Many-Worlds: Why Is It Not the Consensus?

Male lactation: why, why not and is it care?

Mammals are characterised by their ability to provision offspring with milk, but lactation is normally restricted to females. Why do most males not share this trait? The morphological and physiological modifications necessary for male lactation are possible and, although restrictive, the ecological factors that could select for male lactation seem common enough. Until quite recently, there was ...

Is It Legitimate Statistics or Is It Sexism: Why Discrimination Is Not Rational

While in the ideal world, everyone should have the same chance to succeed in a given profession, in reality, often the probability of success is different for people of different gender and/or ethnicity. For example, in the US, the probability of a female undergraduate student in computer science to get a PhD is lower than a similar probability for a male student. At first glance, it may seem t...

Why James ’ Religious Option is Not Forced , and Why It Does Not Matter

Why it is not strongly irrational to have children.

I n his interesting paper Matti Häyry identifies a new disease ‘‘prereproductive stress syndrome’’ as well as a cure for the condition in the form of philosophically based counselling that the desire for having a child is irrational. Few now hold the belief that an engagement with philosophy has strong therapeutic effects (even fewer when they have met real life philosophers), but this in itsel...

Why not use it all?

One of the prominent features of the recent Annual Meeting of the Society of Toxicology (SOT) in New Orleans, Louisiana, was the debate on a hypothetical motion to have the results of mechanistic toxicity studies supersede ambiguous epidemiological data in chemical risk assessments for humans. The audience was polled prior to the debate, but the results have little to say about the merits of th...