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POPSWelcome To Documentary Heaven, Feed Your Brain Documentary Heaven was set up early July 2009 to provide the public with a vast collection of documentaries spanning across every genre out there. We intend on continuously updating the site on a daily basis to bring you nothing but the very best. The Idea Behind This Site: We understand that the internet can be a very interesting place filled with much to do, but have you ever had one of those days where there seems to be absolutely nothing amongst that vast collection of websites out there that could possibly interest you? Well now there is documentaryheaven.com. So whenever your bored, just relaxing or simply in the mood to watch something interesting, why not pop onto our site and find a documentary that takes your interest! There is no hidden agenda here, you see we simply just want to freely entertain the masses!!
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POPSRomantic Science The old artificial polarities of science and spirit persist. Unnecessarily. 'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science', Richard Holmes http://www.slate.com/id/2222360/pagenum/all
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POPSEvo Psych "Like other critics, he has no doubt that evolution shaped the human brain. How could it be otherwise, when evolution has shaped every other human organ? But evo psych's claims that human behavior is constrained by mental modules that calcified in the Stone Age make sense "only if the environmental challenges remain static enough to sculpt an instinct over evolutionary time," Pigliucci points out. If the environment, including the social environment, is instead dynamic rather than static—which all evidence suggests—then the only kind of mind that makes humans evolutionarily fit is one that is flexible and responsive, able to figure out a way to make trade-offs, survive, thrive and reproduce in whatever social and physical environment it finds itself in"
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POPS"Men are hard-wired to suspect infidelity" continues (full at source): According to Goetz and Causey, whose poll of 60 men and 89 women found the former prone to suspicions of infidelity, assuming the worst could be especially useful to men. Infidelity poses certain risks — such as contracting sexually transmitted diseases — to both sexes, but the burdens of cuckoldry are greatest to men. Though an unfaithful woman still gives birth to her own child, her unwitting partner devotes time and energy to raising a rival’s offspring. “The sum of these costs provided selection pressure for the evolution of an arsenal of anti-cuckoldry tactics in men,” write Goetz and Causey, who argue that heightened suspicion is one of these tactics.
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POPSThe evolutionary roots of morality What makes some of us saints and some of us sinners? Newsweek has an article on human good and evil that trots out the usual Milgram-fuelled moral pondering before morphing into a fascinating piece on the psychology of compassion
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POPSPredisposition to believe in creationism?
Creationist tendency "What her work suggests is that the creationist side has a huge leg up early on because it fits our natural tendencies," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University. "It has implications for why most people on earth are creationists, I think." For this reason, it's not surprising that non-religious, college-educated adults fall back on purpose-seeking explanations. Many people have little understanding of evolution and instead view it as a cultural belief, thinking: "'I'm a good secular liberal, I'm no yokel, I believe in Darwin,'" Bloom says. He also wonders if extensive science education could blunt the tendency to fall back on teleological explanations. "It might turn out that if you put Richard Dawkins or Einstein or whomever , no matter how expert or educated they are, they might still make these mistakes." Indeed, Kelemen is running similar experiments on volunteers with stronger science backgrounds to see if they, too, fall ba
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POPSAcademic Earth - Free Lecture Videos From Top Scholars With so much of this going on (iTunes Store has iTunes U as well, and there must be others) why even bother going to a university for much of a degree? Shouldn't there be a reduced tuition for those who can pass a competency exam based on self-paced online study? Sort of an Internet University BA?
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POPSEvoPsych Bingo card For anyone who's ever rolled their eyes while listening to someone justify discriminatory practices on the grounds that "this is the way we evolved!" :rolleyes:
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POPSMind, body and goal: the embodied cognition revolution "In one particularly striking study, Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it. They suggest that we perceive the environment in terms of our intentions and abilities to act within it".
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POPSE.O. Wilson Returns to the Hive With Superorganism Tome Group evolution meant that altruism and self-sacrifice — i.e., morality — might be as much a part of our genetic heritage as hair and eye color.Many prominent biologists, led by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, said no, there was no such thing as a superorganism: Evolution worked on the genes of self-serving individuals only, not groups.
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POPSNever Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence. Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
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POPSWhy Your Boss Is White, Middle-class And A Show-off A very nice study! Pointing just to the point of how things have not changed since men appeared. The more we will not attend to it, individually and otherwise, the more the gaps in relation to the advancement in technology and philosophy... will widen.
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POPSDan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes -- concepts that are literally alive. Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are.
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POPSDan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy? Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned. Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly
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POPS Why We Can't Imagine Death? "This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start."
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POPS"People have found other ways to be cooperative – without God." The study also points out that in today's world religion has no monopoly on kind and generous behaviour. In many findings, non-believers acted as prosocially as believers. The last several hundred years has seen the rise of non-religious institutional mechanisms that include effective policing, courts and social surveillance. Very interesting read, on the social function of god. maybe we can say that JC, Moses and the like are history social workers :)
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POPSThe Moral Instinct "the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
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