The love of unseen things that do not die
Late Thursday night, five singers, students at IU’s Jacobs School of Music, were killed when their plane crashed coming into Bloomington’s airport. ...
Author: Mary
Turning off the self
When I read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith recently, I was struck by some of the things he said about meditation and consciousness, like the following: ...
Explaining female orgasm: An interview with Elisabeth Lloyd
In The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd (Arnold and Maxine Tanis Chair of History and Philosophy of Science and Prof...
Near-death experiences and dreams
A recent study of people who had near-death experiences (NDEs) found that those people were more likely to have had incidents where dreaming and wakefulness int...
Book review: The End of Faith
This weekend I finished The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris. Most of the book is about the dangers that uncritical faith...
Cosmic rays and life on Earth
The degree of biodiversity on Earth goes through cyclic decreases about every 62 million years; this has been going on for at least 542 million years. Recent re...
Essential luxuries: Humans and chocolate
When I think of ways that we deal with being thinking meat, I think of things like music or books or art, or love. But psychoactive plant-derived substances als...
Daniel Dennett at IU
Daniel Dennett is visiting Indiana University this week; I’ve heard him give two talks so far, and there’s one more on Thursday. Dennett is a philos...
Separation of science and religion
This essay from the New York Times by William Broad makes a case (in my opinion a weak one) for why science and religion need not struggle against each other; t...
Risk factors for depression
A long-term study of 127 people has yielded some insight into the genetic and situational factors that contribute to depression. Researchers analyzed the partic...