Personality and political views
You may remember hearing about work that looked at different aspects of morality and found that people who are politically liberal emphasize certain of these as...
Author: Mary
Was civilization a bad idea?
There are those who say that the development of agriculture was a bad idea. It’s about 12,000 years too late to do anything about it, and as I sit here in...
The birth of science
On May 28, 585 BC, a total eclipse of the sun was visible from the Ionian island of Miletus. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that Thales of Miletus p...
Women, science, and life
Today’s post is a bit outside the normal orbit of Thinking Meat, but it touches on a couple of themes that are dear to my heart: the immense value of huma...
Being good and being religious
An ad appeared recently on Bloomington buses that said, “You can be good without god.” It seemed like a fairly obvious statement to me, but it took ...
Civilization founded on beer?
These days I’ve been experimenting with baking bread using various sourdough cultures. Furthermore, my interest in wine has certainly deepened over the la...
Links between musical scales and speech
Music is surprisingly mysterious, for something so ubiquitous. For example, it’s not really clear why we generally associate major keys with happy moods a...
Two-sided genetic coin
A new article in The Atlantic has rocked my world in a way that articles anywhere seldom do. David Dobbs explains a new hypothesis regarding genes, environment,...
Eco on lists
Der Spiegel has interviewed Umberto Eco about an exhibit he is curating at the Louvre. The exhibit focuses on the importance of lists to culture and art. It may...
Out of Africa through a wet Sahara
When our long-ago ancestors left east Africa and spread to Europe, how did they get across the currently forbidding landscape of the Sahara? A recent analysis o...