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"Human Nature"
Stanton Peele makes a compelling case that our obsession with being “treated” for every minor malady reflects our abject terror in the face of clinically based recommendations to cut back on testing.
American health care costs are driving America into the ground. These costs stand at from 2-3:1 compared with other nations (like the UK), [...]
Searing, intense, personal account of being mother to a child with Tay-Sachs, perhaps the archetypal disease used for discussing wrongful life. Emily Rapp’s take on prenatal testing is the opposite of abstract. Read it all:
That it is possible to hold this paradox as part of my daily reality points to the reductive and [...]
Barbara J King critiques the “humans are hard-wired for X” trope that pops up far too often among op-eds:
Anthropological studies show that humans respond with incredible plasticity to the social and environmental forces around us. As biological anthropologist and blogger Patrick Clarkin aptly puts it, our abilities for cooperation and conflict, love and [...]
Lauren Davis reopens the debate started by Zach Zorich at Archeology and continued by yours truly over whether or not we should clone a Neanderthal. She does a nice job compiling a list of yays and nays, including this gem I hadn’t much considered:
Neanderthals might not be built for modern life. The [...]
Nature is a big deal. Vaunted and ancient, Nature publication is a serious endorsement. Womanspace, a poorly written story with truly embarrassing stereotypes, does not deserve such an endorsement. Ed Rybicki’s story about how women enter a parallel dimension making them good at shopping and womanly behaviors is frightening in how oblivious both the [...]
Pretty people are not inclined to cooperate. When people will do what you want because you’re better looking, why compromise?
Santiago Sanchez-Pages, who works at the universities of Barcelona and Edinburgh, and Enrique Turiegano, of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, base their claims on the “prisoner’s dilemma” model of behaviour, played out under laboratory [...]
Patrick Lin asks one of the more intriguing questions I’ve heard in a good long while:
My suggestion is this: If creating children is morally unproblematic, then so is creating autonomous robots, unless we can identify morally relevant differences between the two acts.
Of course, we instinctively want to defend our right [...]
Bill Moyers interviews Goodall and ask about human aggression. She deftly reassures him:
Some people have reached the conclusion that war and violence are inevitable in ourselves. I reach the conclusion that we have brought aggressive tendencies with us through our long human evolutionary path. I mean, you can’t look around the world and [...]
Ross Douthat (whose name I always read as doubt-that) argues what might be a some-what reasonable position on pre-marital sex:
When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect [...]
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
