Footnote Physicist

 by Steven Gussman I never met Dr. Trivers. As such, I feel a bit silly writing a scientific obituary for him. I do not want to take any attention away from his actual family, friends, and colleagues, whose obituaries I am looking forward to reading. But Dr. Trivers did touch my life. Like many others, I first learned about Dr. Trivers and his ideas from Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene 1  and Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate . 2   For me, these were the heady days of 2018. I had just graduated from college a year before, and taught a semester as a PTL (before getting kicked out for political reasons). I was on a crash course learning about postmodernsim, The Long March Through The Institutions, and how so much of social “science” was hostile to evolutionary biology. Pinker showed how Trivers’ ideas brought the social down to a hard science, like physics, by revealing the underlying evolutionary logic that explains how and why such behavioral traits ev...

 by Steven Gussman Author's Note: This article was originally published to the now-defunct   Areo Magazine on 5/30/23 . What appears below is pulled from a version I archived on 11/7/23 (though I don't believe changes were ever made to this article). C onsciousness is among the greatest outstanding scientific mysteries. We have no direct way of telling whether a given being is conscious and therefore have to rely on basic induction. We know that we ourselves are conscious—as Descartes said, “I think therefore I am”—but to avoid solipsism, we must also reason that other people are conscious as well (that it is a feature of our species), and even that many other animals are conscious (judging by their complex behaviour, and the fact that their minds were generated by the same process of evolution by natural selection that generated our own). Would it be possible to build an artificial human that could fool anyone who met it, but that would nevertheless be a mindless machine wi...

by Steven Gussman         In high school history class, as is often the case with issues of identity in the 21 st century, I was given the impression that a significant front opposed Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy on the grounds that he was religiously Catholic (despite his ultimately winning the election). This was presented as a mere (if somewhat tame) expression of bigotry from a country with an ugly history of such attitudes (not to mention practices and laws). In part, it surely was. It had been argued by some that J.F.K. would take his orders not from the American people, but from a foreign actor in the Pope of the Catholic Church in Rome. Ridiculous, for sure, but in reading through some of America's founding documents, I was met with a piece of philosophical history that left me with a slightly more nuanced opinion of this particular opposition to J.F.K.         The early British-American colonists are often described in ter...