Index of Columns by Dan Agin at The Huffington Post
Dan Agin
Dan Agin of ScienceWeek at The Huffington Post.
Access at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-agin/
THE PERILS OF LOOKING BACKWARD: ARE WE COCKROACHES?
Posted July 6, 2007 | 06:22 PM (EST)
In the New York Times of July 6, 2007, David Brooks tells us
integration may be ending, that it's an unrealizable dream that
ought to be abandoned because it obviously hasn't worked in the
past here or anywhere else. People are tribal, they hate each
other, what's the use?...
HUMAN MISERIES: STEM CELLS, REPUGNANCE, AND THE FOUNDATION OF
IGNORANCE
Posted June 28, 2007 | 04:13 PM (EST)
If we consider the 6,000 years between the beginning of Babylonia
and the beginning of modern medicine, the one question that
stares us in the face is quite simple: What took them so long?
You would think that scientific medicine, so important and so
practical, would be the first science...
SEX BEFORE HISTORY: HUMANS IN THE MIST
Posted June 23, 2007 | 07:38 PM (EST)
The writer Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen (1885-1962),
once posed the following question: "What is man, when you come to
think upon him, but a minutely set ingenious machine for turning,
with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
Humans can be described in a...
EUGENICS REDUX: WHAT HATH DAVID WROUGHT?
Posted June 20, 2007 | 11:07 AM (EST)
For years, David Brooks and his chums at various conservative
rags of bitterness such as The Weekly Standard, National Review,
Commentary, and The New Criterion have been telling the American
people that looking backward is more productive than looking
forward, that business is more important...
AUTISM AND OUR PASSION FOR SIMPLE CAUSES AND QUICK FIXES
Posted June 18, 2007 | 02:57 PM (EST)
The boy, whose name is Roberto, is four and a half years old.
He's neatly dressed, alert, seems comfortable in the room, with
no signs of any emotional stress. But it doesn't take long for us
to understand that something is wrong: he never engages you in
conversation. If you...
CUPID'S REVENGE: THE AMERICAN SEXUALITY TIME-BOMB
Posted June 16, 2007 | 02:27 PM (EST)
The crazy religious roots of American sexuality -- from the
psychiatric hatred of sexuality of the Puritans to the obsessive
prudery of the Comstock era to the fanatical phobias of modern
times -- have sprouted a jungle of current confusion about
sexuality that won't survive the 21st century. Human sexuality...
POLLUTION BABIES: INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND THE POISONING OF YOUR
CHILDREN
Posted June 13, 2007 | 05:12 PM (EST)
Lead pollution and the collusion of industry and government that
sustains it are too dangerous to ignore. It's collusion between
government and industry that makes possible the unnecessary
maiming and killing of children by the millions. It's "Contra-
Life" -- attitudes and people in our midst that work against
the...
AGGRESSION, WAR, KILLING: ARE WE KILLER APES?
Posted June 6, 2007 | 04:20 PM (EST)
Our situation looks crazier every day. We're currently fighting a
Bush-Cheney-Halliburton war in Iraq that most people in America
don't want. The younger Bush first got us into the war maybe to
knock off Saddam Hussein for trying to kill Bush Elder -- not for
having "weapons of mass destruction,"...
NEW MORALITY RESEARCH: IS THIS THE END OF MEDIA GENE-MONGERING?
Posted June 4, 2007 | 12:39 PM (EST)
Some news about the origins of human morality, but first some
background: As closet social Darwinists, American neo-
conservatives and their media puffers have for the past three
decades been marching under the banner of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology, shouting a mantra that genes determine
all human behavior, which in turn...
POISON IS GOOD FOR YOU: IDIOT'S DELIGHT ON THE RIGHT
Posted May 21, 2007 | 11:32 AM (EST)
From a scientific standpoint, one of the silliest ideas ever
invented by economists is that it's possible to do a valid "cost-
benefit" analysis of harmful pollution, and a doubly-silly idea
is that it makes sense to apply cost-benefit analysis to
government regulation of trace-quantity toxic pollutant
emissions, such as emissions...
CONTRA-LIFE: WHEN THE COST OF DRUGS KILLS PEOPLE
Posted May 18, 2007 | 11:45 AM (EST)
During the first half of the 20th century, there were not many
life-saving drugs of consequence, and those that existed were
simple and more or less readily available to everyone. Life-
saving medicine was more a matter of individual skills of
physicians than of available drugs. That situation has changed
radically...
DARWIN AND PLAIN POLITICS
Posted May 16, 2007 | 04:14 PM (EST)
For a decade now, Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology have
been linked in the public mind to controversies about
Creationism, Intelligent Design, and what should or should not be
taught to students in American schools. The controversies are now
muted, the public apparently tired of them, and maybe in 40...
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