Sam Harris on Free Will

The religious instinct is not merely limited to belief in God and supernatural agents. And to varying degrees, even hard-core atheists tend to be religious in this sense, since they still adopt beliefs that may be religious in origin. It's a little too convenient that when one denies the existence of God, most other beliefs are not similarly rejected, but why should this be the case?If we reject God, we can't simply assume the reality of the continued...

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The Evolution of the Y-Chromosome in the Colbert Report

Though I like to try to keep up with scientific developments, and consider myself relatively literate (for a layman) in these matters, there are times when I am truly surprised at the fact that something I thought I basically understood turns out to be different and much more interesting than I previously realized.So when David Page showed up at the Colbert Report to talk about the evolution of the Y-chromosome, I was in for a fascinating and entertaining...

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The Word - Hoodies: Dressed to Kill

The unfortunate and sad story of Trayvon Martin, a Floridian teenager who was pursued and subsequently gunned down a month ago in broad daylight by what appears to be an unstable, racist vigilante, George Zimmerman, for the crime of wearing a hoodie and being armed with an iced-tea and some skittles while not belonging to the neighborhood, has rocked the nation, especially because Zimmerman, to date, has not even been arrested...As is the now regrettably...

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Questions No One Knows the Answers to

Many parents tend to grow increasingly frustrated when their children suddenly become question shotguns, going from one question to another, faster than the parents can dish out answers. Comedian Louis C K can at least turn these episodes into hilarious material for his stand-up. Things, of course, tend to turn particularly frustrating when the shotgun turns into a fully automatic machine gun full of 'why.' I wonder if the frustration...

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Peter Singer - The Ethics of What We Eat

One of the recurring themes in human history has been the blindness that those in power experience with regard to those they manage to subjugate. The question of the interests of the latter seldom breach the surface of the former's consideration.We may feel enlightened that we're way in the process of overcoming sexism, nationalism, racism and a bunch of other unjustified separations into "us" and "them," but if you just take a minute to think about...

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Jonathan Haidt - Religion, Evolution and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence

Among my favorite books of all time, Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and "The Extended Phenotype" must be way up there. When it comes to massive and repeated assaults of intellectual stimulation, these books will give you a mindgasm. Hamilton's idea, and popularized by Dawkins, that the gene is the ultimate unit of selection, is an extremely fruitful and elegant way to explain otherwise counter-intuitive biological adaptations.And yet, I don't...

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Tim Minchin - Prejudice

You may think we live in an enlightened society, that we've left ignorant racial prejudice and bigotry somewhere in the dust of the distant, barbaric past...But as Tim Minchin shows in the following absolutely hilarious and brilliant song, prejudice is still all around us. There are words that we use to hurt and demean others, particularly a word that includes "a couple of G's, an R and an E, an I and an N," and maybe it's time we come to term with...

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Brené Brown - Listening to Shame

Just a bit over a year ago, I posted an incredible TEDTalk presentation by Brené Brown on the important relationship between wholeheartedness and vulnerability. That entry was, and still is, particularly important to me personally because of certain events and circumstances in my own life that I'm still struggling to resolve.One of the things I find especially inspiring about Brown is the way her research contrasts and conflicts with her...

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The Kony Campaign Backlash

So the Kony campaign about which I reported recently has been making the news everywhere, first because of its viral popularity, and then because of questions of sincerity, possible embezzlement on the part of its executives, questions of a hoax, impracticality, sweeping generalizations of a more complex problem, the evangelical Christian fundamentalism of its spokesman, Jason Russell, and most recently a psychotic episode involving nudity and public...

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Synthetic Biology - Playing God?

Whenever new technologies arise, such as the ability to genetically engineer biological organisms, one of the classic luddite objections is that such novelty represents human hubris as we attempt to "play God" and do something "unnatural." I've never quite understood such objections, since we run the risk of "creating life" whenever we have a few too many at the local pub and we happen to find an equally hammered partner with whom to engage in all...

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Deep Ocean Mysteries and Wonders

We live in an alien planet, or at least a planet we don't know too well. Most of what we know about Earth comprises only a percentage of the 30% we find on the dry and solid surface, but as David Gallo demonstrates in this short TEDTalk, the deepest, darkest and virtually unexplored parts of the ocean are teeming with ecosystems that contain more life diversity than the rain forest. Oh, and a bunch of microbes are making a feast out of the Titan...

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The Secret You

What does it mean to be you? How is it that the physical matter making up the many neurons in your brain somehow produce your subjective, conscious experience? Are your neurons themselves conscious? While we're at it, what exactly is consciousness? Where does your sense of self come from? Do you actually have a self? Can you be made to experience your self from outside your body? Can your consciousness be transferred to an inanimate object, or to...

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12-21-2012 - Just Another Day

When your poster calendar reaches December 31st, do you freak out about the end of the world because your calendar doesn't mark any future days? That's ridiculous, you say? Well, that's exactly what's happening as we reach the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar, and people are freaking out!If the Mayans had at least gotten the shape of the planet right (or actually thought the world, and not just their calendar, would come to an end), maybe we...

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Sarah Palin Visits Saturday Night Live

Ok, the title is pretty self-explanatory, and the following video is hilarious: And for those of you who can't watch Hulu from overseas, maybe this will work:For more, check out the SNL t...

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Kony and the Invisible Kidnapped Children

This blog, this little one-man operation, is motivated by the desire to educate those curious minds who want to be exposed to awesome, fascinating ideas and learn from them, and by the belief that a single individual can make some sort of positive difference in the world, no matter how small. I think of this blog as my small contribution to a world I love and want to help improve. Today's entry is particularly apropos of that theme because your...

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Michael Shermer - The Baloney Detection Kit

In this blog we have featured previously a basic intro to logic and argumentation, a primer on the importance of critical thinking, a fun intro to informal logical fallacies, and many more relevant entries. And yet the main point cannot be emphasized enough: critical thinking is a crucial form of mental self-defense against possible manipulation and exploitation by others, and it is also the conceptual basis upon which we can figure out how to become...

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Rush Limbaugh will do anything with his mouth for some money

I seriously can't understand any legitimate reason why issues concerning women's reproductive health are tearing this country apart (unless this is just a red herring to distract us from other issues). Are we really so insecure that the notion that women should have control over their own bodies frighten us to the point of lunacy?But it's not just the misogyny, it's also the double standards: while no men complain that Viagra (which is used exclusively...

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The Fabric of the Cosmos - What Is Space?

That's probably not the first question that comes to mind for most people when they wake up in the morning, but it is definitely one that has kept some of the greatest minds of all time awake at night. What exactly is space? Is it a substance? Is it merely a relationship between objects? Whatever it is, is it static or dynamic, absolute or relative, immanent or transcendent? If there no physical objects in the universe, would empty space still exist,...

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Born Equal

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection provides a wonderful scientific explanation of biological adaptation and diversity. The theory is wonderful. The process of evolution itself is torturous, blind, indifferent, and cruel.And when you take a ruthless process, and mix it up with some extreme political and social ideology, what you get is the pseudo-scientific distortion of scientific evolution: social darwinism in its many...

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