Both the European Union and the U.S. government have proved themselves to be incompetent to mint coins. The Economist Magazine just reported that “1- and 2-euro coins, when clutched in sweaty hands, release 300 times more nickel than is allowed by EU guidelines.” According to The Washington Times: “Three years after its splashy introduction by the U.S. Mint, the Sacawagea Read More ›
Praising the adoption Thursday night of a policy encouraging the “discussion of disputed views” about evolution in Cobb County, Georgia schools, Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman called the decision “a victory for academic freedom and good science education” and faulted critics of the policy for “trying to mischaracterize the controversy as a battle over religion.” “The policy adopted by the Read More ›
There are a few ongoing controversies about the Patriot Act, the batch of laws passed to combat terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Most serious is the charge that anti-terror laws are being misapplied to advance agendas that have nothing to do with preventing another attack on America. If so, this is a serious problem. Specifically, civil-liberties Read More ›
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!