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by Susan Blackmore All around us information seems to be multiplying at an ever increasing pace. New books are published, new designs for toasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed or synthesized and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded into cyberspace. This is rather strange. We know that matter and energy cannot increase but Continue reading Temes: An Emerging Third Replicator by: Dame Gillian Beer Darwin’s radical new history of the world did not give a central place to the human. It challenged human exceptionalism and emphasised what was shared, across all organisms extant and extinct. He thought of himself initially as a geologist, so was constantly alert to the ghosting presence of past life forms, visible Continue reading Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human by Elliott Sober This is a précis of an argument that I developed in an article called “Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?” The article was published in 2009 and may be found on my web set at http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/recent.html. An expanded version of the argument is the first chapter of a book that Continue reading Common Ancestry and Natural Selection in Darwin’s Origin by Margaret Boden Creativity and computers: what could these possibly have to do with one another? “Nothing!,” many people would say. The two are simply incompatible.” Well, I disagree. Computers and creativity make interesting partners with respect to two different projects. One, which interests me the most, is understanding human creativity. The other is trying to produce Continue reading Can computer models help us to understand human creativity? by Harriet Ritvo Although humanism itself has often been controversial, until recently there has been a fair amount of consensus about the denotation of “human” among practitioners and critics. This consensus has been notably durable. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first three senses of “human” distinguish “mankind” from animals, from “mere objects or events,” and Continue reading Humans and Humanists (and Scientists) by: Terrence W. Deacon Introduction Since Darwin’s time, the human language capacity has been a perennially cited paragon of extreme complexity that defies the explanatory powers of natural selection. And it is not just critics of Darwinism who have argued that this most distinctive human capacity is problematic. Alfred Russel Wallace—the co-discoverer of natural selection theory and Continue reading On the Human: Rethinking the natural selection of human language by: Connie S. Rosati It is now something of a commonplace that we think about our lives in story form. According to a recent article in the New York Times, psychological research into the personal narratives we tell supports the idea that we are natural storytellers. [2] “The human brain,” the article reports, Continue reading Narrative and Personal Good |
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