Are conservative intellectuals anti-intellectual? The short answer must be no. Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay—conservative thinkers have championed scholarship, learning, and history. The long answer, however, is more ambiguous. Confronted by social upheavals, conservative intellectuals tend to blame other intellectuals—socialist, liberal, secular—as the cause. They perceive political unrest as…
Amid a cascade of comment on the decline of mainline Protestantism, an historian argues that a great progressive tradition is in the throes of renewal
Punishment helps discourage the dishonest from destroying the fabric of cooperative human societies. But that’s not what you actually think about when you feel the urge to punish a rule-breaker. Scientists have long debated what motivates humans’ deep-seated desire for retaliation, which we’ll carry out even at great personal cost. New research published in the…
The headline on the press release about a new report warns of “R&D trends posing a threat” to the U.S. economy. Scary words, to be sure, especially coming from the presidentially appointed National Science Board, the policy-setting body for the $7 billion a year National Science Foundation. But the data upon which the board bases…
Big scientific discoveries, such as the God particle, can have great Earthly potential that must be shared by the world’s poor. The announcement from CERN that we now have compelling evidence for the Higgs boson — the elementary particle that, according to theory, allows other particles to obtain mass — is widely acknowledged as a…
Americans’ confidence in organized religion is at its lowest in more than three decades, with just 44% having a lot of faith in the church, a new Gallup poll suggests. The results follow a long-term decline in Americans’ confidence in religion since the 1970s, when Americans ranked “the church or organized religion” higher than any…
Wild chimpanzees communicate using similar gestures to humans, according to a Stirling researcher. Anna Roberts said she had identified about 20 to 30 manual gestures used by chimps, up to a third of which were similar to those used by humans. The chimps’ gestures included beckoning to make someone approach or flailing their arms to…
In many cases in the developing world, red tape and lack of funding ensure that the best projects go to men. The administrators are not willing to take a risk on a woman, it would seem. Problems get compounded for a woman who already has a family. It would appear almost as if having a…
Stone spearheads and human DNA found in Oregon caves, anthropologists say, have produced firmer evidence that these are the oldest directly dated remains of people in North America. They also show that at least two cultures with distinct technologies — not a single one, as had been supposed — shared the continent more than 13,000…
The hormone-disrupting chemical makes it hard for some fish to recognize their own species, a problem that could ripple throughout ecosystems.