Parting Thoughts I

Parting Thoughts

It has been said that there is no stronger urge than the urge to edit someone else's writing. Upon my retirement from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and concurrently from my position as co-editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Perspectives, I find that perhaps the stronger urge is not to edit but rather to editorialize. Therefore, I would like to provide some...

The European Heart Journal: parting thoughts after 6 years of editorship.

When I took over the editorial office of the European Heart Journal in the autumn of 2002 the flow of papers was mainly handled manually, and online submission did not even exist. Today more papers are read on the website of the journal than on paper, and an efficient electronic platform distributes manuscripts for review around the world in a few seconds. The use of the internet had a tremendo...

Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology, Oral Radiology, and Endodontology. Parting thoughts.

Animals, Consciousness, and I-thoughts

Parting with illusions in evolutionary ethics

I offer a critical analysis of a view that has become a dominant aspect of recent thought on the relationship between evolution and morality, and propose an alternative. An ingredient in Michael Ruse’s ‘error theory’ (Ruse 1995) is that belief in moral (prescriptive, universal, and nonsubjective) guidelines arose in humans because such belief results in the performance of adaptive cooperative b...