Good faith, bad faith and no faith in reasoning

We are hearing a lot of calls for there to be public debates with climate deniers, the alt-right (that is, modern fascists), creationists and antivaxxers, and this has led to people marking the so-called “paradox of tolerance” named by Karl Popper in his epochal 1945 Open Society and its Enemies: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the […]

50 words for snow: addendum 3a, or what counts as sociocultural?

Jim Harrison made the following comment on the last post: … I have trouble understanding how you distinguish the s and the c in your pseudo equation. You mention folk taxonomic as an example of sociological distinctions, but if such taxonomies aren’t part of culture, what’s left to put under c Maybe distinguishing s and Read More...

Thoughts on racism

For many years, I have been very hesitant to speak about race. I’m white (a stupid social construction in itself), male and middle class. Every time I make a comment, in come the critics, attacking me on everything from my own group identity (which, by the way, I do not adopt; being on the spectrum, Read More...

The Abstract and the Concrete, or, the Road to Fascism

I was thinking about the way in which the anti-abortionists justify their views. I have always said that “Pro-Life” is a misnomer. Instead of being pro-life, they are pro-potential life. In order to protect potential lives, they ignore the needs and rights of those who have actual life – the women who cannot for whatever reason carry that Read More...

The Triumph of Stupidity

The following essay was written by Bertrand Russell in 1933. I have changed the names of the countries and made some minor amendments to make it applicable to today: What has been happening in America is a matter of the gravest portent for the whole civilised world. Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, individual Read More...

Evopsychopathy series in PDF

I have converted my series on Evolutionary Psychology and Sociobiology to a handy PDF. Feel free to download it or even better, download it and pay something. Wilkins on Evopsychopathy [PDF] I will be converting other series also. Let me know in the comments what you’d like to see in this format.

Morality and Evolution 6: Moral dispositions

[Morality and Evolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7] In any field that has statistical variation, it is necessary to isolate the variables. Biology is all about statistical variation of populations, and so we must expect that any account of morality that is based upon biology will have variation along a number of axes. Here I wish to sketch out […]

Morality and Evolution 5: biology and culture

[Morality and Evolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7] I should note that there is no set historical sequence implied in the levels 0 to 4, apart from the fact that we were primates before we were humans, so some sort of historical transition from 0 to 1 must occur before any of the others. Each layer contains the contexts […]

Morality and evolution 4: Is morality fitness-enhancing?

[Morality and Evolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7] If we agree that morality enhances fitness, because it enables cooperation, several questions arise: what sort of fitness enhancement does it provide and to what? In short, what is the selection process tracking? To say that morality provides a foundation for social cohesion and the consequent benefits that accrue is not […]

Morality and Evolution 1: The Milvian Bridge

[Morality and Evolution 1 2 3 4] A while back I gave a talk to a group of theologians on the question of Darwinian accidents. It had no ethics content. The first question I was asked was “If you are an atheist, how can you have moral rules?” Like many others who talk about Darwin […]