Posted 22 Jun 2012 / 0
Back in March, David Barash used his regular column in the Chronicle of Higher Education to unveil “The Truth about the Temple of Templeton“. Reacting to an increasingly-large funding stream coming out of the Templeton Foundation, Barash questions whether receiving money from this religiously-affiliated, pro-business group will lead to tainted science. Barash begins his critique by Read More
A Major Post, Articles, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Economics, Evolution, Grants & Funding, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Religion
Posted 21 Jun 2012 / 0
Evolving Economics “Gandolfi, Gandolfi and Barash’s Economics as an Evolutionary Science” Great commentary on the fitness-maximizing behavior (or lack thereof) by the ultra-rich. Clearly humans are maximizing something other than their genetic fitness when they seek utility.
A Minor Post, Cultural Evolution, Economics, Memetic Fitness
Posted 20 Jun 2012 / 0
Steady State The Daly News “Real Dichotomies Are Not Made ‘False’ by Soft Science or Political Pandering” What’s really valuable here is the clarification of what is cultural construction (‘there does not have to be a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection’) and what is scientific reality (‘there is actually an empirically-demonstrable conflict between Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Conservation Biology, Economics, Ethics, Sustainability, Web
Posted 06 Jun 2012 / 0
WNYC The Leonard Lopate Show “Joseph Stiglitz Explains the Price of Inequality” As I have suggested before [1, 2], in order to stabilize our economy, we have to incentivize the generation of income from actual labor — not simply owning resources.
A Minor Post, Economic sustainability, Economics, Ethics, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts
Posted 27 May 2012 / 0
Today’s New York Times Business section features an interesting article on the recent JPMorgan multi-billion loss. Entitled “The Hunch, the Pounce and the Kill: How Boaz Weinstein and Hedge Funds Outsmarted JPMorgan“, the article explains how a risk-prone hedge fund manager named Boaz Weinstein was able to exploit errors by JPMorgan and end up on Read More
Articles, Economic sustainability, Economics, Ethics, Parasitism, Public Policy, Social Capital, System Stability
Posted 23 May 2012 / 0
Smithsonian Magazine “Truffle Trouble in Europe: The Invader Without Flavor“
A Minor Post, Economics, Invasive Species
Posted 21 May 2012 / 0
Marketplace “High-frequency trading: Bad for markets… and the soul?“
A Minor Post, Economic sustainability, Economics, Parasitism, Radio & Podcasts
Posted 07 Jan 2012 / 0
Contrails captured by NASA scientist Louis Ngyyen Global carbon emissions continue to increase, threatening future generations with catastrophic climate change. And while most of the world agrees that something needs to be done to curb our carbon emissions, several decades of international talks have provided little progress at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Most famously, the Read More
Altruism, Articles, Climate Change, Cooperation, Economics, Environmental Justice, Ethics, Pollution, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Sustainability, Web
Posted 18 Sep 2011 / 0
I just watched the video Home, a production of Yann Arthus-Bertrand and his Good Planet Foundation. Composed solely of high-quality panoramic images intensified by a soaring new-age soundtrack, the film provides viewers with a fairly comprehensive overview of the earth’s ecosystems and the challenges to the future health of these ecosystems posed by human industry. Read More
Anthropogenic Change, Biodiversity Loss, Biomes, Bogs & Wetlands, Carrying Capacity, Climate Change, Ecology, Ecology Education, Economics, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Ethics, Extinction, Film, Television, & Video, Food, Freshwater Ecosystems, Hunger, Mangrove Forests, Marine Ecosystems, Pollution, Population Pressure, Public Policy, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, System Stability, Taiga (Boreal Forest), Temperate Forest, Terrestrial, Tropical Forest, Tundra, Vegetarianism, Water Supply
Posted 11 Aug 2011 / 0
If there is a theme running through my diverse interests, it is stability. For those who understand how ecological systems and evolutionary processes work, this should be entirely unsurprising: the living systems that persist today are those that are stable at multiple levels. The interactions between populations in a community must be stable, individual organisms Read More
Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Economics, Ethics, Human Evolution, Memetic Fitness, Reciprocity
