People will have different opinions about what is funny and what isn’t; what makes them laugh and what doesn’t. But we do know that humour and laughter exist, so the mysterious question surrounding this fact is: how did they evolve? Is there really some evolutionary advantage to finding ‘humour’ (however you define it) in social…
View Post
From my own personal experience, I find it more difficult to concentrate on something which requires sustained attention – when reading a book, for example – than I used to in the past. I believe that this diminishing ability to concentrate is a result of the internet; more specifically, the way in which I (and…
View Post
Rupert Sheldrake is an English author and parapsychologist (someone who studies paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis and other forms of ESP). In recent times he gained notoriety for having his TED talk banned, a talk that questioned, what Sheldrake believed to be, the ten dogmatic assumptions of modern science. He is credited with…
View Post
Christopher Ryan is an American psychologist who is best known for his book, Sex at Dawn (2010) which looks at the prehistoric origins of human sexuality. The book has attracted quite a bit of controversy due to its main thesis, which says that our ancestors evolved to be sexually promiscuous, not monogamous. Dr Ryan is…
View Post
‘Nothing’ is a tricky concept to think about and it is as much a philosophical problem as it is a scientific problem. The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has been tackled by different philosophers in different ways. Parmenides, the ancient Greek philosopher, stated that “nothing comes from nothing” which means for something…
View Post