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The Evolution of Human Behavior?
On why scientists should not make unsubstantiated claims in popular science works especially where human beings are concerned It is quite fashionable these days to try and explain human behavior as a result of evolution through natural selection. Just as a small example, I quote the following from an article by the renowned evolutionary psychologist…
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Bombs, Sectarianism and Blasphemy: What’s Art Got To Do With It?
March 4, 2013 Was coming back from an “Art Event” at the Karachi Arts council. I don’t go to such events but mom insisted (emotionally blackmailed to be precise), so I went. While coming back we started getting messages and calls on our cellphones that there had been two bomb blasts a few hundred meters…
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From Causality to the Supernatural: Babies know it all!
Work in cognitive psychology has shown that young infants possess the concept of causality as an innate feature of their minds. In fact, it has been shown through recent experiments that this notion is so strong that infants can infer the existence of an unseen casual interaction and even an unseen causal agent from just the motion of…
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I ♥ Game Theory; Let’s all be irrational, shall we?
Some nights back, my flight from Karachi to Islamabad couldn’t land due to bad weather in Islamabad and instead it had to land at Lahore airport. We waited and waited, with no official intimation of takeoff plans. Hours passed. I started feeling very hungry and so I went ahead and bought something to eat in…
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Newton’s ‘Quantum Revolution’ and the Death Knell of Materialism
In an earlier post on Einstein, I discussed Newton’s demolition of the mechanical philosophy. Since the topic of materialism is so widely misunderstood, I think the significance of what Newton did should be discussed at length. Unfortunately, the revolutionary import of what Newton did has still not been absorbed by many people, even after the…
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Profits over people: Aaron Swartz and the dominant model of our world
For those who did not know, Aaron Swartz committed suicide on the 11th of January, 2013. He was being prosecuted by the state attorney for having ‘stolen’ thousands of documents from the online academic library JSTOR, and faced up to 35 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. He did this at MIT,…
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Complexity Science, Marx and Religion
One of the tenets of a religious life is the acknowledgement of the fact that we are not in control; we surrender to the belief that there are bigger forces at work. This is construed by some people to be defeatist. It could be argued that this line of thinking is not only not defeatist…
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Method in Acting and Science: Why there is no such thing
Growing up in China, with the state television often showing boring programs, I was hooked to our cherished VCR and movies. My favorite actors growing up were Al Pacino and Robert Deniro (no surprises there). It was only later on I discovered while doing my PhD in the Netherlands, that actors like Pacino and Deniro…
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Realm of the SCENSCI 