Cosmically Connected Primates

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”                 – Carl Sagan, Contact … Three different people have shared the inspirational video below with me in the past two days, and I thought it deserved to be disseminated as widely as possible. It’s the response of [...]

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Further Strides toward Reconciliation

One of the major themes of this blog has been reconciliation and cooperation under difficult circumstances. Below are three pertinent, hopeful stories on reconciliation that I’ve collected over the last few months. … 1. Colombia to Spend $30 B to Compensate War Victims (AlertNet; Jan 24, 2012) … Reparations to victims of Colombia’s long, bloody armed conflict [...]

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Roundup (Jan 10, 2012)

I generally don’t do roundups, but below are a few things I thought worth sharing. If “a scholar is just a library’s way of making another library,” as Daniel Dennett put it, then this is what I’ve checked out lately. … #1. Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology has begun a new series on anthropology and the [...]

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Conduct Your Triumph as a Funeral

With the news of Osama bin Laden fresh, I’m reminded of a passage (#31) from the Tao Te Ching on humility and military victory: …

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Demography and the Possible

Living in New England, we have older cemeteries than most other areas of the country (though Eastern hemisphere readers might scoff at what Americans consider ‘old’). I frequently walk with my sons and nephew through a cemetery near my home, as it is a tranquil place away from traffic, where we can go through the [...]

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Reconciliation, Biology, and the Second Indochina War

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” …………………………………………………………………………– Mohandas K. Gandhi … On my desk sits a spoon I bought in a restaurant in northern Laos. It’s lightweight, bigger than a tablespoon, and full of tiny dents that some unknown metalsmith hammered into it. The owner was bemused that in [...]

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Evolutionary Aesthetics

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ – John Keats … In 2004, Kevin Kniffin (a former classmate of mine at Binghamton) and David Sloan Wilson, published an article in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior revealing their results from three different studies [...]

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Choice, Obesity & the Irrational Ape (Homo insensatus)

“What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.” ……………………………………………………………………………………. – Albert Einstein … Jonah Lehrer has written another great piece about our irrationality in decision making, and our emotional responses to avoiding loss. He writes: [...]

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The Sin of Certainty

Lane Wallace wrote a recent article in The Atlantic about bias in journalism, and how it influences the questions that one asks. As journalists are human beings, I think we can reasonably assume that they, like everyone else, have biases. What resonated with me was Wallace’s use of the phrase ‘the sin of certainty,’ coined [...]

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