Category Archives: Science without worms

One of the most enjoyable things that ever happened to me in the God business was meeting John Lucas, the philosopher who came up with one of the early arguments against AI. It is much more subtle than it’s usually … Continue reading → Continue reading →

My current profile is Dan Dennett, so I’m rereading his books, and once more filled with irritation at the idea of memes. I really don’t see how it adds anything except a specious impression of precision to what we already … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Apparently not: Oliver Sacks has a rather disappointing roundup of consciousness books in the NYRB which claims that Whatever the mechanism, the fusing of discrete visual frames or snapshots is a prerequisite for continuity, for a flowing, mobile consciousness. Such … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Here’s an odd fact: among Western women, breastfeeding does not much suppress fertility, whereas among hunter-gatherers it does. In the US,on average, women start menstruating about eight weeks after giving birth whether or not they breast feed their babies, whereas … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The BBC did not just get its metaphors wrong about Craig Venter’s sequencing of his poodle’s genome. they failed to notice that he hasn’t actually done it. According to the AP report, “The researchers achieved what is called 1.5 X … Continue reading → Continue reading →

— the Radio show, that is. I was listening this morning, as I usually don’t, and caught the news that Craig Venter’s dog has had its genome sequenced. I hope they did it properly. In any case, it was announced … Continue reading → Continue reading →

At lunch on Sunday, I found myself sitting between a doctor and the master of a Cambridge college, who were having a competitive whinge about the ways in which bureaucracy and de-professionalisation were wrecking their lives. Actually, said the Don, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

If you want to know where the debate on altruism, group seleciton, and sociobiology is going for the next decasdee, these papers would be a good place to start. Continue reading →

Nicotine enhances several cognitive and psychomotor behaviours, and nicotinic antagonists cause impairments in tasks requiring cognitive effort. If you knock out the nicotine receptors in the brain, you get the following results: “in the 2-/- mutant, the high-order spatiotemporal organisation … Continue reading → Continue reading →

David Sloan Wilson’s book Darwin’s Cathedral is a kind of follow-on to the book he wrote with Elliot Sober, defending group seleciton and the possibility of real altruism. DCis about religion considered as an agent of group selection. So he … Continue reading → Continue reading →