Posts by: Kyle Munkittrick
The Society Pages’ Cyborgology dives into our weird relationship with the otherness of the disabled body. While the piece opens with the predictable discussion of Mullins and Pistorius, I was floored by Sarah Wanenchak’s use of Olympic speed skater Apollo Ohno:
Like the images of Mullins and Pistorius, Ohno’s body is explicitly being [...]
Evolution is lazy and a spendthrift. Sure, it drives change, but it will cling to anything that is just barely good enough. As a result, every creature alive today has bits and pieces that don’t work so well. For example, humans are prone to choking and sinus infections because our resperatory pathways are fairly terrible for [...]
Chris Mooney searches for one.
The primary weakness for me is that Mooney is convinced that conservatives are more biased. I don’t think they are. Mooney makes the implicit distinction that somehow liberals are “more tolerant” overall than merely on specific issues:
Moreover, while I dig this whole improving democratic-dialogue-about-science thing, I also think that if there is [...]
Carolyn Abraham pens an exhaustive and balanced article on embryo selection. If you are honest with yourself about trying to understand the situation new parents will be facing in the coming decades, you’ll read this article.
Sherry Turkle is awesome. A good buddy of mine, Tyler, sent me the link to David Zax’s interview with Turkle about her new book Alone Together thinking it would get my hackles up. Turkle is perhaps one of the most perceptive thinkers on technology and society. She is not eternal pessimist David Carr, nor is [...]
IQ is not the same throughout your life. Like physical fitness, the amount you workout, stay active, and push yourself alters your overall intelligence. Your brain gets better at thinking if you make it.
A higher IQ can get you more than admission to Mensa and bragging rights on online-dating sites. IQ, measured by [...]
Peg O’Conner in the New York Times relates her battle with alcoholism to Plato’s famous allegory. Addiction is the right word for those who return, who need, the Cave and the shadows on its wall to be their reality:
In various scenarios of addiction, the addicted person’s fixation on a shadow reality — one [...]
Fertility, depression, Parkinson’s, fitness, hunger levels, pain, and asthma are a few of the things the inert wonder drug can help treat.
Why did the placebo work—even after patients were told they weren’t getting real medicine? Expectations play a role, Dr. Kaptchuk says. Even more likely is that patients were conditioned to a positive [...]
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
