There’s lots to think about in the write up on recent studies into the relation between neural wiring and the concept religion at the New Scientist. A really simplified version would be that the brain has a couple of built in biases that make the concept of religion arise almost naturally. One...

The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America By Laurie Lebo The New Press 238 Pages $ 24.95 In late 2005 national media eagerly flocked to the heretofore peaceful town of Dover, PA in what many journalists labeled a modern day Scopes Monkey Trial, officially known ...

Did you see the ACLU press release today about how the American terrorist watch list now has more than one million people on it? “America’s new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, o...

In what is no doubt yet another amazing coincidence to those who don't accept evolutionary biology, a fish with four, well formed leg-like paddles turns up in the fossil record: The aquatic creature, which lived during the late Devonian period about 365 million years ago, represented an evolutionary...

I knew it all along, but it’s nice to have some science to back it up Spending on Happiness — HBS Working Knowledge Can money buy you happiness? Yes—so long as you spend the money on someone else. According to new research, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased wel...

There's an excellent article in today's NY Times Magazine, The Moral Instinct, in which Steven Pinker summarizes recent neuroscience research on the human moral sense.  This bears directly on how we think about justice and morality in cyberspace. He covers the enormous progress (at least since ...

Genes and memes are selfish replicators, and the very convoluted nature of it all is highlighted nicely by the example of how the "green things" were assimilated. I don't mean "little green men", I mean how plants and algae got their chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are the tiny, membr...