I don’t oppose transgenic use of animals to obtain legitimate medical substances. For example, Dolly the cloned sheep was manufactured as the first step toward creating a genetically altered sheep herd that produced a protein useful in the creation of medicines. That effort went . . . . Continue Reading »
[Note: Since I give a rather harsh—though fully deserved—critique of Rand in my On the Square column today, I thought I should add this slightly less bombastic addendum .] There once was a time when I was enamored by the philosophy of Ayn Ran. An émigré from the Soviet Union, . . . . Continue Reading »
The latest poll by Gallup reveals that theism is still popular in America : More than 9 in 10 Americans still say “yes” when asked the basic question “Do you believe in God?”; this is down only slightly from the 1940s, when Gallup first asked this question. Despite the many . . . . Continue Reading »
Yesterday, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in the wake of Jack Kevorkian’s demise, had a good column against legalizating assisted suicide. I didn’t post it because it closely tracked with what I have written here and elsewhere. Now liberal Washington Post . . . . Continue Reading »
Look here. . Is this the beginning of the a big clash between health-and-safety legislation and religious duty? Is it evidence of a shortcoming of Scalia’s interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause? . . . . Continue Reading »
Working with a small group of graduate students at the Stanford Literary Lab, English professor Franco Moretti fed a digitized text of Hamlet into a database in order to create and examine the play’s character-network : Most recently Moretti has turned his attention to what might be the most . . . . Continue Reading »
This is your opportunity to view a really fine whole conference on your computer through “streaming video.” If you want to see ME, click on the Locke panel, where I ambiguously endorsed some of the features of the “pink” Locke presented by Brown’s Professor Tomasi. . . . . Continue Reading »
We have discussed the issue of MM and SF’s proposed ban on circumcision until we are blue in the face, and so I am not permitting further comments here. But I thought some might be interested in this front page SF Chron story.Here’s the . . . . Continue Reading »
National Geographic has a fascinating article on the recently-discovered Gobekli Tepe religious site. Built around 9600 B.C., the site predates Stonehenge by about 6600 years and places the origins of human religious experience much farther back in the historical progress of our civilization than . . . . Continue Reading »
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