Archive for July, 2007
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Pinker and Others to Speak at Stevens
The Center for Science Writings at Stevens has lined up some great speakers for the upcoming fall semester. All the events listed below are free and open to the public.Please spread the word about them to anyone who might be interested. For more information contact me, John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings, at jhorgan@stevens.edu, 201-216-5057. I also welcome your suggestions for future speakers, especially authors
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Just How Improbable Are We?
In Rational Mysticism, I argued that both science and mystical experiences reveal our existence to be “staggeringly improbable.” “If a miracle is defined as an infinitely improbable phenomenon,” I wrote, “then our existence is a miracle, which no theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.” Needless to say, many readers disagree with this assertion, including Jon Sargent, who just emailed me the letter below:
Mr.
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
PZ Myers on Bloggingheads!
Cephalopod sex, monsters, evo devo, nature-nurture, the new atheism—these are some of the topics that I discuss with mega-blogger PZ Myers in the latest edition of “Science Saturday” on Bloggingheads.tv. PZ is a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris and author of one of the funny, informative, popular blog Pharyngula, which is subtitled “random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.” During our chat PZ says what pharyngula means and how to pronounce it. He does a great job explaining recent trends in biology, and he remains calm and reasonable in spite of my efforts to goad him into making inflammatory statements about religion.
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Saturday, July 7th, 2007
When Did the Killing Start?
How long ago did we start butchering each other? From the very beginning, the Bible tells us, and lately many scientists seem to concur. In his upcoming book The Most Dangerous Animal, the philosopher David Livingston Smith argues that murder and mayhem date back millions of years to the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees, the vicious brutes who are our closest genetic relatives. My friend the anarchist
7 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
More Memes in the Blabosphere
Been busy tossing memes into the blabosphere lately. I rant about Frank Sulloway, birth order, the Flynn effect, the female tendency to hold grudges and the tautological nature of natural selection in the latest Science Saturday with George Johnson. And I rant about psychopharmacology, behavioral genetics and the neural code on Madness Radio. Now I’m going to walk my dog in the woods and say and think nothing.
9 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan