Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley (HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95) This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that he wants to shore up genetic determinism as the key factor in understanding human nature and individual Read More ›
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Ageby Bill McKibben Times, 255 pp.,$25 PEOPLE AREN’T SMART ENOUGH, strong enough, pretty enough, healthy enough, talented enough, or agile enough the way we are. Worse yet, our miserable lives are over far too soon. The human condition stinks, and then we die. That seems to be the vague despair that drives the partisans Read More ›
Since the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s, evolutionary biology has become a growth industry. This growth has resulted in the demand for more flexible methods of establishing evolutionary biology’s grandiose claims than the laborious, difficult, pedantic, and “rigorous” methods favored throughout the rest of the sciences. This demand has been met by what is now a well-developed branch of evolutionary Read More ›
MARIETTA, GA — Amid the controversy over the Cobb Board of Educations proposed policy concerning evolution, a group of scientists and professors have come forward to say that not all academics are pro-Darwinism. In an open letter sent Friday to members of the Cobb school board, a professor of medicine at Emory University said he supports the boards efforts Read More ›
Original article A new primer on transportation titled “How Do We Get There From Here,” co-authored by Bruce Agnew and Bruce Chapman of Seattle’s Discovery Institute, has arrived, as does spring with more daylight hours, to shed some light on the transportation morass. This new report from the institute’s Cascadia Project is ambitious enough to tackle all the transportation dilemmas Read More ›
In recent years, scientists have mixed the DNA of a jellyfish with that of a monkey, creating a “transgenic” animal that glows in the dark. (“Transgenic” means possessing the genes of more than one type of organism.) Scientists have also inserted spider DNA into the genes of goats, creating ewes that produce milk containing spider-web silk. The goal of the Read More ›
Please see the article at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14581 Thanks!
Original article Proposed Canadian legislation to relax marijuana laws could lead U.S. authorities to increase border scrutiny this summer, raising concerns over increasing congestion at a time when holiday traffic may be rebounding from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent security threats. The jury seems mixed on the potential impact from the proposed looser Canadian regulations, given the intense Read More ›
SOMETHING DISTURBING is happening in the Florida elections this fall. No, not the chance that Janet Reno will be the Democratic candidate for governor. A state initiative has qualified for the ballot letting voters decide whether to grant constitutional rights to pregnant pigs. On the surface, the issue is one of animal husbandry. In the interest of industrial efficiency, and Read More ›