Philosophy & Ethics

70% of you, man or woman, will have an HPV infection at some point in your life.   There is no cure for HPV, just as there is no cure for the common cold and in most people, an HPV infection…

Ethics, Expertise and LawDear reader: please excuse the style of this article.  I am dealing here with observations in law.  I have chosen a legalese style so that any student of law…

The Beauty of Justice Some celebrities use their status to promote the most idiotic ideas. Fortunately, there are many more, who use that status to help make the world a better place.   In…

In exploring some of the biological issues surrounding selfishness and altruism, invariably the philosophical issue of selfishness surfaces. Ayn Rand has argued that selfishness is a virtue because…

A Grammar of Questions. Quistic grammar is based on what I believe to be the biological basis of language in the brain: a set of models of our internal and external environment, specifically…

Mummy's Little Grammatical genius How babies learn to use language. A special note of caution to students.  My description of how a baby probably acquires language is speculative and is not a…

Last week we found out that Merck paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal.  This week we found out that Elsevier produced five other pay-for-publication journals.  The …

The Borg Builders Human language evolved to serve human purposes.  For most people, that purpose is to just get on with life, to be happy, to work, to play, to provide for tomorrow and to leave…

Francis Collins' new Templeton-sponsored website, BioLogos, has been getting a bit of news coverage recently. For those not familiar with the story: Collins is the Director of the Human Genome…

We Have Ways of Making You Conform Language is both a product and a process of evolution.  It has mechanisms by which its continuing evolution is kept from running out of control.  Those…