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Meta
Tag Archives: evolutionary psychology
Machine Trumps Ghost
It is—time flies—now thirty years since the appearance of The Closing of the American Mind, an anniversary noted by Alexander Riley in The American Conservative. The whole thing is well worth reading, but this passage caught my attention: Some elements … Continue reading
Posted in philosophy
Tagged Charles Darwin, evolutionary psychology
Comments Off on Machine Trumps Ghost
How I learned to love moral relativism & cultural chauvinism
Over at Crunchy Con Rod Dreher points me to a new book, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, which, in Dreher’s words “attempts to defend St. Paul against his modernist critics (e.g. those … Continue reading
Social science & engineering
A recent Bloggingheads.tv featured two philosophers, and was titled “Explaining and Appraising Moral Intuition”. A considerable proportion of the discussion involved the utility of cognitive and evolutionary psychology in probing the reflexive roots of our moral intuitions, and how that … Continue reading
Brooks bashes the “new atheists”
David Brooks argues that the view that moral decision-making results from an intuitive, pre-rational engagement with the world, rather than from logical deduction from a set of moral principles, is a challenge to “the new atheists, who see themselves involved … Continue reading
Evolution & morality
The American Scene points me to two Will Wilkinson posts where he attempts to move beyond vulgar evolutionary psychology in adducing proper morality. I learn toward the sentiment. The naturalistic fallacy is less fallacious when one conceptualizes human moral intuitions … Continue reading
The Origins of Morality?
While no-one who has read Demonic Males: Apes and The Origins of Human Violence can view chimpanzee society as a model of entirely good order, the research described by the Daily Telegraph below (which builds on earlier work showing pretty … Continue reading
The many faces of human nature
Ivan Kenneally and Larry Arnhart continue their dialogue over Darwinian Conservatism. Ivan says: …In the spirit of a “comprehensive science” as described by Leo Strauss, Arnhart recommends a more monistic approach that captures not only our natural inclinations but those … Continue reading
Posted in science
Tagged Darwinian conservatism, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, human nature, sociobiology, taboos
14 Comments
Your genes on cuisine
A year ago there was a paper on the effect of diet on enzyme production, Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation. That human evolution skeptic, P. Z. Myers, has just noticed the paper, and says: This … Continue reading
Posted in culture, science
Tagged culture, evolutionary psychology, genetics, human evolution
2 Comments
The tasty drug
Sugar Can Be Addictive: Animal Studies Show Sugar Dependence: A Princeton University scientist will present new evidence today demonstrating that sugar can be an addictive substance, wielding its power over the brains of lab animals in a manner similar to … Continue reading
Sexuality and human nature
A friend emailed me in response to my post below: Interesting example with homosexuality, both because the choice of sexual behavior, pretty much the sort of thing that one would expect the strongest biological constraints on, was apparently needed to … Continue reading