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The Long View 2007-10-28: The Fitness of Natural Selection; Macrohistory and Generations; The Decisive Lifetime

This is a pretty good case of a time when not looking at something quantitatively produces immense confusion. In the the case John J. Reilly mentions here, distinguishing between traits under selection and things that happen to be correlated with those traits, is something with a pretty robust theory behind

The Long View 2007-10-24: Parallel Universes; Doctor Who; The Purpose-Driven Hurricane; Thomas Friedman; The Final Bush Cover-Up.

Thanks to everyone who has supported the Long View re-posting project through my affiliate links! The posting will continue until morale improves. Parallel Universes; Doctor Who; The Purpose-Driven Hurricane; Thomas Friedman; The Final Bush Cover-Up. "Did I make something up?" asked the horrified Marvin the Paranoid Android in

Night's Black Agents by Daniel Humphreys: Paxton Locke Book 2 Review

Have I said I’m a sucker for any book [Silver Empire affiliate link] that mentions my hometown, Flagstaff, Arizona, even in passing? Paxton and his not-quite-girlfriend Cassie do simply pass through Flagstaff, as it is the junction between I-40 and I-17, on their way from Wisconsin to Arizona. Since

The Long View 2007-10-19: God v. Kant; Democratic League; Talking Shops; Dr. Moreau; Premier Putin

John’s Thomist good sense is on display here: I am not much distressed by genetic chimeras. There is a human genome, but there is very little DNA that is specifically human. The whole point of molecular genetics is that different organisms use the same components. I’ve said similar

Space Viking by H. Beam Piper Book Review

You couldn’t get any more on the nose with the title Space Viking [Amazon link] than this book, which despite it’s space opera trappings, is a re-imagining of 9th or 10th century Europe, when intrepid men like Rollo secured their domains by wits and force of arms, while

The Long View 2007-10-17: Tolerated Use; Cold Civil War; Counterknowledge; Electoral Voting by District

John J. Reilly here proposed a more formal solution to the current unsatisfactory state of copyright law: I did a little research before I uploaded my single foray into fan fiction, The Gray Havens, which is an alternative ending for the Tolkien trilogy. My conclusion was that I could make

The Long View 2007-10-15: Kurdistan & Armenia; A Failure of Theory; The Return of the Fantastic

John mentions in passing here something that didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, but sticks out now: Literary modernism actually had to exert a great deal effort for several generations to delegitimize the fairy tales and minatory stories that people ordinarily prefer for their