Reading Time: 6 minutes I had never met these two little girls before—flesh and blood relatives—but when I did, it was a lot of fun. They were full of energy and cuteness. It was 40 years ago. I was 15. My parents had taken me back East one summer, to the Bronx, to the neighborhood where my father grew […]
genetics
Posted inEvolution
Did God Give You Kidney Stones?
Reading Time: 6 minutes I would like to introduce you to Matthew Sabatine who will contribute a few pieces that can also be found on his own blog – details below. Over to him: DNA is often given supernatural attributes and its uniqueness is often hard to separate from God as an origin. I have witnessed this understanding many […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Science, Sex & Gender
The Causes of Homosexuality, and What It All Means
Reading Time: 11 minutes So now it is time to return to the idea of homosexuality and Christianity about which I posted the other day. Having looked at biblical issues concerning the position of deeming homosexuality (h/s) morally wrong, let us now look at what makes people h/s and whether it is fair for an all-loving god to judge them. […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Causes of Human Behavior – Good and Bad
Reading Time: 2 minutes A friend of mine recently sent this to me; I thought it would be good for stimulus, summing up some of Robert Sapolsky’s writing. I would love to find time to read Behave – it sounds a tour de force. The Causes of Human Behavior — Good and Bad Extracted from Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s. BEHAVE (pages 6 and […]
Posted inCartoons, General
What Do Good People and Bad People Have in Common?
Reading Time: < 1 minute Take notice when you blame bad behavior on circumstance and good behavior on your own virtuousness.
Posted inScience
First happiness genes have been located: Genetic overlap between happiness, depression discovered
Reading Time: 2 minutes This information is released by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: For the first time in history, researchers have isolated the parts of the human genome that could explain the differences in how humans experience happiness. These are the findings of a large-scale international study in over 298,000 people, conducted by VU Amsterdam professors Meike Bartels (Genetics and Wellbeing) […]
Posted inPsychology, Science
Parenting – why it might not much matter. Nature vs nurture!
Reading Time: 7 minutes I want you to consider the possibility that your parents did not shape you as a person. Despite how it feels, your mother and father (or whoever raised you) likely imprinted almost nothing on your personality that has persisted into adulthood. Pause for a minute and let that heresy wash across your synapses. It flies in the face of common sense, does it not? In fact, it’s the type of claim that is unwise to make unless you have some compelling evidence to back it up. Even then it will elicit the ire of many.
Posted inScience, Sex & Gender
Guest post: a request about homosexuality and genetics
Reading Time: 4 minutes Here is a guest post from someone (a South American who wants to remain anonymous) who contacted me by email asking for help in dealing with the topic of homosexuality and genetics after he read my two posts on homosexuality and Christianity. It seems that there is a prominent Christian author pairing whose work seems to be a concerted effort to minimise the importance of genetic determinism in producing homosexuality. Over to the guest poster:
Posted inScience
Christianity and Homosexuality Part 2
Reading Time: 10 minutes So now it is time to return to the idea of homosexuality and Christianity about which I posted the other day.
Having looked at biblical issues concerning the position of deeming h/s morally wrong, let us now look at what makes people h/s and whether it is fair for an all-loving god to judge them.
…
I would like to give a good synopsis of the current tate of biology and sexual orientation. First of all, it is interesting to note that the drivers for male and female h/s are understood to be often very different. It is not one rule fits all. Furthermore, there are also a whole host of reasons that can lead to h/s – biological, genetic (and epigenetic), and environmental and social.
Let us look firstly at the biological causes and theories.
Posted inPhilosophy, Psychology, Science
Explanatory scope of free will
Reading Time: 4 minutes So I have a question. I will detail the following research. For ‘free will’ to be true, it has to explain the following. Or more accurately, the following has to be fully explicable within the free will hypothesis. How does it do that?