Is peace or war the natural state of man? Do men fight primarily over material possessions or over women? For decades anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon studied the Yanomamö, a remote tribe in South America, learning about their almost-constant warfare. His findings put him in open conflict with academic anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association. The latter […]
Ideological wars in anthropology Read More »
What distinguishes science from pseudo-science?Why is confirmation bias so hard to overcome?Why were many great scientists in history were labeled heretics?And why have so many crank theories been empowered and killed millions of people? The next time I teach philosophy of science, this “Scientific Heresy” talk by Matt Ridley will be on the reading list.
Ridley on scientific heresies, past and present Read More »
Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery is fascinating but not for the squeamish. The key figure is John Hunter, an 18th-century anatomist and revolutionary surgeon of volatile temperament, with a hunger for knowledge that drove him to rob thousands of graves, record the tastes of corpses’ bodily
“The greatest obstacle to discovery,” argues Barry Marshall, “is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.” Marshall is the co-discoverer of Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers, for which he won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine. But his hypothesis initially met with great resistance from the medical establishment, which was strongly committed
Barry Marshall, ulcers, and resistance to discovery Read More »
I did not know this about Priestley’s significance to two of the great American founding fathers: “In the 165 letters that passed between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the name Benjamin Franklin is mentioned five times, George Washington three times, Alexander Hamilton twice — and Joseph Priestley, a foreign immigrant, is cited no fewer than
Joseph Priestley’s significance Read More »
Hardin is one of the most widely-read twentieth-century intellectuals, most known for his two pieces “The Tragedy of the Commons” and “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” The two are intimately related, as one diagnoses a fundamental problem with resources and the other draws policy conclusions. A key quotation, in which Hardin states
Garrett Hardin bemoaning India’s 600 million population in 1974 Read More »
A striking quotation from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic
Kuhn on the Greeks and scientific culture Read More »
One of my all-time favorite passages from Aristotle is in his Parts of Animals (Book 1, Chapter 5).
The scientific mind, according to Aristotle Read More »