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Love In A World Of Atoms

The threads that weave the cloth of our mentality are soulless. Our experience of the most beautiful sunset, our most fervent desires, our loftiest thoughts, and our most expansive feelings of love are storms of neural activity, nothing more. Science – and neuroscience in particular – has stripped our mental lives of a soul. But […]

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On the Golden Age of Islamic Science

During what we sometimes call the “Middle Ages,” science in the Abbasid Caliphate was flourishing: scholars from diverse backgrounds gathered in centers like Baghdad, where they made fantastic advances in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and physics. When these scientific achievements eventually reached Europe, they helped spark Europe’s Scientific Revolution. As beneficiaries of their discoveries, we are […]

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Why Humans Go To War

Humans, chimpanzees, and wolves are the only mammals that form coalitions with other members of their species to inflict deadly violence on yet other members of their species. Why do we do it? We may have evolved an instinct for war. Support for this idea comes from what anthropologist Richard Wrangham calls the Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis. The […]

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Information and the Emergence of Life

Scientists don’t yet know how life emerged on Earth. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explains how life evolved once it emerged, but it does not explain how life emerged in the first place. But science presses on. One of the main challenges in figuring out how life emerged from chemistry is defining what life is. […]

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Is Neuroscience a Mature Science?

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Mark Baxter, Ph.D. about the status of neuroscience as a field. Mark is a neuroscientist who studies the molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. This is my second conversation with Mark. Several months ago, we discussed a controversial paper on the effects of marijuana consumption on the […]

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