Timothy McGettigan | The Socjournal

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Homo sapiens has enjoyed singular success at tweaking the environment because of the unique psycho-social wiring of the human mind ( Pagel ). Hearkening back to the nature-nurture debate, the human mind is a multi-dimensional intellectual construct that emerges from …

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“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”—Albert Einstein The Defense Advanced Research Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced an extraordinary new project, the 100 Year Starship …

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Hey, Donald, “Yuh fired!” Make no mistake about it, Donald Trump loves the limelight. He’s a rich guy who loves to plaster his name on any object that isn’t agile enough to jump out of his way. It’s an ego …

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Last Thursday (June 7), I attended a debate that took place at Pueblo Community College between the two democratic candidates, Bill Thiebaut and Jeff Chostner, who are vying for the position of Pueblo’s District Attorney. Both candidates are veteran politicians …

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In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton managed to produce a series of record-setting federal budget surpluses. Not deficits, surpluses. For those who are unacquainted with such a foreign concept, budget surpluses occur when the federal government collects more revenue than …

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For reasons that anthropologists have not yet fully uncovered, Homo sapiens evolved a pronounced aesthetic sensibility (Schellekens and Goldie, 2011): not only has Homo sapiens developed more sophisticated tools and weapons than any other species, Homo sapiens has also cultivated …

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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 …

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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 …

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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, …

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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 …

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