Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…… Read the rest

Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual. … Read the rest

‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’… Read the rest

‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ – yes, they always are, that’s the problem.… Read the rest

‘I don’t need a Hell to fear to be ethical, or a paradise to reward me for my good.’… Read the rest

‘He was very easily irritated by anything bogus, anything facile or hypocritical.’… Read the rest

Why did it take the US Senate forty years to ratify the UN Genocide Convention?… Read the rest

Sally Satel looks at the way we construct narratives about our symptoms.… Read the rest

‘A Russian, an Italian, could not justify beating his wife to death by referring to the customs of dear old Moscow or Calabria’… Read the rest

The Bush administration wants scientists it can trust.… Read the rest

Why do people believe or disbelieve?… Read the rest

Bernard Ortiz De Montellano on gibberish dressed up as education.… Read the rest

Dawkins on fun and games.… Read the rest

The shift from logic to history, and the perennial appeal of irrationalist programs.… Read the rest

The way to ‘reject the insipid relativism of the tabula rasa without denying or ignoring the freedom and variability of individual human beings and their cultures.’… Read the rest

Paul Krugman draws an interesting parallel with Stephen Jay Gould.… Read the rest

Conference brought Armenian
and Turkish scholars together for the first time to discuss the 1915 genocide.… Read the rest

TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

(1) Check out that tree. Isn’t it pretty?
(2) Therefore, God exists.… Read the rest

‘Whenever you’re told that you shouldn’t look into something, for some people, that is a very clear directive that you ought to keep looking.’… Read the rest

Meera Nanda had good reasons to fight against patriarchal, upper-caste Hindu traditions that would have suppressed all she valued. Science was not ‘elitist’ or Western but a way of life and a philosophy for social action.… Read the rest