The nexus between science and diplomacy has grown increasingly important as both the international relations between countries become increasingly complex and the scientific endeavor expands globally. The term and concept, "science diplomacy," has gained currency at the highest political levels. >>Read More

The culture war is far more vicious in the United States, and has become more so in recent years, something that has grown to disturb the University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt. >>Read More

For years I have been turning the phrase “the nature of discourse” over in my head, like a tumbler polishing a stone. Discourse is a verbal interaction among people. As such, it is a social behavior that might benefit from evolutionary analysis. >>Read More

Partly stemming from misapplication of metaphors such as "survival of the fittest" and the "struggle for survival," it was assumed that Darwinian processes could only produce selfish individuals that care not for the welfare of others. In the case of coalitional violence, early ethologists argued that chimpanzees and humans naturally strive to dominate each other and that aggression is the inevitable consequence of competitive social environments. >>Read More

Laudable as such attitudes may be, they make it difficult for social scientists to study war. Scientists are part of the broader society and are affected by shifts in the public mood. >>Read More

The new standards, based on recommendations from the National Research Council, are not mandatory for all states. But they have already provoked a backlash from states, such as Utah, which have officially ruled climate change is not settled science. An unauthorised release of documents from the rightwing Heartland Institute last month revealed an ambitious plan in 2012 to discredit existing teaching on climate change. >>Read More

Good guy" -- the description of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales by neighbors that is headlining in the American media -- is pretty much the way ordinary Germans saw other Germans who brutalized people in extermination camps in WW2 (See Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust). >>Read More