The year 2017 sees the 25th anniversary of Iain Banks’s novel of 1992 ‘The Crow Road’. The novel is the tale of Prentice McHoan and his complex Scottish family. Prentice, preoccupied with thoughts of sex, death, booze, drugs, and God, (which interesting person isn’t?) has returned to his home village of Gallanach full of questions about […]
The Crow Road by Iain Banks Read More »
Following on from the global success of his book ‘Sapiens’ (2014, http://sbr.lanark.co.uk/?p=5180 ), Yuval Noah Harari (http://www.ynharari.com/about/) offers us a terrifying vision of the life forms to which, even now, we are giving birth. For 70,000 years Homo sapiens has been the smartest life form on the planet. We love to think so. But one way to depict
Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari Read More »
When economists seek to explain Brexit, Donald Trump and the rise of populism/nationalism, the concept they most often reach for is ‘globalisation’. Goods and services, it seems, can be produced almost anywhere on the planet and consumed anywhere else, rapidly. This has had profoundly dislocating effects on patterns of employment, income and population movement over
The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin Read More »
In each of our individual genomes we carry the history of the whole of our species. Since scientists first read the human genome in 2001 it has been subject to all sorts of claims, counterclaims and mythologising. Drawing together the latest discoveries in this rapidly changing area of science, Adam Rutherford (http://adamrutherford.com/) shows us that in
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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
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Many people, including myself, who have visited the battlefield of Culloden report being underwhelmed. It amounts to little more than a rickle of stones on a heather moor. The battle itself in 1746 had lasted less than an hour, and the forces on each side were small, even by the standards of the day. The
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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
This year sees the 20th anniversary of Tom Wolfe’s landmark novel The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1987. Seven years prior to its publication I had been shaken to be told by a biblical scholar that Ecclesiastes doesn’t belong in the Old Testament. It is evidently a Greek text, he proclaimed, and is not consistent
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Psychology professors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski offer this look at how the knowledge of mortality drives human culture. The authors’ contention is that fear of death has been a primary driving force of human creativity. They began working together on the elaboration of what they now call ‘Terror Management Theory’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory) in
The Worm at the Core by Sheldon Solomon et al Read More »
