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 ...
Read More »Category Archives: Timothy McGettigan
Feed SubscriptionThe Inside Job
The film, Inside Job, won the 2011 Academy Award for best documentary. Charles Ferguson the director of Inside Job kicked off his Oscar acceptance speech with the following statement, “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years ...
Read More »As far as I am concerned, the sooner Muammar Qaddafi is gone the better. Forty-plus years of his malignant tyranny is more than enough. The only misgivings that I have about deposing Qaddafi is the inordinate time that it took ...
Read More »Live Long and Prosper: The 100 Year Starship Project
“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 ...
Read More »Trumped by the Dorkusians: Donald Trump’s Evil Plan to Conquer the Planet
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 ...
Read More »Power to The People’s Attorney
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 ...
Read More »The Federal Budget for Dummies: Tax Cuts + Increased Spending = Red Ink
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 ...
Read More »Planet of the Persnickety Apes: Darwin and the Aesthetics of Survival
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 ...
Read More »Condoning Criminality: Sam Harris’ Warped Determinism
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 ...
Read More »A Prelude to Good Science
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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