There are writers on the Internet, some maybe just scribblers but many are thinkers of some capacity, who criticize other peoples, including most Latin Americans, for being too dumb to handle complex, American-style economic and political systems. To be sure, many of these criticisms are quite true, though we should realize that current immigration patterns … [Read more…]
Razib Khan, is a geneticist who is an atheist but not a naively anthropocentric atheist nor one blind to the reasons why others hold or seek a faith he doesn’t hold and doesn’t desire. He has published an essay, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist?, in which he says: In the culture of … [Read more…]
Peter Frost has published a good essay in which he deals with human moral nature. The essay can be found at Does Natural Law Exist?. I vaguely anticipated this discussion in my previous essay, The Interior Richness Which Lies in a Civilized Man. Frost defines natural law as teaching: All people are born with a … [Read more…]
Kimberly Noble, MD and PhD, pediatrician and neuroscientist, has written the article, Rich Man, Poor Man: Socioeconomic Adversity and Brain Development, which is posted at the website of The Dana Foundation, a foundation run by neuroscientists. There is good stuff in the article which has a properly optimistic tone to the idea that we can … [Read more…]
Larry Cahill, a distinguished brain-scientist, recently published an article in which he discusses the need for recognizing the differences between male and female brains by first discussing some bad medical results due to the assumption that there are no such differences and, thus, medicines will affect both the male and female brain in the same … [Read more…]
Judith Curry is Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Curry’s blog is well worth reading for reliable commentary on climate science and more general matters of science practice and of public policy in its relationship to science. One of her recent articles, More scientific … [Read more…]
In an interesting article, How Our Brains Go the Distance, Virginia Hughes tells us: People think about distances all day… long. Distance can describe physical spaces (a far-flung city; a nearby store), time (distant past; near future), and social relationships (near-and-dear pals; a quarreling couple needing some space). Researchers have long thought that these various … [Read more…]
In my most recent post, the essay: How a Christian Finds Metaphysical Truths in Empirical Reality, I argued that Christians should respond confidently to what lies around us, to our concrete and thing-like realm of Creation and to all the other realms which remain yet in our universe which is our world when seen in … [Read more…]
In this short essay, Classical Liberalism versus Anarchism, Mike Rappaport tries to shift the focus in a debate about anarchism vs. classical liberalism. He quotes Robert Higgs, an advocate of anarchism: My difficulty arises not so much from a dissatisfaction with government’s being charged with protecting the citizens from force and fraud, but from a … [Read more…]
This article, The Invisible Hand Illusion, deals with a laboratory testing trick by which psychologists can make people feel as if they have an invisible hand. Ed Yong writes: Hold your hand up in front of your face. It is patently obvious that the five-fingered thing in front of you is your hand, and the … [Read more…]