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Index: Science, Medicine & Technology

Looking for a little warmth in East Anglia’s climate data.

Sunday, 5 December 2010

Nick O’Hear: It would be good to live more frugally and that taxation should be aimed at making this more desirable. We need energy, particularly to help development in Africa, South America and parts of Asia. Oil and gas will eventually run out and coal is a dirty fuel. Nuclear energy, however unpopular, has been a total success in France and we should follow the French lead.

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The Wonders of Man in the Age of Simulations.

Monday, 9 August 2010

Roger Berkowitz: A new urgency has energized those who welcome and those who fear the power of man to transform his nature. While hopes of technological utopias and fears of technological dystopias may be part and parcel of the human condition itself, we are living through a moment when extraordinary technological advances are once again raising the question of what it means to be human.

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Excerpt: Science and social reform in America.

Wednesday, 30 June 2010

Ronald G. Walters: To attack present-day critics of science as misguided and cranky radicals does more than violate the historical record: it obscures problems within science itself and the degree to which it invites hard scrutiny, particularly when applied to social issues. On that score, the sources of frustration among intellectuals and the public alike are several. The historical record contains reminders that what seem to be progressive uses of science from one perspective look reactionary in hindsight.

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The mystery of life.

Saturday, 22 May 2010

W. E. Garrett Fisher: Dr Bastian’s discovery can hardly be overrated in its bearing on one of the most difficult and interesting questions which biology has yet to resolve.

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The End of Reason.

Thursday, 14 January 2010

Anthony O’Hear: One of philosophy’s longest known but best concealed secrets is that science itself is, in a certain sense, irrational. Its irrationality derives from the fact that scientific knowledge, if we have any, depends on the assumption that the universe is ordered, at least to the extent that things we have observed and discovered in the past are a good guide to the future we have not yet experienced.

Also filed in Principal Articles, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | | Comments (1)

On the Dread and Dislike of Science.

Sunday, 10 January 2010

George Henry Lewes: In the struggle of life with the facts of existence, Science is a bringer of aid; in the struggle of the soul with the mystery of existence, Science is a bringer of light. As doctrine and discipline its beneficence is far-reaching. Yet this latest-born of the three great agents of civilisation—Religion, Common-Sense, and Science—is so little appreciated by the world at large that even men of culture may still be found who boast of their indifference to it, while others regard it with a vague dread which expresses itself in a dislike, sometimes sharpened into hatred. [This article is published with an attached comment by P. Anderson-Morshead.]

Also filed in Principal Articles, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | | Comments (1)

Darwinian Tensions.

Thursday, 17 December 2009

Anthony O’Hear: In 2011 it is hard not be disturbed Darwin’s casual reference to the elimination of endless numbers of lower races, and even more by the way this sort of thinking was taken up by his followers such as Haeckel and von Treitschke, who in turn influenced Hitler. Moreover the remark in question is all of a piece with the teaching of The Descent of Man, even if more forcefully expressed.

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The Art of Flying.

Friday, 9 October 2009

W.E. Garrett Fisher: The announcement of the sad death of Mr. Percy S. Pilcher, from an accident to his artificial wings on the 20th of September [1899], was probably the first intimation that people at large had of his experiments. They are highly characteristic, however, of the new departure which has been taken by the art of flight in the last ten years.

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The Fortnightly Review