Mary Jane West-Eberhard (left) is both brilliant and quietly subversive, but she is no firebrand. Unlike the subject of my previous column in this series, James A. Shapiro, she does not present her ideas as revolutionary or as a mortal threat to the Darwinian worldview. In fact, she goes out of her way to associate [...]
At First Things (May 7, 2012), law professor Robert P. George offers a complaint on behalf of a friend, who has been unexpectedly and gratuitously insulted by a university. My friend and former colleague on the President’s Council on Bioethics, Dr. Benjamin Carson ([left] of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is, to put it [...]
In his occasional series on Huffington Post, James A. Shapiro—a distinguished bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago—responded to a recent column of mine about his work (5/3/2012) . Shapiro’s reply was called “Natural Genetic Engineering and Vitalism: What’s the Difference?” (5/15/2012). I have the impression that Professor Shapiro and I are in broad agreement and that [...]
. . . and it might help some people if you just said them. In “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations” (Chronicle of Higher Education April 30, 2012), Naomi Schaefer Riley got herself fired from her job there for racism. Despite the fact that she married a black guy. Here [...]
People are too big. If we want to save the planet, we must shrink ourselves. That’s the message of a recent Atlantic article entitled “How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change.” The piece reports on a proposal—to be published soon in an environmental ethics journal(1)—to meet the challenge of climate change (if such it be), [...]
In “Credentialism, Part I: How much of your education do you really need?,” I looked at the relationship between the amount of information you really need to do a job and the other qualities that make—or break—success. The nurse practitioner needs a high level of medical science information as well as skill and rapport with [...]
In a recent article in New Criterion , Charles Murray, whose book, Coming Apart, I have been considering here, offers another scholar’s view that expertise in a field requires 50,000 chunks of information: Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload. Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this [...]
Technology and education go hand in hand. With recent technological advances, students utilize online resources and other tools in order to supplement the classroom experience, earn an online bachelor degree, pursue professional development credits, or simply satisfy curiosity. Whether used to enhance the educational experience or to replace the traditional classroom, students and educators realize [...]
In Part I, we looked at how images are obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), as well as a history of brain-scan technology and where we got the idea that blood flow relates to brain function. In this installment, we are going to look at some of the accomplishments and some of the limitations [...]
Why is it that so many people offer students straight talk about stuff that they can get straight talk about anywhere, but not about stuff they can’t? Sex? It’s the best sales tools in history, as my Grade 7 teacher pointed out in 1962. Aren’t we all overwhelmed with straight talk about sex from the [...]