Category Archives: Evolution

L&Cs: Wars on Education

Posted on Tuesday 23 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Controversies like the current one over the teaching of “critical race theory” have, of course, happened before.

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Sam Harris, LYING (2013)

Posted on Friday 5 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Summary and comments about this 2011 essay and 2013 book. With an aside about my belief in Santa Claus.

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L&Cs: Christakis on COVID and Altruism

Posted on Saturday 23 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

A Big Picture item: what does our COVID response say about humanity’s capacity for altruism?

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Links and Comments: The Game of Life; Authoritarianism; Conservatives and the Feudal System

Posted on Saturday 2 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT, from last week’s Tuesday Science section: The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life. (Print title: “Life, In All Its Glory” with subtitle “Fifty year on, a game still offers lessons about simplicity, complexity and uncertain.”) The article … Continue reading →

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The Afterlives, Part 2

Posted on Sunday 8 November 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I read a striking insight somewhere recently, but don’t remember where it was or who said it. The insight flips inside out the standard belief (at least among Christian faiths) that living a good life gets you into heaven, so … Continue reading →

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Notes for the Book: Magical Thinking, Cognitive Dissonance, Group-Thinking

Posted on Wednesday 30 September 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Extending thoughts from previous posts about the future of enlightenment and similar matters. About group-thinking and how people get along in their lives just fine without understanding how the world actually works (as well-established by physics, chemistry, biology including evolution, … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Loners, Law and Religion, Our Anti-Science Leaders, the Roots of Science Denial

Posted on Saturday 23 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Atlantic: How Loners Are an Evolutionary Insurance Policy This echoes my comments about how diversity is needed in the human race because different attitudes and skills may be needed in situations that require different ways to survive. Though the article … Continue reading →

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Yuval Noah Harari, HOMO DEUS: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017; 2015 in Israel)

Posted on Friday 7 February 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This is, in effect, a sequel to SAPIENS. Top level summary: It opens with a long prologue: now that humanity has largely overcome famine, plague, and war, what next? Three possibilities: immortality, happiness, divinity. However these are predictions; this book … Continue reading →

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Yuval Noah Harari, SAPIENS: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)

Posted on Sunday 2 February 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Yuval Noah Harari, SAPIENS: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) This is a history of the human species in the context of “Big History” – the first page sketches the history of the entire universe as a backdrop – and … Continue reading →

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Peter Watts essay: “Understanding Sarah Palin, or, God Is In the Wattles”: Summary and Comments

Posted on Saturday 21 December 2019 by Mark R. Kelly

From the book Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays (Tachyon, November 2019), a selection of posts from the blog of Peter Watts, which has been running since 2007. Watts is the noted author of high … Continue reading →

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