EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE – Science & Technology

We regard our British countryside as precious and ‘natural’. After all, that’s where we find ‘nature’. In truth, almost the entire landmass of the British Isles above the geology is an artefact of human intervention.   It all starts, in this context, with the European climatic spasm of 9,700BC and the end of the last ice age. […]

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were two Israeli psychologists whose work revealed patterns of human irrationality, particularly the ways that our minds consistently fool us. They used the word ‘heuristics’ to describe the rules of thumb that often lead people astray, and investigated cognitive biases. One such rule is the ‘halo effect’, in which thinking

Cosmology and theoretical physics are developing rapidly. For the general reader, then, what’s the best scientific account we have of reality in 2017? An overall picture is offered by Sean Carroll (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/self.html) here. He seeks to make sense of the universe and everything in it, from protons to people, from the Big Bang to the origins

It’s the seat of the magic lantern show that you’re privy to every day. It’s where your consciousness is generated. It controls the functions of your body. It’s where your personality and memories reside. It’s your brain. And yet what do we really know about this 3.3 pound gelatinous mass inside our skulls? Quite a

There are two suspicions, which are related, about human beings which go back a long way in human thought. One is that we are composed of a myriad of miniscule particles. The other is that our psychology is really fractured, so that the unity of consciousness we normally enjoy is a temporary construct at best.

A song lyric from a 1987 album by Sting could be the strapline for this book about science and the environment. ‘How fragile we are, How fragile we are’. More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth’s current species

As our knowledge of the natural world deepened from the mid nineteenth century onward it became increasingly implausible to think that humans were in any sense unique or special. Features that had been offered as uniquely human were complex communication, social organisation, capacity for suffering, personality and empathy. These are all now known to be