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By Benedict Carey 12/6/2010, The New York Times The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes...
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by David Munger from Seed Magazine "Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly , this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated...
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by Elizabeth Landau for CNN "Henry Molaison, known as H.M. in scientific literature, was perhaps the most famous patient in all of brain science in the 20th century. "My daddy's family came from the South and moved North, they came from Thibodaux Louisiana, and moved north," Molaison...
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by Alison Gopnik, New York Times Book Review "At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the...
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review by Michael Bérubé from American Scientist "Let me explain a thing or two about humanists like me. There are legions of us who reach for our guns when we hear the word genome. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the history of eugenics, and we flinch whenever someone attempts an “evolutionary...
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The John Templeton Foundation organizes a series of conversations among leading scientists, scholars, and public figures about the "Big Questions." The current question under consideration is: Does evolution explain human nature? Follow this link to view: A video from the Templeton/ Discover...
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by David Sloan Wilson The idea that evolution explains selfishness well and altruism poorly is starting to stink. Can we please bury it now? The conflict between altruism and selfishness, good and evil, is an eternal theme in religion and literature. It also threatens to be an eternal controversy in...
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Jamais Cascio writes for The Atlantic on evolving human intelligence. "Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make...
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by Natalie Angier in NYT "In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby...
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“Wisdom is the freedom and the ability to make the kinds of choices that move our life forward and benefit the planet.” Wisdom is actually a “How” we make our best choices and not a “what we choose or “why we choose it.” Wisdom is the antidote for the choices that keep us mired in a world of negative...
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By Stanley H. Ambrose The evolution of modern human behavior was undoubtedly accompanied by neurological changes that enhanced capacities for innovation in technology, language, and social organization associated with working memory. Constructive memory integrates components of working memory in the...
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By April Nowell Hominin evolution is the result of complex interactions of biology and behavior within particular physical, social, and cultural environments. While evolution takes place at the species level, species are made up of individuals engaging in a social world. Extensive research into topics...
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by Marco A. Janssen, Robert Holahan, Allen Lee, and Elinor Ostrom Governance of social-ecological systems is a major policy problem of the contemporary era. Field studies of fisheries, forests, and pastoral and water resources have identified many variables that influence the outcomes of governance efforts...
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By Jayna L. Ditty and Philip A. Rolnick Since 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species , biology has increasingly challenged comfortable theological assumptions. Being convinced, however, that evolutionary biology and theology have in common the desire to know truth, we have...
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Ryan T. McKay, Daniel C. Dennett From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this...
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George Ainslie The radical evolutionary step that divides human decision-making from that of nonhumans is the ability to excite the reward process for its own sake, in imagination. Combined with hyperbolic over-valuation of the present, this ability is a potential threat to both the individual's...
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By Yukiko Uchida, Sarah S. M. Townsend, Hazel Rose Markus, and Hilary B. Bergsieker Four studies using open-ended and experimental methods test the hypothesis that in Japanese contexts, emotions are understood as between people, whereas in American contexts, emotions are understood as primarily within...
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by Marshall Abrams Abstract: It’s recently been argued that biological fitness can’t change over the course of an organism’s life as a result of organisms’ behaviors. However, some characterizations of biological function and biological altruism tacitly or explicitly assume that an effect of a trait...
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By M. FRANZ & C. L. NUNN "Culture is widely thought to be beneficial when social learning is less costly than individual learning and thus may explain the enormous ecological success of humans. Rogers (1988. Does biology constrain culture. Am. Anthropol. 90: 819–831) contradicted this common...