Featured Book Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels Ian MorrisPaperback edition 2015 Reviewed by George KasabovContributing Writer How has the amount of energy that could be captured in each stage of human development affected our values and attitudes to fairness and justice? What can we can learn about humanity by looking back to long before there …
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Featured Book Beyond Culture Edward T. Hall and Our Hidden Culture By Edward T. Hall Report by John ZadaContributing Writer The late American cultural anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward T. Hall (1914 – 2009) was considered an outlier in his broader field of ethnography. Unlike most of his 20th century colleagues working in anthropology, Hall …
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Featured Book New World New Mind Moving Toward Conscious Evolution Robert E. Ornstein and Paul R. Ehrlich Paperback edition 2000 The world that made us was one that changed little or not at all during a lifetime: tasks and social roles were passed down unaltered for millennia. Our biological evolution favored ancestors with limited perceptions and …
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Featured Book The Anxious Generation How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness By Jonathan Haidt (2024) Report by Kathleen MazorContributing Writer “It matters what we expose ourselves to…we need to take back control of our inputs.” – Jonathan Haidt In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt focuses on …
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How long you live may be determined by your zip code at birth …and a number of other social determinants. By Margaret A. Caudill-Slosberg, MD, PhD, MPHContributing Writer The implementation of population-level improvements in vaccination, access to safe water, food and sanitation get the “biggest bang for the buck,” quite literally. Life expectancy has long …
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Some 95% of the trillions of dollars the US spends on health care goes to direct medical services and just 5% to population-wide approaches to health improvement. How well does that investment align with what we know about the true determinants of health? By David Sobel, MD, MPHContributing Writer When we think of health and …
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edited by Robert A. Wilson & Frank C. Keil
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the methodological and theoretical diversity of the changing field of cognitive sciences. At the core of the encyclopedia are 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an important concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, provide overviews of each of six major areas of cognitive science: Philosophy; Psychology; Neurosciences; Computational Intelligence; Linguistics and Language; and Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. For both students and researchers, MITECS will be an indispensable guide to the current state of the cognitive sciences.
Early Quranic manuscript dated between 568 and 645 CE, contains parts of Surahs 18–20. Muhammad had developed a refined integrated understanding, an intuitive capacity to connect to what has been referred to throughout our religious history as God/Truth/Knowledge/Love. As a result of this, far from what we think of as a vocation or choice, Muhammad …
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Rome’s decline, followed by the disastrous Byzantine wars with Persia, left a vacuum into which the Muslim invaders stepped, taking over the land and ideas of the peoples they conquered, including their accumulated resources of Greek literature, philosophy and sciences. By Hafeez Diwan and Sally MallamContributing Writers For the first time since Alexander the Great, and for a …
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Something extraordinary in the history of humanity occurred 2500 years ago in Athens—much of our cultural heritage, for better and worse, descends from a very small population of landowners, farmers and sailors during a surprisingly short space of time. They organized themselves into a radically democratic government. They held as a high ideal the dignity …
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Recursive thinking, the ability to embed ideas within other ideas is the underpinnings of human communication. Understanding more about how this ability evolved may help us unlock the complex challenges we face today. All humans are born with the ability to speak and think recursively. But our individual languages are unique, adaptive tools, each one …
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Muir Glacier, Alaska: August 13, 1941 and August 31, 2004 (NASA photos: William Field and Bruce Molnia). Like other animals, on some level humans have always understood our dependence on the weather and the changing seasons. Modern climate science, a combination of many disciplines, has given us knowledge of how the weather and the seasons …
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