‘To concede that no one ever believes something solely because it’s true is not to deny that anything is objectively true.’… Read the rest

‘Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.’… Read the rest

The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.… Read the rest

Paul Krugman draws an interesting parallel with Stephen Jay Gould.… Read the rest

Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write ‘eh?’ in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.… Read the rest

‘There has been a tendency among Marxist, or marxisant, critics of Darwin, and social Darwinism, to criticise, or ridicule, the theory as a simple product of the society in which it was developed.’… Read the rest

Psychoanalysis was never, despite Freud’s ‘positivist rhetoric,’ a science; it was a ‘purely speculative enterprise,’ argues Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen.… Read the rest

‘John does know more mathematics, more physics and more engineering than the average biologist. But he also knows more biology than the average biologist.’… Read the rest

‘…many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.’… Read the rest

‘The protection built into Theory…is composed of layer on layer of ignorance.’… Read the rest

The world is a jungle, barely one child in a hundred escapes being murdered! Or so you would think.… Read the rest

Eerily patient explanations from Sokal and Bricmont of why gibberish is gibberish.… Read the rest

Betrousered, two-eyed philosopher Ventre considers a world in which Things are Against Us.… Read the rest

‘How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge — Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science’ — could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?’… Read the rest

‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’… Read the rest