ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
Can a planet have a mind of its own? Science continues to explore the Gaia Hypothesis, which speculates that our planet is a self-regulating organism which may hold a collective planetary intelligence, which humanity is part of and affects. If this is true, what will scientific observation show us about other civilizations on extraterrestrial planets? …
In 2018 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had something to say: “AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire.” Pichai’s comment was met with a healthy dose of skepticism. But nearly five years later, …
For the second time in five years, scientists are warning about declining human sperm counts. (I wrote about this issue in “Declining sperm counts: Nature’s answer to overpopulation?” early last year.) Read more
Sperm counts worldwide have halved over the past five decades, and the pace of the decline has more than doubled since the turn of the century, new research shows. The international team behind it says the data is alarming and points to a fertility crisis threatening the survival of humanity. Their meta-analysis looked at 223 …
The Enlightenment” has been regarded as a turning point in the intellectual history of the West. The principles of religious tolerance, optimism about human progress and a demand for rational debate are often thought to be a powerful legacy of the ideas of Locke, Newton, Voltaire and Diderot. There was however a radical Enlightenment, indebted …
As we mark the end of the ninth month of the largest, most brutal war in Europe since 1945, the worst thing we can do for peace on our continent is to push for peace negotiations with Vladimir Putin. The best thing we can do for peace is to increase our military, economic and humanitarian support …
When we talk about the concept of race in the 21st century, we are discussing a socially constructed idea. For the most part, we are talking about skin color when we use the term today. But, at the dawn of the 17th century, race typically identified a group of people with a common ancestor. That group, just …
Conservatism (or conservativism) is any political philosophy that favors tradition (in the sense of various religious, cultural, or nationally-defined beliefs and customs) in the face of external forces for change, and is critical of proposals for radical social change. Some Conservatives seek to preserve the status quo or to reform society slowly, while others seek to return to the values of an earlier time. Read more
Conservatism and its modernising, anti-traditionalist rivals, liberalism and socialism, are the most influential political philosophies and ideologies of the post-Enlightenment era. Conservatives criticise their rivals for making a utopian exaggeration of the power of theoretical reason, and of human perfectibility. Conservative prescriptions are based on what they regard as experience rather than reason; for them, …
Conservatism is a preference for the historically inherited rather than the abstract and ideal. This preference has traditionally rested on an organic conception of society—that is, on the belief that society is not merely a loose collection of individuals but a living organism comprising closely connected, interdependent members. Conservatives thus favour institutions and practices that have evolved gradually and are manifestations of continuity and stability. Government’s …