There is no more tired or trite argument than that some or other topic is tainted by association with eugenics. For instance, research into intelligence or behavior genetics in general. These aim to describe the world as it is rather than as it ought to be. Eugenics is a policy which attempts to alter the world, to fashion how it […]
History
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Freeman Dyson, Useful Idiot
Freeman Dyson made his reputation as a first-rank theoretical physicist. He also had a sideline in popular essays and mildly controversial opinions in other fields. The following anecdote is taken from a collection of these for The New York Review of Books, The Scientist as Rebel (2006). (It is curious that scientists are always rebels in their own minds, no […]
History , Statistics
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Colonial Atrocity Porn
Thanks to Adam Hochschild, King Leopold of Belgium (1835–1909) is now known as one of history’s greatest mass murderers. At 10 million, he keeps company with Joseph Stalin (perhaps 30 million), Mao (perhaps 60 million) and that little house painter with the silly mustache (usually credited with 6 million). Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo [Leopold] looted its […]
Ethology , Sociobiology
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Bill Charlesworth on Washburn
Since he has a name virtually unpronounceable in the Anglosphere, the great ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1928-2018) is not nearly as well-known as he ought to be outside of specialist circles. German is also a language that is really hard to render idiomatically in English, so his many books take some getting into. That is a pity. They are first-rate, in […]