The psychology of religious belief
This is an interesting essay from The Edge by Daniel Gilbert about how several quirks of our psychology can lead us to explain things in terms of supernatural p...
Author: Mary
Evolutionary psychology examined
David Buller has written a book, Adapting Minds, which critically examines some of the claims of evolutionary psychology. He’s summarized three of his ana...
Deep time
I closed an earlier essay (That time of year) with a quote about the curious blend of terror and exhilaration that the contemplation of deep time can bring. On ...
Moral disengagement
I went to hear Albert Bandura give a talk this afternoon on “Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities.” Bandura holds the David Starr...
Personality, gender, and heart disease
One component of type A behavior is hostility. A recent study of more than 3,000 people showed that while the distribution of different levels of hostility was ...
Dagger of the mind
I just got back from an excellent production of Macbeth at Indiana University. When I think of Macbeth, I think of ambition, the lust for power, and violence (a...
Memorial trees
I read a kind of a peculiar story from Wired News. A company called Biopresence is working on a way to create living memorials by adding human DNA from a dead p...
That time of year
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang… Shakespeare’s sonnet compares human aging with the aging of ...
How humans relate to nature
What is the goal of conservation biology or environmental activism? (Or to put it more generally, what is our obligation toward nature?) If the goal is to prese...
How dangerous is it on this planet?
Well, it’s evidently more dangerous these days, but that’s because of us humans. This article from Live Science discusses how things that used to be...