Anti-adaptation bias

Here’s Jerry Coyne on the evolutionary roots of religion:
I like the “byproduct” hypothesis, if for no other reason than it’s almost self-evidently true. Surely every human behavior is in some sense a byproduct of genes that evolved for other reasons. And if religion, like music-making, jokes, and pornography, is an outgrowth of genes that [...]

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Avatarand weird human impulses

I’m really late to the “explaining the meaning of James Cameron’s Avatar” game–I saw it over winter break, then got absorbed in other “fun winter break things,” then got absorbed in the re-start of grad school. But here it goes: First, yes, Avatar is indeed pretty, so much so that I disagree with the people [...]

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MacIntyre on the is-ought problem

I think most philosophers nowadays take it for granted that there is a distinction between judgments about how things are and what we ought to do, and that claims of one type cannot be logically derived from nothing but statements of the other type–you’re going to need a premise in there of the form “if [...]

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Why decent philosophers use too much jargon

In general, I think analytic philosophy (as in current, Anglophone academic philosophy) has a lot going for it. It’s the only subculture in the world that really tries to cultivate the skills needed to think clearly as such, as opposed to just doing competent work in one specialty. But there are also trends in it [...]

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Marriage, morals, and the green-eyed monster

Atheist perspectives on sexual morality
Recently, I finally got around to picking up a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals, the notorious book that played a major part of the campaign to get him barred from teaching in New York. I also had brought to my attention a Richard Dawkins piece on sexual jealousy from [...]

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