Happy New Decade

Most of the current essays on the last decade have been pretty pessimistic, but here Tyler Cowen gives us a different take. I like his view, which is similar to Zakaria in that it takes the whole world into account, rather than just the U.S., and argues that we will be better off if the rest of the world is better off. Not that we will really know what kind of decade it was until much further in the future.

It is back to work today after 10 days of lounging. I can see that retirement is going to be a fun deal, but also that I will probably volunteer somewhere to feel like I am doing some good and for other social reasons. After reading Matt Ridley's book, I got quite energized about zoology, comparative evolution and evolutionary psychology. Am about halfway through Catching Fire; How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham and have started The Ancestor's Tale and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and The Agile Gene by Ridley. Every time I dip into one of these areas of science I realilze how much learning has been going on in the last 30 years and how little I really know. There are a lot of great mysteries out there. On the other hand, here is a great article on why just trying to keep up and challenging your beliefs is good for us oldsters.

I was thinking about auditing a Philosophy of Social Science class but I don't see how I can be up there three days a week. I got partly through one of the textbooks and it looked pretty interesting. But I wish professors would do a better job of getting the course descriptions up on-line. I am giving The Teaching Company another try although I have been disappointed so far. They need to do more with the media capabilities rather than have somebody standing at a lecturn most of the time. But I am going to try Brian Fagan's Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations. I loved a couple of his books, The Great Warming and The Little Ice Age. These courses are best if you know nothing about the subject and so this one fits. They also might be quite good if you do a lot of traveling and just get the CD version.

Discovered a new internet filter called The Browser. They seem to select very good articles and have some new stuff up on Iran. This article was really good on the evolution of the Revolutionary Guards. The Guards now have a great self-interest in protecting the status quo, which I guess is what you get when any group has too much power for too long.

Addendum: Here is the entry on evolutionary psychology from the Stanford on-line Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an excellent resource. The evaluation of such theories gets pretty complicated.