From June 10 Science by Elizabeth Culatta: From the moment the announcement of a 1-meter-tall ancient human nicknamed “the hobbit” shocked the world in 2004, supporters and sceptics alike have longed for more fossils. After the first burst of discoveries, the team kept digging, at the original find site and at other sites in …
Social psychologists, Laura Niemi and Liane Young wrote a piece in the NYTimes Review section on a study they conducted on what determines the degree to which people tend to blame the victims of crimes: In a recent series of studies, we found that the critical factor lies in a particular set of moral values. …
All of a sudden the term “liberal” is off the table, and everyone is using the term “progressive.” Your only assignment in this first post is to listen carefully—more than just once— to Franklin Deleno Roosevelt’s fourth inaugural address in 1945. Keep in mind that Roosevelt was dying of congestive heart failure with his blood …
The strengthening of across-group marital-family bonds has exerted a relentless “ground-level” cohesive force that has resulted in the capacity to cohabitate in ever larger groups-of-groups—which is our species root adaptive advantage, upon which all our cognitive and cultural achievements rest.
You can quibble around the edges about his analysis (and painfully trite take on religion), but I think he is generally right just as I have been claiming in this blog: over the long haul, human history has been in the direction of greater justice accompanied by prosperity—resulting from the progressive coordination of our increasingly divided labor.
Liberty is the fruit of justice. In order to make the flower stay in bloom, it is the plant that must be tended.
In the absence of any fossil information on our cousins, the great apes, here is their story from reading their genomes.
The megaliths at Brogdar, in the Orkney Islands stand as a clarion ring straight through to very heart of who we are.
in the 21st Century, the secularist view that religion is a Darwinian side-effect, or an emotional “complex” of childlike Freudian defenses that should/will go away, has become an alarmingly dangerous abdication—nay, an abject surrendering—of the received power of the collective being that is the very heart of who we are.
Months after my birth in 1941, Roosevelt secretly met with Churchill at Argentia, Newfoundland with the storm clouds of world war ominously looming. With British and American battle ships lashed together, the sailors all sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Although that battle song would be stricken from the hymnals following the war, this was a luminous …
How E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins introduced me to the spiritual dimensions of evolution.
Reposted: The thickness of the skulls of Homo erectus is convincing evidence of violence amongst them. But what was the nature of this violence?
Studies in China reveal that the well-known Asian communal mind set compared to the more individualistic West is attributed to the interdependence necessary for farming rice compared to wheat.
Nietzsche thought that the “Will to Power” is the strongest human drive, but it is really just a form of gluttony.
How E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins introduced me to the spiritual dimensions of evolution.
Reposted: The thickness of the skulls of Homo erectus is convincing evidence of violence amongst them. But what was the nature of this violence?
An optimist takes the long view that the atrocities of history represent a painful transitional phase of history that is eventually headed towards a brighter future.
I came to an understanding that the secular progress in the history of our fallen species has been due the long evolved capacity for individuals to construct and subjugate themselves to rules of fairness in the form of secular law in ever expanding groups. Under the authority of law, political and economic competition has progressively …
Months after my birth in 1941, Roosevelt secretly met with Churchill at Argentia, Newfoundland with the storm clouds of world war ominously looming. With British and American battle ships lashed together, the sailors all sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Although that battle song would be stricken from the hymnals following the war, this was a luminous …
So, the ancient Israelis were the first to recognize that the power of God was tied to the rule of justice, and the Kings that invoke God without these rules bring nothing but devastation. However, what sets the Israelis apart from the other three axial cultures (Greece, Buddhist India, and Confucian China) is their maintenance …