Currently viewing the tag: "Culture"
Dolphins, like me in a bar surrounded by large angry dudes, do there best to talk their way out of fights:
“Burst-pulsed sounds are used in the life of bottlenose dolphins to socialise and maintain their position in the social hierarchy in order to prevent physical conflict, and this also represents a significant energy [...]
Michael Anissimov makes one compelling case, starting with Pocahontas Dances with Ferngully in Space:
The mainstream has embraced transhumanism. A movie about using a brain-computer interface to become what is essentially a transhuman being, Avatar, is the highest-grossing box office hit of all time, pulling in $2.7 billion. This movie was made with hard-core [...]
Transhumanists like to talk about immortality, anti-aging, and life-extension. These three ideas are often used interchangeably and for most debates, such as over issues of Malthusian catastrophes or existential boredom, they apply. But what if we only conquered the middle of the three; what if we could only slow the aging process, but not add [...]
Don’t you love it when something you’ve been harping on is supported by hard evidence? Biologists are discovering that culture is affecting evolution at the genetic level:
The best evidence available to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Richerson for culture being a selective force was the lactose tolerance found in many northern Europeans. Most people [...]
Robin Hanson, as is his wont, finds a third-rail and grabs it with both hands. I’m posting most of it because it is hard to take any one of these paragraphs out of context:
So dating is our last refuge of overt racism because … preferring people based on race isn’t racism if its [...]
Gwen at Sociological Images does a quick survey of yet another place where humans and non-human animals seem to have a brightline but do not: culture.
Richard Eskow has a great post up on IEET about the Singularity Summit and the hurdles still faced by the transhumanists.
Objects in the rear-view mirror—those artifacts of human history that may seem archaic to some in the Transhumanist community—are likely to be sources of substantial public resistance. The artifacts in question include religion, patriotism, [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
