Since I wasted time reading the NYT most e-mailed article, which was about the science of religion, I might as well share my reactions, which I conscientiously wrote up while reading, thinking the article would be worth the many pages it was printed on. Ultimately, the article fell short of expectation. Studying the evolution of religion is ( Read more... )

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7442915Read more... )

It's the 25th Aniversary of the first diagnosed AIDS case. Frontline will be showing a four hour documentary about AIDS in two parts today and tommorrow. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/ Set your TiVOs.


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as a result of a comment to my last post, "historically racist," any reader of this blog is hereby invited to slap me with a large trout if I hence use the word "race" when I mean "patterns of human biodiversity".

Why doesn't anyone want our "historically black" colleges and fraternities to become dilluted the way we want all our "historically white" institutions to become (this would be a rhetorical question)? In other words, why do we play lip-service to cultural equality, while expecting and applauding black people who assimilate, and being rather afraid ( Read more... )

I wonder how many generations back one has to go, on average, to find shared ancestry between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews? Would DNA evidence of this relatedness have any impact on the animosity between the two groups? Not likely at all ( Read more... )

Something I don't get about the whole fantasy genre ( Read more... )

revirginization anyone?

My question to you is whether if any (reasonable) practice can be called inherently patriarchal or not? Whether it's wearing hijabs, being a direct or implied subject of pornography, or getting one's hymen sewed back up, the subject a woman can experience it as a concession to a patriarchal culture, or as something that in ( Read more... )

Alright folks here's a link to an episode of This American Life. real audio about testosteroneIt's amorg the most facinating hours of radio I've ever heard. One man lost the ability to make testosterone for a while, and he recounts being in a fog of non-desire. Everything seemed equally unintersting to him. He became dispassionate. It sounded ( Read more... )