This recent open access paper in Clinical and Translational Medicine caught my attention primarily because it invokes the concept of stigmergy. It’s unusual, though not surprising, that the idea is now finding some currency in medicine. Eukaryotic cells have an entire panoply of communicative and cooperative mechanisms. Since the individual cellular participants can have independent goals in…
Nicely balanced review of Dennett and Scruton’s latest books. We need both approaches. See article in Standpoint. ADAM ZEMAN Roger ScrutonconsciousnessDaniel Dennettevolutionary biologyEvolutionary PsychologyHuman natureMaterialismneural correlatesNeurophilosophyneurosciencePhilosophy of mindreductionism
My chum David Livingstone Smith’s long awaited edited collection of essays by a top-notch lineup is now available. To get a better sense of the scope of the project check out the book’s homepage as well as David’s other writings here. For the past thirty years I been of the view that though Hume did not have…
Jerry Coyne’s latest on his blog Why Evolution is True. To claim that there are no evolutionary differences in behavior and psychology between men and women is fatuous. anti-sciencecultural evolutionevolutionary biologyEvolutionary Psychologyideologuesideologyjerry coyneregressive left
Robert Wright in The New York Times on the late great William Hamilton “I’m also quite open to the view that there is some kind of ultimate good which is of a religious nature — that we just have to look beyond what the evolutionary theory tells us and accept promptings of what ultimate good is, coming…
Ah yes, a priesthood that is not at all interested in science and the pursuit of TRUTH. While it’s just tiresome to hear parents gushing about their novitiate children building an “academic” career (i.e. reheated cultural Marxism, activism dressed as inquiry, deploying the usual buzz words of identity and power), what is most disconcerting are their philosophical enablers, not just…
New book from Alva Noë. Our lives are structured by organized activities, in the large, in the small. Our lives are one big complex nesting of organized activities at different levels and scales. Talking, walking, eating, perceiving, driving. We are always captured by structures of organization. This is our natural, indeed our biological, condition. It is…
Evan Thompson reviews two of the most controversial books of recent years: What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel. Cognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceconsciousnessEvan Thompsonevolutionary biologyExplanationJerry FodorPhilosophy of mindsciencethomas nagel
manwithoutqualities 