Category Archives: science

Diversity at the NIH

Heather: Good post on the Columbia "diversity" rackets. On the general issue of racially-proportionate representation in this and that, I’ve done a couple of rounds with the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research at their website. The topic is the recent … Continue reading

Posted in Odds & Ends, politics, science | 2 Comments

Your Ancestors Were Zombies

At a gathering the other day I mentioned Julian Jaynes, who caused a stir back in the 1970s with a very odd book about religion and human consciousness. Roger Kimball was present.  He later forwarded to me an essay on … Continue reading

Posted in philosophy, Religion, science | 2 Comments

Templeton Prize

[Cross-posted from The Corner at NRO] Astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees, who has a walk-on part in We Are Doomed (and who is properly written of as “Lord Rees,” though nobody seems to bother any more) has been awarded the Templeton … Continue reading

Posted in Religion, science | 14 Comments

Bradlaugh Savaged by Dead Sheep

Here’s a cross-posting from The Corner at National Review Online. Been doing a few rounds with the George W. Bush fans, most recently with one Peter Wehner, who worked in Bush’s Department Of Alleviating All Suffering Everywhere And Hang The … Continue reading

Posted in politics, science | 8 Comments

DeMint’s Choice (2)

From O’Reilly (Nov 16 2007): O’DONNELL: They are — they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they’re already into this … Continue reading

Posted in science | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Catholic Or Protestant?

Well, I guess it had to happen. After fruit flies and flatworms, jellyfish and sea cucumbers, mice and sheep, genetic science has now advanced to the point where we can sequence the genome of an Irishman. Here, choosing a DNA … Continue reading

Posted in culture, science | 5 Comments

Life Goes On

Blind faith in progress is like most faith a mistake. Nevertheless, on the whole this  (via the Economist) seems to be good news:     Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence … Continue reading

Posted in science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The wives of Cain

Over at Discover I’ve been talking a lot about the new Neandertal admixture paper. The short of it is that it looks like most of the world’s population has admixture from Neandertals on the interval 0-5% (though some scholars, such … Continue reading

Posted in science | Tagged | 11 Comments

Magnets & Morality

I’m not entirely sure how this fits into Derb’s discussion below (if at all), but here, FWIW, is this: CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT neuroscientists have shown they can influence people’s moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region — a … Continue reading

Posted in science | Tagged | 3 Comments

It must come back into balance…eventually

Conservatives in Texas won a curriculum change battle. But another event also occurred which was of note: The Religious Right suffered a surprise setback in Texas when incumbent Don McLeroy—a creationist and critic of church-state separation—narrowly lost his re-election bid … Continue reading

Posted in science | Tagged , , | 6 Comments