Several recent, disparate stories from the world of education have a common thread: One student is expelled and arrested, facing felony charges, for accidentally starting an explosion. A science buff, she had mixed toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a small container, a common method of producing a minor explosion. In what should be [...]

We are taught from childhood that empathy is a good thing. We would be monsters without it. Unfortunately, it isn’t so simple. We are often exhorted to think with our hearts or our guts, yet empathy is so often a poor guide to responsible decisions. We empathize with those whose problems we understand, but the [...]

Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent, is a sociology professor who holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, England. He was educated at Columbia University where he graduated cum laude in History and Sociology in 1979. In 1981 he received a Master of [...]

Terry Scambray, a Fresno, California–based writer, offers a review of prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos, in which he challenges his thesis a bit: Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel. Oxford University Press, 2012. 128 pages. $24.95 In Mind & Cosmos, the highly regarded [...]

Philosopher-photographer Laszlo Bencze commented recently on the film The History of the World in Two Hours: He writes, ==================================================== In terms of computer graphics, it was quite impressive. In terms of explanations of life, it was the usual: The great myth of our times presented uncritically in the vaguest of terms: Chemicals form on the [...]

The human brain does not differ in organization from the ape brain, yet is capable of so much more. So clearly, physical organization is where human uniqueness apparently does NOT lie … Recently, a Reading University research team has used statistical models to suggest that “Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might [...]

From Noel Rude, a specialist in a native American language group, on the Pagel team’s recent statistical study here, suggesting that words from human prehistory might be conserved for ten thousand years or more: Yes, language evolves—that is, language changes over time, and those changes accumulate to create completely new languages—French from Latin, for example. [...]

Gary Marcus (left), professor of psychology at New York University, who has written, among other books, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of The Human Mind, points out that there is nothing specific about our brains that explains humans’ unique intelligence—which he regards as a “modest tweak” of evolution. Obviously it isn’t a modest tweak, but philosophical [...]

I keep hearing from people who wonder why everyone now hates philosopher Thomas “What is it like to be a bat?” Nagel. Actually, if you have covered the history of life beat, as I have, for over a decade, there is no need to ask why Darwin’s tenured mediocrities, Christian or otherwise, hate him so much. [...]

I first learned to beware of bioethics when an “ethicist” proudly assured me that “ethics” was completely different from “morality.” I never got the difference (not clear with those kinds of  ideas), but I did get the idea to hide the expensive electronics, charge cards, etc., when “ethicists” were visiting. Bioethicist Heather Zeiger offers some [...]