I’m writing this post for two reasons: to recommend a new book by Columbia astrobiologist Caleb Scharf, and to defend an old book of mine.
Posts published by “John Horgan”
In my last column, I poked my nose into the debate over whether climate change will precipitate more conflict. I offered half a dozen objections to predictions that more warming means more war.
“There’s a surprisingly strong link between climate change and violence.” That’s the headline of a recent article by journalist Chris Mooney in The Washington Post.
I met Stephen Hawking in the summer of 1990, when I spent five days in northern Sweden at a conference attended by 30 or so leading cosmologists.
Late last spring, as I’ve mentioned in previous columns, I participated in a conference called How the Light Gets In, where I hung out with all kinds of professional reality-ponderers.
For more than 20 years, I have hammered behavioral genetics, which attempts to pinpoint the genetic underpinnings of an enormous variety of human traits and disorders, from homosexuality and religiosity to alcoholism and depression.
One of the best parts of being at Stevens is hanging out with cool (compared to me), young (compared to me), up-and-coming scholars, from whom I can learn a lot about science and technology.
Almost every day, the media reports some alleged breakthrough stemming from research on cancer, leading many people to believe that science is winning the war against this dread disease.
Last June, I attended the annual “Dialogue” of the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland, California, thinktank that challenges mainstream environmental positions, and then I wrote positively about it.
In this column and in my book The End of War, I knock what I call the deep roots theory of war.