can PTSD Become Hereditary?. We can pass on to future generations the psychiatric problems we develop during our lifetimes. To simplify a lot: Our genes carry out some very important tasks for the organism of which they are part, such as providing active templates — tiny assembly plants … [Read more…]
A recent article, Female Minorities Are More Affected by Racism Than Sexism, Research Suggests, speaks of a study showing that Oriental women who are members of immigrant communities in the United States are upset in a deep and emotional way by racial prejudice but are dispassionate about prejudice against them as women, taking that as … [Read more…]
I’ve drawn some insight from Norman Cantor’s Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization on the subject of the destruction by Catholic philosophers and theologians of respect for the mind. There’s still more to be said on that topic but I’m commenting on another topic where Cantor had some views which would not … [Read more…]
In Brain Performs Near Optimal Visual Search, we read of some interesting research on the power of visual search techniques used by human beings: In the wild, mammals survive because they can see and evade predators lurking in the shadowy bushes. … This ability to recognize target objects surrounded by distracters is one of the … [Read more…]
This article, How Do Neurons in the Retina Encode What We ‘See’?, points to the great effort our nervous system puts into the effort to make sense of perceptual input. One surprise is that the eyes don’t pick up some of the more complex patterns which change over time even though complex spatial patterns, say, … [Read more…]
There’s a review, Language and spandrels, at the weblog of John Hawks which discusses the question: “How can there be one grammatical structure for all human beings if there is no known way to see selective pressures for the rules of grammar?” As the review notes, the famous linguist Noam Chomsky did a lot of … [Read more…]
John Hawks, prominent anthropologist and leader of the Neandertal Anti-defamation League, made some interesting comments in reviewing the article Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(Early online) by Marina Bedny, et al. See John Hawks Weblog for his review, Language bootstrapping the … [Read more…]
I’m about 2 years late in writing a follow-up to So What if the Human Mind is a Product of Evolution? published on 2009/05/05. For those who don’t follow the link to that earlier article, I’ll quote the first paragraph: Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, … [Read more…]
All reason is from God and of God. There is no immaterial reasoning agency part of or attached to the human creature. There is no mind or soul as many imagine, nor can we directly access even the manifested truths underlying Creation, let alone any transcendental truths which exist beyond this particular Creation. All reason … [Read more…]
Relationships of a more abstract sort, such as those in politics and economics, are not so much different from concrete relationships as we might think. Not so much different as we’ve led ourselves to believe. Those concrete entities which are more complex, such as a man or a rhinoceros, are made of substances which have … [Read more…]