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A brilliant case of analytic sophistry can be observed unfolding in the counterpetition to the petition to reform the American Philosophical Association’s current failure to exclude, or at least reprimand, academic institutions that explicitly their staff from engaging in “homosexual acts”. Basically, as the counterpetition puts it, accurately it would seem, The American Philosophical Association [...]
In an article entitled “Looking Differently at ADHD,” Julie Hail Flory reframes so-called attention deficit in terms of “memory retrieval”, or the “failure of active maintenance.” It happens to us all – you walk to the refrigerator, open the door, then stand there, unable to remember why you went to the kitchen in the first [...]
Though little-known and only once republished, “A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World” (1674) by Nathaniel Fairfax, physician and fringe member of the Royal Society, remains a remarkable document, literarily and historically. Conceived at the apogee of what might just be the most awkward moment in English letters – when respected intellectuals [...]
Massimo Pigliucci of Rationally Speaking has a short post up on the many problems with “the idea that the DNA sequence of an organism’s genome is analogous to a computer ‘program,’ and that it provides the ‘blueprint’ for building said organism.” He then goes on to list the many ways in which this idea of [...]
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