Like It or Not, Politics Is the Solution

Like it or not, politics is the solution.

Over the 20-year life of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) huge strides in biological understanding have been made. Michael Soulé, one of SCB’s founders, recently noted that prior to the mid-1980s “there was virtually no awareness of edge effects, fragmentation effects, ecological sinks, extinction vortices, inbreeding effects in natural populations, habitat destruction in the seas, en...

The EFL Pre-Service Teacher Training in Iran: Is it Adequate or not?

Teacher training programs should provide evidence that they are preparing teacher trainees for their teaching career. However, the literature contains few evaluation reports of the layout of the pre-service EFL teacher training program in Iranian EFL context, a gap which this study tries to fill. The participants of the study were high school EFL teachers (n = 346), teacher trainees (n = 97) an...

Is it or is it not a pathogenic mutation? Is it or is it not the podocyte?

Entry Barriers in Politics, or: Why Politics, Like Natural Monopoly, Is Not Organised as an Ongoing Market-Process

In the paper “Entry Barriers in Politics, or: Why Politics, Like Natural Monopoly, Is Not Organised as an Ongoing Market-Process,” an analytical framework for dealing with processes of political competition is presented. The idea goes back to Tullock’s model of democracy as franchise-bidding for natural monopoly. To this, basic insights of New Institutional Economics and Austrian Ecomomics are ...

Abstinence is not the safest sex, or is it?

I am commenting on the common saying that the safest sex is abstinence. This is a common catch-phrase used by sex educators and I have read it in a few of your readers' comments and questions. The thing I would like to point out is that abstinence is not the safest sex because it is NOT sex at all! That's like saying the safest way to fly is to stay on the ground, or the safest way to swim is t...