Should we be horrified by extinction? Charles Darwin didn’t think so. In On the Origin of Species, he mocked the catastrophist view of extinction as scientific illiteracy: “So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world!” Extinction was no cataclysm. Without it, the human species—along with all other life—would never have evolved.
Category: ideas
Practice Does Not Actually Make Perfect – At Least, Not By Itself
Ulrich Boser reminds us of one of those factors that’s so obvious that people forget about it.
The Ideas That Kill Great American Cities
“Believing that hipsters can reverse the consequences of late-stage capitalism is a more attractive thought for city planners in cash-strapped cities than realizing that many American cities are, for now, screwed thanks to postindustrial decline and growing inequality. Gentrification may provide a new tax base, but it also reshapes what cities are, turning them into explicit supporters of inequality, reliant on it to self-fund, yet still unable to meet the needs of their poor. A real solution to the economics of American cities would require more work—more taxes, more laws, more intervention from the federal government. Those things are hard. Gentrification is easy.”
What Makes People Troll, And How To Stop Them (Or At Least Slow Them Down)
A team of four computer science professors at Stanford and Cornell used studies to work out what moves ordinary people to start trolling online, when it’s likely to happen, and measures that can make it less likely to spread.
How Did Icebergs Get To Be Such Powerful Metaphors?
For much of modern history, icebergs have helped us speak about deeper reservoirs of meaning. The phrase “just the tip of the iceberg” has, at least since the environmental movements of the Sixties, expressed the idea that there is much more to something than meets the eye. As the historian William Cronon observes, internalizing nature through language like this is our best way of understanding it—and ourselves.
This Picture Of Strawberries Contains (Believe It Or Not) No Red Pixels
“The strawberries appear red, despite their lack of any red pixels, because of color constancy, or the way that the human brain is designed to perceive the same colors under a range of circumstances. Remember The Dress? Same deal.”
The Myth Of College As A “Marketplace Of Ideas”
“Campus speaker invitations and disinvitations reflect a curious paradox. On one hand, there’s clearly a market for speakers for bestselling authors like Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart writer and prolific campus provocateur. On the other hand, Murray was met with disinvitation attempts in 2014 and 2016 before he was shouted down last week at Middlebury, reflecting student awareness that the work for which Murray is best known—1994’s The Bell Curve, which was excerpted in the New Republic alongside criticism of it—has been largely discredited among social scientists.”
Parallels Between The Arts And Medicine
“It’s said that literature helps us to explore ways of being human, grants glimpses of lives beyond our own, aids empathy with others, alleviates distress, and widens our circle of awareness. The same could be said of clinical practice in all of its manifestations: nursing to surgery, psychotherapy to physiotherapy. An awareness of literature can aid the practice of medicine, just as clinical experience certainly helps me in the writing of my books. I’ve come to see the two disciplines as having more parallels than differences, and I’d like to argue they share a kind of synergy.”
Our Changing Relationship With The Things Around Us
“When did our world become quite so full of stuff? But acquisition and waste are both logical byproducts of basic human capacities for shaping and making, for decoration and manipulation: part of being human. Our linked capacities for manufacture and trade have long shaped our world, it’s just that both have developed exponentially in recent history and we are still unsure of where that is leading us. The things we are drawn to acquire reflect and express our personalities and more: our ideas about ourselves, our aspirations and perhaps our limitations and delusions.”
Study: Why Males Are Less Interested In The Arts
“Society-wide cultural norms … define highbrow culture as belonging to the feminine sphere,” notes a research team led by Ghent University sociologist Susan Lagaert. In a newly published study, she and her colleagues present intriguing evidence of how that assumption affects the behavior of adolescents.