[Buddha-l] Re: New trans. of poetry of the Sixth DL

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 22:27 -0600, Joanna wrote:

> Not knowing who Pinker is, I checked with amazon and found this blurb for 
> his recent book, _The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature and Modern 
> Intellectual Life_, that might help to clarify what he's up to:

Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954 and was trained in psychology at
McGill University. He is now at MIT, where he has done some excellent
work in cognitive psychology. He is particularly interested in the
computational view of the mind. His book <cite>How the mind works</cite>
won awards. He is one of the most readable and entertaining science
writers on the scene. As an added bonus, he likes to take on cherished
dogmas of the age and criticizes them intelligently.

If you do a Google search on him you'll find several hundred references
to people howling about his claim that a human foetus is not yet complex
enough to support enough consciousness to speak of. This produced a
spate of editorials in the NY Times decrying the fact that a person who
advocates infanticide can get tenure at a major university, and
criticizing the NY Times for allowing a child murderer to express his
views in public. 

Let me know when the times we are living in are scary enough for you.

-- 
Richard Hayes
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes