The NYT just published an article (”Scandanavian Nonbelievers, Which Is Not to Say Atheists”) describing new research examining religious attitudes in Sweden and Denmark.   Most of the people interviewed had been baptized and don’t consider themselves to be “atheists.”...

Over the past three years of writing for DI,  I have discussed evolution with many creationists who have posted comments at this site.  These exchanges have been good for me.  They have forced me to think harder about exactly what it is that I understand about evolution and what evidence supports...

I’ve been reading more of Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis , including Chapter 9, titled “Divinity With or Without God.” Haidt’s travels through India led him to conclude that divinity and disgust were located on the same axis. As evidence of this, consider tha...

There’s no gender socialization in monkeys, right?   Then why are the boy monkeys (vervets and rhesus) preferring “boy” toys to “girl” toys?   The two sets of experiments have been reported by Psychology Today : In 2002, Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M Univer...

Today I read a 2005 Scientific American article examining why so many innocent people confess to committing crimes. The pages of legal history reveal many tragic miscarriages of justice involving innocent men and women who were prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to prison or to death. O...

It seems to me that people who are obese seem to spend lots of time around with other people who are obese.  Smokers tend to pal around with other smokers.  This raises an important question: Do friends cause each other to pick up bad habits?  Not that I’m claiming it to be intentional, but do ...

In the Washington Post, Bob Woodward has written an excellent summary of the ten lessons we have hopefully learned from the Bush Presidency.    The article is titled “10 Take Aways From the Bush Years.� Here are the titles to these ten lessons, which Woodward carefully illustrates throughout ...

How does pseudo-science “beat” science?  I’m still thinking this through, but here is where I am at the moment.  Here are three steps often employed by pseudo-scientists: Step I: Claim that honest work done by careful scientists is not credible without having any appreciation of ...

We have all been through one cycle after another of debate with someone who insists that science is a religion. This is a tiresome argument on one level because it is one with all sorts of things that fall under the category of “I know it when I see it.”  But on another level, it’...

Richard Dawkins once wrote a letter to his ten-year old daughter, explaining the difference between belief based on evidence versus authority.   This letter addresses the appropriateness of extrapolating from evidence in making solid scientific conclusions.   The title of this article from a boo...