Future Thought | The Socjournal

Are we all but hapless pawns of Fate, or can humans exert some measure of creative control over the course of their lives? Beginning with Laplace, hard determinists have claimed that they can literally explain every event that has ever …

On June 2, 2011, Mark Guarino reported in the Christian Science Monitor that the Louisiana Science Education Act managed to survive a recent legal challenge in the Louisiana legislature. Sadly, that does not bode well for science education in Louisiana, …

I tend to agree with Karl Popper far more than I disagree. Nevertheless, I diverge from Popper over his under-specification of truth (BTW: I work out the particulars of this argument in much greater detail in a forthcoming book, Good …

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”—Albert Einstein As we assess the current state of global affairs, it is easy to become disheartened. Problems that have …

A surprising number of people believe that the universe is deterministic (Hawking, 2007; Kurzweil, 2005; Skinner, 1971—among many others). Determinists believe that humans don’t have any control over their lives, or the world around them. Further, determinists reject the idea that humans …

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who celebrate Darwin Day, and those who don’t. Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809-1882) is without doubt one of the most important scientists who ever lived. He is also one of …

Truth and Science After The Sokal Hoax It’s easy to beat up on postmodernists these days. Ever since the Sokal Hoax, the postmodernists’ Waterloo, the science wars have been a rout. Once it became clear that postmodernism was incapable of distinguishing …

Drawing upon a sequence of the most important breakthroughs in the history of science, Good Science develops a ground-breaking argument about the evolution of social reality. Good Science is composed in an engaging style that will capture the interest of students who are …

The level of gun use and ownership in the U.S. is way beyond what is rationally necessary, or politically appropriate. You can have guns, by why assault rifles and high capacity magazines? “Their judgment is distorted by their patriotism” and the arguments or devoid of sense and rationality, according to this author. He may have a point. When frontier justice, ideology, and primal instincts trump care, compassion, and common sense, society has a problem. The only question is, how to fix it.

Scholars have referred to Homo sapiens’ game-changing capacity to transform the biological evolutionary process into an intellectual exercise—or what I refer to as super-adaptability (McGettigan, 2011, 2013)—in a variety of ways. Karl Popper (1999) distinguishes between biological and cognitive problem …

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