I'm surprised the issue of race doesn't seem to have entered into the discussions of Judge Barrett's pending confirmation as a Justice of the Supreme Court. In her short career on the appellate bench, Barrett has voted on one sensitive issue of racial civil rights, the Autozone case. Autozone is a chain of auto parts stores that has several stores in Chicago. It seems to have segregated its employees in its assignments, sending the Black employees to the Black neighborhoods and vice versa for their white colleagues. The EEOC brought an action against this policy. A three-judge panel of the 7th circuit (a panel to which Judge Barrett did not belong) ruled in favor of Autozone, holding that these assignments are a matter of managerial discretion. The EEOC tried to appeal this to the whole court, that is, en banc. But the appeal was rejected and the ruling stands. My point? Barrett was one of those who voted in favor of refusing to take the appeal. She gave her supp...
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Here are some dates. Herbert Spencer, SOCIAL STATICS (1851) Charles Darwin, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859) Henry Maine ANCIENT LAW (1861) Henry Maine, VILLAGE COMMUNITIES (1871) Charles Darwin, THE DESCENT OF MAN (1871) Joseph Fisher, THE HISTORY OF LANDHOLDING (1877) Herbert Spencer, THE DATA OF ETHICS (1879) Social Statics , the one specific ally cited (and rejected as a constitutional authority) by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Lochner case, was early Spencer, and preceded the great Darwinian controversy. Maine did develop his legal theories subsequent to Darwin, but there is no biologism in them. Maine believed that human societies have passed through predictable stages, and that the overall direction of progress in which the world was engaged in the 19th century was a move away from status toward contract. A movement away from inborn identity to voluntary choices and the acceptance of their consequences. The later Spencer may well owe a lot to...
As readers may be aware, Herbert Spencer has been much on my mind of late. As a side effect of this, I became curious about who first used "social" as an adjective in front of "Darwinism," and in what context. The answer may well be an otherwise forgotten writer named Joseph Fisher. [In wikipedia, there is a disambiguation page for the name "Joseph Fisher," which lists 13 different men of that name who are notable in various ways. Most of the "Fishers" listed are in blue, indicating that they each have a wikipedia article of his own. The Joseph Fisher I have in mind is the only one listed in red -- indicating no article -- so the only information about him you will find in wikipedia is the one fact used to distinguish him on the disambiguation page, that he "coined the phrase" social Darwinism.] In 1877, the TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY ran Fisher's (very lengthy) article on "The History of Landholding in Ire...
Scientists recently announced that they are now confident phosphine is present in the atmosphere of Venus. This suggests -- it doesn't prove but it suggests -- that there is life on the planet. (There could be some strange but non-living chemical reactions going on, which would itself be a fascinating discovery but would make for less dramatic headlines than the one I used above.) On earth, phosphine results from the breakdown of organic tissue. It is the gas that produces the distinctive smell of dead fish, or garlic. The issue of life-on-Mars remains debatable. The issue of life-on-Venus may just be getting (excuse the pun) lively. But one can now make the case that life isn't a rarity in the universe. It isn't even a rarity in this one solar system. It may well be the norm given certain broad parameters of planets circling a sun at a given range of distances, and this solar system may simply happen to have three bodies within that range.
There are lots of stories in various media that follow this pattern: 1. Something spooky happens. 2. Someone (the story's rationalist) explains it, perhaps with the help of a surprising twist. The spooky thing has a natural explanation. 3. Finally, the twist is retwisted, the explanation comes unraveled. We are left with the initial spookiness. This was a common template in the old Rod Serling Twilight Zones. Here is a single example of which I have a memory both indelible and vague. A notorious bad-guy cowboy comes into town, and goes to a cemetery on a dare. He dies standing on a gravesite. It is the plot, we soon learn, of a man whom this newly departed hombre had murdered years before. Ah, spooky ... could the dead person have reached out from beyond the grave and killed him? Looks like it: but ... The town rationalist has an explanation. Lots of townspeople are standing around the scene of the suspicious/spooky heart attack while the rationalist expla...
In understanding the history of this pandemic, US edition, the Biogen meeting in Boston is several months back in the rear view mirror, but looms ever larger as it is studied. In late winter 2020, Biogen -- NASDAQ listed, and indeed a NASDAQ 100 component -- hosted a conference. I'm sure sure what the specific subject of the conference was, but it involved flying specialists in from Europe, from countries that were already contending with severe outbreaks of Covid-19. If you like irony you can find it in the fact that a company known for its IP portfolio in bio-med technology acted so naively. The conference proved to be a super-spreader event. In retrospect, it has "pandemic" written on it in neon. A lot of people from all over the US and the world gathered together in confined spaces to meet. Only a small number of them had any of the virus in their system when they got together, but many seemed to have had it when they went their separate ways -- again, to place...
A fine review. Is it rational for me to feel a sense of loss at the fact that the NDPR has said au revoir? https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/nothing-tome-a-defence-of-the-growing-block-theory-of-time/ I believe I've described it before. The "growing block" theory of reality, also a theory of time, is that which postulates that the present and past are real. The future is not yet real. So reality is growing, and the present moment is the edge of its growth. This is an attractive theory in that it sets out how the world seems to work. We should not depart from such a persistent seeming without reason. I wake up in the morning and find that a variety of changes that I made to my apartment are still here. The book shelf I put up yesterday is still here. Unless I'm a bad carpenter and it fell overnight. In which case there is a mess of books and wood on the floor. Even in that case, though, reality has grown by the addition of a new shelf, and then by the further addition of ...