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POPS'The slap heard around the web' Communications technologies are now delivering unprecedented volumes of information. This story clearly shows that this "information" can be used in powerful ways. Used properly, it may just be possible to improve societies by publicizing unacceptable behavior that was previously "secret". One obvious issue is "transparency" versus "privacy".
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POPSAnd Jesus Laughed "A minister woke up on a beautiful Sunday morning and decided to squeeze in a round of golf before services. St. Peter observed the man headed for the golf course and gave God a nudge. ‘He should be punished for this." God said, "OK, just watch." The minister proceeded to play the best golf of his life. His club selection was precise, and he hit every shot perfectly He was shooting par for the first time. "I thought you were going to punish him," said St. Peter. "Just watch," said God. The minister continued to play flawless golf and on the 18th hole he shot a hole-in-one. "What kind of punishment is this complained St. Peter." "Just think about it," said God. "Whom can he tell?"
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POPSwhy are we the naked ape? did we come from the sea........go to TED talks 2009 to hear a speaker named Morgan speak on the subject of evolution and hairlessness too
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POPSThe evolution of religion "Religion arose out of a hodgepodge of genetically based mental mechanisms designed by natural selection for thoroughly mundane purposes," he writes. Those mechanisms include conformist bias (believing what your peers believe, in order to get along), a tendency to explain events in terms of personal agency (since our mental machinery for thinking about causality evolved in the context of social interaction), and interest in remote control (a bias toward beliefs that promise influence over predators, diseases, and bad weather). Given these biases, we're prone to believe in powerful, jealous, tempestuous personal deities.
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POPSChina doctor reveals 100 rules for would-be spacemen China sent its first man to walk in space in September last year. Zhai Zhigang, the son of a snack-seller, unveiled a small Chinese flag in space, helped by colleague Liu Boming, who also briefly popped his head out of the capsule. The space walk was a step toward China's longer-term goal of assembling a space lab and then a larger space station.
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POPSStephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" We have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information." But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.
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POPSMonkey see, monkey do... "These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality. De Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society's moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals." Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in "Primates and Philosophers," with "a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality."
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POPSBusinessDegree.com Hundreds of Sports & Entertainment Business Degrees to choose from. Browse Sports & Entertainment Business Degrees programs from a Selection of Top Quality Sports & Entertainment Business Degree Schools and Programs.
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POPSThe Great Designer Baby Controversy of ’09 This will probably become in the coming yrs one of the most heated controversaries we will come across as a species. we do not yet have the philosophy (and by implication ethics) to go with such technological advancements. having said that, the motion is inexorable and we need prepare our arguments.
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POPS How altruism evolved over 200,000 years of conflict Biologists have argued for decades about the evolution of altruism and long ago came to the conclusion that Darwinian natural selection cannot explain acts of supreme personal sacrifice except those directly connected with helping the survival of close blood relatives who share similar genes.
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POPS Cooking Makes The Man . . . psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer. There were other benefits for humanity’s ancestors. He writes: “The protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey.
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POPSNatural-born supernaturalists 2 interesting concepts that portrait religion and other supernaturalism as stemming: 1) Natural selection- the Darwinist angle. 2) A by-product of the human psychology.
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POPSA Cultural Law of Gravity "Human culture seems to have gone way beyond what such a law of gravity might allow" a fascinating post, worthwhile your time of reading
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POPSThe 10 Best Windows Backup Software Programs Backing up data regularly should be one of the most important tasks of every computer user; Yet only a minority is doing it thoroughly and regularly. The rest is flirting with disaster as there are numerous incidents that can delete data on computer systems
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POPSWhat if, the alien, is no more than a human? These same thermodynamic arguments should also hold on Earth-like planets elsewhere in the cosmos. And if that's the case, then ET may not be so alien after all, as Higgs and Pudritz imply with the extraordinary conclusion to their paper: "The combined actions of thermodynamics and subsequent natural selection suggest that the genetic code we observe on the Earth today may have significant features in common with life throughout the cosmos." Now that's a thought....
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POPSRage Against the Art Gene On the other hand: Stephen Jay Gould. Until his death in 2002, he stood as one of the great champions and evangelists of science, as well as one of the most exacting critics of its tendency to overreach. According to Gould, life's history needs to be understood not just as the result of natural forces explicable by science, but also of contingency: strange, unplanned events that change the course of everything that follows. The arts, likewise, may be one of the many adaptively useless byproducts of a complex brain that evolved to perform other tasks. something rings false in the overriding impression created by evolutionary esthetics: that a mental trait is ennobled when we supply it with Darwinian roots. Gould, the self-described "naturalist by profession, and a humanist at heart," knew the opposite to be true. An interesting debate, one that surely is only beginning as we enter this era of progress...
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POPSTesting EU's IQ It was approximately 100 years ago when specialists – mainly psychologists – started researching human intelligence using the IQ – intelligence quotient. There are many definitions (or understanding) of intelligence – from the ability to adjust to a statement that intelligence is an entire set of factors related to the speed of thinking. My own, simplified definition of intelligence is: Intelligence is the ability to arrive at a true (correct) conclusion (result) from certain presumptions (facts). I define geniality as the ability to conclude correct conclusions also from an insufficient amount of facts.
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POPSTomorrow the responsibility for evolution may rest on our own shoulders Our Post-Darwinian Future; Pluripotent stem cells, gene targeting, and artificial chromosomes could leapfrog over evolution and let us take control of our genome, maybe even turn ourselves into a whole new species. “There is no scientific basis for thinking that we couldn’t,” Silver says. “There’s nothing really special about the human genome. There’s nothing that says this is the end.” more from the article: "Who should have the final say on when and how the human genome should be changed? On the other hand, if technology can enable us to eliminate disease and disabilities from our children or insert genes that might make them smarter or better looking, why wouldn’t we use it?"
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POPSSkadden Selects 28 Fellows The law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom has announced the selection of 28 Skadden Fellows for the class of 2009.
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POPSI am not my Genome Here is a succinct statement of an important point, and a corrective to some of the )often implicit, taken for granted) assumptions regarding research findings in biology (including neuroscience). It makes the point that within and across competing explanatory paradigms (which by the way, are constrained by the human identity they seek to explain!) an acceptance of overdetermined factors (or, if you orefer, a collection of several fifferent 'necessaries') is productive of ways of understanding and advancing research.
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POPSGay Bishop to be involved in inauguration festivites This looks to be an ok compromise. We knew Obama was not going to remove Warren as the invocationist at the inauguration proper, but I am glad they have found a way to acknowledge the hurt his selection has caused the gay community.
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