"HOW ALASKA CAN HELP MEET AMERICA'S ENERGY NEEDS" is an article to which Republican Senator Jim Talent of Missouri refers his constituents. That article argues that we need to start drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) of Alaska, because it holds 10 billion barrels of economically…
You’ve just noticed several people carrying signs that say “Down with Ice Cream.” You approach them to ask what is so bad about ice cream. After listening to them for a few minutes, it becomes clear to you that there is a misunderstanding. To them, the phrase “ice cream” actually means kicking dogs. They are against kicking dogs.
“Oh, you mean that you’re against kicking dogs?” you ask.
“Down with ice cream!” they nod.
It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation without a common understanding of the words being used. “Evolution” is a good example. When I hear someone speaking disparagingly about evolution I can trigger the following exchange:
Q: What’s so bad about evolution?
A: It’s just a theory (#1) that says that everything here is just an accident (#2) and that people came from monkeys (#3).
Zero for three, every time. In short, most people who “oppose” evolution are against something other than the scientific theory of evolution. Further, most anti-evolutionists I’ve encountered don’t know what scientists say about evolution and don’t care [Good places to learn what scientists think would be here and here.]
The irony is that most people who oppose evolution are not opposed to any of the major facts upon which evolution is based (e.g., that random mutations occur, that some of these mutations make organisms more likely to survive long enough to bear offspring, or that a parent’s traits tend to be passed on to its children). In fact, opponents don’t usually …
A lot of people are beating up on old Sigmund Freud these days. More than a century ago, however, Freud hit a particular ball out of the park and it’s still sailing: he concluded that many important thought processes are unconscious.
In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Mark Johnson and George Lakoff listed some of the many important unconscious mental activities:
In short, most of what is going on in our heads is unconscious. Lakoff and Johnson concluded that “unconscious thought is at least 95 percent of all thought and that our unconscious conceptual systems function like a “hidden hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience. It constitutes our unreflective common sense.”
Nietzsche expressed this same idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
“It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”
Freud and Nietzsche have been proven absolutely correct on this point. That consciousness is only the “tip of the iceberg” has been conclusively proven by hundreds of experiments outlined in numerous …
People who don’t believe in God are constantly disparaged as immoral by those who do. Many conservatives believe that most of what they perceive to be wrong with the world can be traced to secular humanism, a phrase they can barely utter without spitting. For them, secular humanism is a…
Complexity at its best: God created the evolutionary algorithm, but had to create a world too, to see where it would all lead. The world is the smallest device capable of accurately computing where it will all lead. He’s still watching and He is often quite surprised.