A report in Nature on 10,000-year-old skeletons unearthed in West Turkana, Kenya is being touted as evidence for the assertion that war has deep evolutionary roots.
Posts published by “John Horgan”
Physics, more than any other field, lured me into science journalism more than three decades ago. Physics represented a kind of scientific theology, an empirical, rational way of probing, if not solving, the mysteries of existence.
At the end of every year for almost two decades, science book agent John Brockman poses a provocative question to a bunch of smarty-pants, including scientists, philosophers, and journalists.
For this pre-holiday issue of The Stute, I’m reprinting an edited version of an essay I originally wrote 15 years ago for The New York Times.
I watched a conversation recently between journalist Robert Wright and physicist Lawrence Krauss on “the origins of the universe, quantum weirdness and the limits of scientific knowledge,” according to an announcement from event host Union Theological Seminary.
I was at a workshop on the mind-body problem—where scientists and philosophers debated, among other questions, whether dark energy might be conscious—when reality intruded.
In my last column, I confessed that my personal feelings toward proponents of a scientific claim affect my judgment of the claim.
Assessing scientific claims is hard enough when you stick to empirical evidence. When personal factors intrude, which they invariably do, such assessments get even trickier.
I’ve been hard on social science, even suggesting that “social science” is an oxymoron. Social science has enormous potential, however, especially when it combines rigorous empiricism with a resistance to absolute answers.
After decades of being told that mammograms save lives by detecting breast cancer early, women are now learning that these tests often lead to false alarms, more technically known as “overdiagnosis.”