Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

generosity

Discredited paper claiming that religious children are less generous is still cited in media

We love it. “Correction mechanisms in science can sometimes work slowly… ” Why does that remind us of “Nature has retracted a major oceans warning paper, after ten months of mass freakouts? The suspicion raised—and it is not unreasonable—is that the harm that wrong information does is useful to some parties. It’s almost like we sense the retraction coming conveniently after the damage is done. Read More ›

Michael Egnor: Apes can be generous. Are they just like humans then?

Reading the claims for ape generosity in The New York Times, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers a clarification: There is a fallacy about the human mind that regularly appears in research on animal behavior, and this fallacy is related to the pervasive misunderstanding about machine “intelligence.” It is a misunderstanding about the most basic characteristic of the human mind—that the human intellect and will are immaterial. That the human intellect and will are immaterial abilities is supported by a mountain of logic and empirical research. It is precisely this immateriality that animals and machines lack. Science writer Carl Zimmer has an essay in the New York Times, “Seeking Human Generosity’s Origins in an Ape’s Gift to Another Ape” (September 11, 2018) Read More ›