Posts filed under “Books”
The real “hard sciences”
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: Everyone knows that the social sciences are hypercomplex. They are inherently far more difficult than physics and chemistry, and as a result they, not physics and chemistry, should be called the hard sciences. They just seem easier, because we can talk with other human beings but not […]
What’s the problem?
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: The current status of the social sciences can be put in perspective by comparing them with the medical sciences. Both have been entrusted with big, urgent problems. … In both spheres the problems have been intractably complex, partly because the root causes are poorly understood. The medical […]
Brave New World
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge Still, except for the rare behavioral conditions approaching total genetic determination, heritabilities are at best risky predictors of personal capacity in existing and future environments. … The message from geneticists to intellectuals and policy-makers is this: Choose the society you want to promote, then prepare to live […]
And why would he do that?
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge Perhaps God did create all organisms, including human beings, in finished form, in one stroke, and maybe it all happened several thousand years ago. But if that is true, He also salted the earth with false evidence in such endless and exquisite detail, and so thoroughly from […]
Who are we?
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies […]
Foundation
I’ve had Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series recommended to me a million and one times and I finally got around to reading the first book in the series, Foundation. The premise of the series is interesting – Psychohistory is a science that combines statistics and psychology to predict what large populations of people will do. A […]
Falling in love
From Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast […]