Christopher Hitchens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens) died at the age of 62 on 15th December 2011. The cause of death was pneumonia brought on by esophageal cancer. He had been highly productive writer, polemicist and debater. He had also been a heavy smoker and drinker. This book includes the six elegant pieces he wrote for Vanity Fair chronicling his illness […]
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens Read More »
Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Dubois) is not nearly as well known as his most important scientific contribution. Dubois’s 1892 archaeological expedition found the first fossil evidence of Pithecanthropus erectus (what we know today as homo erectus, http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus) or ‘Java man’. At the time of its discovery, P. erectus was viewed by many scientists as the
The Man Who Found the Missing Link by Pat Shipman Read More »
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
The entire digital world in which we’re steeped, not to mention the power of technology and all modern convenience is all based on numbers. I Bernard Cohen’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._Bernard_Cohen) book here shows how this relation to our world only developed gradually. The author begins with the scientific revolution of the 17th century, which formulated the laws
The Triumph of Numbers by Bernard Cohen Read More »
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
