My commuting reading for the last few weeks has been Chris C. Mooney's The Republican War on Science. I'm predisposed to believe Mooney's premise to be true: that the Bush administration in particular, and Republican politicians in general, have recently developed a historically-unprecedented hostility to science, especially science that threatens ( Read more... )

People are sometimes horribly bad at reasoning about probabilities. cakmpls has just written about this, focusing on the issue of perceived risk. Her main example: women are ten times more likely to die of heart disease than breast cancer, and yet they consistently report being more frightened of the latter. She has several good theories about why this ( Read more... )

I don't know if I have enough new thoughts to merit a whole post on this subject, but I met one of my readers at an Independence Day gathering, and he was kind enough to ask me where I thought I was taking this ideaI was going to argue for a strong connection between the notion of an intentional system and the notion of a supernatural phenomenon. ( Read more... )

While I was running this morning I had an insight about the idea of supernatural phenomena. The idea is pretty simple, but to explain it I need to explain another idea first. You might not see what this has to do with the supernatural at first, but bear with me ( Read more... )

Bear with me: it's hard to get started here because there's no firm metaphysical footing.

People toss around the words natural and supernatural as if they meant something, but I've been thinking about it and I'm not sure I agree. It turns out to be really hard to come up with a definition. Maybe some philosopher out there can give me a clue ( Read more... )

While nobody commented on my last post here, I talked to a couple of friends on Lambda who read it, and their reaction startled me. It was a negative reaction, both times, from people I like and who like me, I think.

We didn't talk about it much in either case. But the reaction was essentially the same as if I had written the following. Note: ( Read more... )

Recently an old conflict has been making the news again, around the question of where our species came from. (Well, where all species came from, but tempers run especially hot when debating the origin of Homo sapiens.) On one side are those who say that the question is pretty much answered in broad outline by explanations involving natural ( Read more... )

Today I shall share a pet peeve ( Read more... )