-
The Age of Human Arrogance, Part III
For centuries, humanity imagined itself as the apex of creation — the God chosen species, the master builder, the rightful ruler of the Earth. But no empire has ever been as destructive as the one we have built in our own name. We have poisoned rivers, erased forests, destabilized climates, and driven ancient species to […]
-
The Age of Human Arrogance
For most of human history, we lived as one species among many. We shared forests with elephants, rivers with hippos, skies with vultures, and coastlines with turtles whose migrations predate our earliest civilizations. The natural world was not a backdrop to human life; it was the condition that made human life possible. For millennia, animals […]
-
Sharks and Rays and Skates and Chimaeras: Spielberg/Benchley Messed it up big time back then for Great WHITES — Now?
As a shark conservation scientist, one of the most common questions people ask me is, “How are shark populations doing?” To answer this question, it’s important to understand two types of fishery surveys: fishery-independent and fishery-dependent. Fishery-dependent population surveys gather data from fishermen’s catches. These data are valuable because there are many more fishermen on […]
-
Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics
Orientation What is politics? Nine Questions for Determining What is Politics In Part I of my article Seven Theories of Politics I posed ten questions for narrowing down what the range for defining what is politics. Temporal reach How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or […]
-
A Challenge to Environmental Activism
Looking at the world with perspective, it is clear that there are an overwhelming number of issues of concern needing general recognition and action. Most often, people moved to action by these concerns see the immediate need or danger with clarity: people are hungry, give them food; people are sick, give them medical care; a […]
-
Evolved Homo Sapiens (and the frustrated “ID”)
As we move further into the 21st century, shared delusions about human complementarity with robots, “artificial intelligence”– or even the bizarre fantasy of a forthcoming “trans-human” fusion with AI (Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” 1 ) — are becoming all-pervasive. In a previous article, “Homo Sapiens: Not a Machine!,” I offered a trenchant critique of this growing […]
-
Armageddon and the Limits of Evolution
On March 28, 2022, the Biden administration sent to Congress a revised version of its classified National Defense Strategy. The new version removed the longstanding doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and opened the door to a nuclear response to a non-nuclear threat. Within months of the new U.S. policy, but without referring […]
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish