Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve just finished reading Steve Stewart-Williams’s recent book The Ape That Understood the Universe (Cambridge University Press, revised edition 2019). I recommend it highly as a good way to get not only an introduction to evolutionary psychology, but also to see why the discipline is worthwhile and why its detractors are often misguided. Click on the screenshot if you want to buy it from Amazon US.

I have to hedge my encomiums a bit, because while most of the book—the first part that deals with evolutionary psychology—is excellent, the second bit, only the last 64 pages, is weaker. That’s the bit that deals with memes, the popular but, I think, misguided view that we can understand human cultural evolution by assuming it’s propelled by memes, “units of culture” first dreamed up by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. While memetics sounds good at first glance, and has become incorporated into…

Thousands of Germany’s wind turbines have reached the end of their economic lives; and replacing them is no simple matter. First, the costs of doing so are colossal. Secondly, the behemoths that might replace their ancestors are so large as to exceed the height limits placed on turbines by Germany’s planning rules.

Pierre Gosselin can barely conceal his delight with the fact that Germany’s wind industry is literally coming to a grinding halt.

Green Dream Arrives In Germany! But Repowering Obstacles Pose “Imminent Catastrophe” For Wind Power
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
9 September 2020

All is not so wunderbar when it comes to Germany’s wind power outlook.

The green dream, with all its scenic beauty and nature conservation, has arrived in northern Germany. But now that green dream faces more obstacles.

Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act, passed in 2000, was intended to ensure the generation of “green” electricity. Operators…

Our blogging schedule has me signed up for artwork production on Saturdays. I’m currently working on a couple of drawings – some for a book, one for a text adventure, one piece of fanart for a Harry Potter fanfiction (which, I think, either I or Nick will most probably be talking about more), and a couple of ideas I had for a site banner for this blog. I’m going to kick things off by presenting one of the drawings I did for a banner:

The depiction is of Samuel Johnson’s famous refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism. Berkeley, a prominent philosopher, maintained that the world around us existed only in perception: ours, and God’s – a position which made it seem as if the world itself were unreal (he named his philosophy “immaterialism”, which didn’t help; I believe it’s now considered a form of Idealism) and which could easily tip over…

I’ve written a couple of posts over the months drawing on work by Waikato economics professor John Gibson. Back in April there was this post, and then last month I wrote about an empirical piece Gibson had done using US county-level data suggesting that government-imposed restrictions in response to Covid may have made little consistent contribution to reducing death rates (in turn consistent with evidence suggesting that much of the decline in social contact, and economic activity, was happening anyway, in advance of government restrictions).

Fascinating as I found that paper, I was never entirely convinced how far the point would generalise, It seemed implausible, for example, that government restrictions and “lockdowns” would never make much difference – even if, in practice, the particular ones used in US counties might, on average, not have. After all, at the extreme, if a population (wrongly) regarded the threat from a particular…