Let me state a certain political position as: The United States of America are but Massachusetts is. This is a grammatical statement of the classic States’ rights doctrine which was one of the matters so violently dealt with in the American war between the states. It was, in fact, a matter of contention from the … [Read more…]
The talents and skills of accurate perception and memory formation are very much higher-level properties of the human being, giving the appearance in past ages that ‘soul-stuff’ or ‘mind-stuff’ is necessary for such acts tied so tightly even to what we would label as virtues, such as honesty. In more recent years, dualists with the … [Read more…]
Is it surprising to learn there is a Marked Rise in Intensely Sexualized Images of Women, Not Men? It’s funny we live in an age where we’ve learned so much that enriches the traditional understanding that men and women are shaped to their different roles in reproduction and we fail to transfer any of that … [Read more…]
As we explore God’s world, it turns out to be just as complicated and complex as some had suspected many centuries ago. And more so. Over the past century or so, DNA was discovered and shown to be that shadowy agent of heritability which was so important a part of the theories of Darwin and … [Read more…]
This article is interesting though hardly surprising: Can PTSD Become Hereditary?. We can pass on to future generations the psychiatric problems we develop during our lifetimes. To simplify a lot: Our genes carry out some very important tasks for the organism of which they are part, such as providing active templates — tiny assembly plants … [Read more…]
A recent article, Female Minorities Are More Affected by Racism Than Sexism, Research Suggests, speaks of a study showing that Oriental women who are members of immigrant communities in the United States are upset in a deep and emotional way by racial prejudice but are dispassionate about prejudice against them as women, taking that as … [Read more…]
I’ve drawn some insight from Norman Cantor’s Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization on the subject of the destruction by Catholic philosophers and theologians of respect for the mind. There’s still more to be said on that topic but I’m commenting on another topic where Cantor had some views which would not … [Read more…]
In Brain Performs Near Optimal Visual Search, we read of some interesting research on the power of visual search techniques used by human beings: In the wild, mammals survive because they can see and evade predators lurking in the shadowy bushes. … This ability to recognize target objects surrounded by distracters is one of the … [Read more…]
This article, How Do Neurons in the Retina Encode What We ‘See’?, points to the great effort our nervous system puts into the effort to make sense of perceptual input. One surprise is that the eyes don’t pick up some of the more complex patterns which change over time even though complex spatial patterns, say, … [Read more…]
There’s a review, Language and spandrels, at the weblog of John Hawks which discusses the question: “How can there be one grammatical structure for all human beings if there is no known way to see selective pressures for the rules of grammar?” As the review notes, the famous linguist Noam Chomsky did a lot of … [Read more…]