It is a terrible shame that a creative civilisation like Islam can come to be so backward and identified now in the international media with extremist violence. Islam did, in fact, contribute much to world culture and civilisation. Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in […]
Something’s happening in your brain when you sense beauty, just as something’s happening in your brain when you eat a chocolate biscuit. One would like to think there is more to looking at a masterpiece by Titian than chewing a Jaffa Cake. In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gabrielle_Starr) argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of
Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95 percent of all living species died out – a global catastrophe far greater than the extinction of dinosaurs 185 million years later. Scientists are slowly working out how this happened and there are many competing theories. Some blame
The Enlightenment (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/) has been battered, abused, misrepresented and accused of leading to all sorts of horrors like the worst excesses of the French Revolution and Nazism. The vilification has been going on since its earliest appearance in Europe in the 1600s. This is mostly because it had deeply unsettling implications for established world views,
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker Read More »
We step on and off aircraft these days routinely. Yet the action of a mammal flying through the air in a planned and directed manner in a machine is completely astonishing. The human ingenuity behind aviation is a marvel, and Tom D. Crouch (https://airandspace.si.edu/people/staff/tom-crouch) is your best guide to appreciating it in a single volume
There have been many attempts to define the demarcation between humans and other animals. Tool use, spirituality, complex language, moral intuition, culture have all been offered. In Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham (a British primatologist working at Harvard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wrangham) argues that cooking really put us on the path to becoming homo sapiens. Almost 2 million years
Insects have been on planet Earth for approximately 400 million years. That predates Homo Sapiens by over 399 million years (Homo Sapiens having evolved by about 200,000 years ago). It’s a reasonable guess that the creepy crawlies will be here long after human extinction. Should you become fascinated by insects, you’ll want a splendid reference
Encyclopedia of Insects by Vincent Resh Read More »
Like most animals, humans cling to life tenaciously. Even in care homes and hospices where the spirit is weakened, one more breakfast and one more dawn is generally preferred to oblivion. David Boyd Haycock (http://www.johnsonandalcock.co.uk/haycock-david-boyd/) here gives us a history of our battle against mortality. Four centuries ago in western Europe more people died
Is it just luck that some people find purpose and fulfilment while others do not? Jonathan Haidt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt) compares philosophical, religious, and theoretical texts with recent scientific insights to find out. He draws on psychology’s ‘attachment theory’, sociological research, and recent developments in the neuroscience of emotion. Haidt uses this research to illuminate ancient and more
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt Read More »
