ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax


Evolution had to do an "end around" to get us from lizzard to mammal.
Consider evolutions problem. It wants us closer together, but wants to inhibit our desire to eat the young. What to do?
Evolution could have spent a nearly infinite amount of time adjusting many muscle genes to manipulate our movements and inhibit them, or evolution could have cheated and used olfaction.
Olfaction was a way for evolution to cheaply drug us, it was a short cut, using aerosols to inhibit actions when around members of the species.
Since then, all of our cognitive thought became action delayed. We go through the motions of action in our head, but via the olfaction path, evolution created a means to inhibit the movement itself, leaving the sense of movement behind as thought.
Studying physics and logic are excellent training for the brain. Do everything you can to defeat bias in your thinking. Ideology is deadly; it will make you stupid.
Bill:
Prove it. Bonus points for using only pure logic.
To FC: Bill's claim that physics and logic are excellent training for the brain cannot be proved through logic alone. This is a scientific hypothesis that must be tested using the scientific method. One would first need an accepted and reproducible way of testing the brain's ability to handle logic and solve problems, then one would need to do either case matching or randomization to assign persons to a test group and one or more control groups (such as no studying or studying English literature and sociology). After a period of study, the groups would be retested to see if their cognitive skills improved.