A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Science

  • For what it’s worth

    Consider this a kind of postscript to the last two posts. My personal view is that consciousness and mind are perfectly “natural” in the sense that no supernatural intervention was necessary to “insert” them into the process by which life developed. I take it that they emerged once living organisms became sufficiently complex, even though Read more

  • Meat in a vat?

    This piece from NPR has generated some interest in the topic of in-vitro meat–that is, meat grown in a lab from a cell culture. Apparently there is a real possibility that sometime in the next decade or so we could see lab-grown meat on our supermarket shelves. On its face, this seems like a win-win Read more

  • Friday Links

    –Why Washington doesn’t care about jobs. –At the Moral Mindfield, Marilyn has more on the question of whether welfare reforms benefit animals raised for food. –Metallica’s classic album Master of Puppets turned 25(!) yesterday. This was the first real metal album I ever heard, and it’s still one of the best. –NPR’s “First Listen” is Read more

  • NASA’s climate change evidence page

    http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ A very handy summary of the evidence for climate change. Not that it will change the minds of hardened deniers. (Particularly since we all know that the crypto-Islamic/Kenyan anti-colonialist Obama administration has turned NASA into a Muslim outreach enterprise.) Read more

  • Chimps, morals, and God

    This Frans de Waal essay and the accompanying video discussion with Robert Wright, on the evolutionary roots of morality, are worth checking out. De Waal’s argument is that moral impulses exist in our non-human animal relatives–particularly our closest relatives, the primates–and that we can see morality emerging along a continuum as a completely “natural” phenomenon. Read more

  • “Self-awareness is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon”

    From Wired, a report of laboratory monkeys (rhesus macaques, to be specific) that have shown signs of self-recognition (and thus potentially self-awareness): In the lab of University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Luis Populin, five rhesus macaques seem to recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Monkeys weren’t supposed to do this. “We thought these subjects didn’t Read more

  • Coming up for air

    Thanks to everyone for their kind congratulations on the birth of our daughter. If you have kids, you don’t need me to tell you that it’s an exhilarating and exhausting experience. And if you don’t, my paltry words won’t be able to do it justice. I can’t go so far as to say we’re in Read more

  • Jonathan Balcombe on the lives of animals

    Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe has a new book called Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals and was recently interviewed on the Diane Rehm show (listen here). Not a lot of earth-shattering information in the interview if you’ve read much in this area, but it provides a nice overview. Balcombe also makes a good case for Read more

  • Genius physicist for socialized medicine

    Just sayin’. Read more

  • Cognitive ethology, the Left, faith, and dominion

    A long but worthwhile essay that to some extent recapitulates the argument made by John Gray in Straw Dogs. Gray’s contention was that the secular Left has largely jettisoned the metaphysics of Christianity but held on to its anthropocentric outlook and belief in a progressive history. Echoing Nietzsche, Gray argues that the scientific, secular outlook Read more