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POPSIs Language a Window into Human Nature? the way it parses the world around us, the way it uses shortcuts and assumptions would have served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well, but it is less than perfect for dealing with some of the problems we face in the 21st Century.
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POPSWhy we curse-What the @#$%? In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises an eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be titillated by a character in a movie saying "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."... IN DEPTH ANALYSIS AT http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071008&s=pinker100807
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POPSThe Danger of Cognitive Blinkers From Steven Pinker's preface to What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable . In this regard, it's disconcerting to see the two institutions that ought to have the greatest stake in ascertaining the truth — academia and government — often blinkered by morally tinged ideologies.
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POPSStunning Photo of Saturn Backlit By the Sun With our sun behind it, Saturn carves out a majestic silhouette against the vastness of space. And the tiny speck peeking through the rings? That's us! Click on images for full-size. (Transmitted by the Cassini probe looking back at the Earth from a billion-mile-out vantage point. Background behind the image's creation.)
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POPSReligion and war will die out, scientists predict Daniel Dennett (okay, not a scientist, but still) and others predict that as people's access to information becomes more democratic and widespread, the appeal of traditional religions and fundamentalisms will evaporate. These folks obviously know nothing about religions or how they work...
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POPSAre we still evolving? recommended reading. (via TheFastTurtle ) This is one reason why Lahn's discovery of recent brain evolution has created such a stir. Lahn agrees with Wills that the defining feature of human evolution is that our minds have shaped our environment, which in turn has led to evolutionary changes in the way we think, and he is convinced it is continuing. Wills goes further, arguing that in the modern world nobody can do everything, so the advantage lies in being good at something that not many others can do well. "My prediction is that we are not simply getting smarter, we are selecting for more variability in our behaviours," he says. If he's right, that means our gene boat is getting bigger.
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POPSThe Future of Science - 6 Presentations (video) 6 (seemingly) very interesting talks (videotaped, freely available). by Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Marc Hauser, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Lisa Randall. On Evolution, Religion, Neurology & the Brain, Humanity, Morality etc... -- Edit: -The Dennett talk is about the same as he did at TedTalks , but somewhat longer (42m in stead of 25m).
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POPSThe survival value of music And Pinker isn't the only skeptic. Boston Pops maestro Keith Lockhart conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra while he, a few musicians, and a portion of the audience were wired with monitors that tracked their heart rate, muscle tension, respiration, and other bodily signals of emotion. Yet though Lockhart was happy to make himself Levitin's guinea pig, he confesses to be ultimately uninterested in the origins of music. "It's enough for me to know that music does have a distinct emotional reaction in almost everybody that no other art form can boast of," he says. "I've never particularly wanted to know why that happens."
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