Author: Logan Chipkin

Free Speech is a Value, not a Right

Published by Logan Chipkin

Free speech is a value, not a right. Understanding this distinction sheds light on the various debates in the culture war—who social media platforms should ban, the role of the First Amendment, and cancel culture. It’s true that companies like Twitter and Facebook have the moral right to allow whoever they like on their platforms. In that sense, customers do not have some immutable right to say whatever they please, but instead must conform to the companies’ rules or risk banishment. The same holds for a suburban dinner party—the host owns the house and so determines the rules of engagement for guests. In general, it is the owner of the property who decides what is and is not acceptable speech there. Even the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution does not really grant its citizens a right to free speech. The Amendment is more about constraining government encroachment rather than allowing Americans to speak their mind in all places and at all times. “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or …

How Innovation Works—A Review

Published by Logan Chipkin

A review of How Innovation Works and How it Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley, Harper (May 19th, 2020), 416 pages. If you are reading this, then you are taking advantage of the global information network we call the Internet and a piece of electronic hardware known as a computer. For much of the world, access to these technologies is commonplace enough to be taken for granted, and yet they only emerged in the last century. A few hundred thousand years ago, mankind was born into a Hobbesian state of destitution, literally and figuratively naked. Yet we’ve come to solve an enormous sequence of problems to reach the heights of the modern world, and continue to do so (global extreme poverty currently stands at an all-time low of just nine percent). But what are the necessary ingredients in solving such problems, in improving the conditions of humanity? In How Innovation Works, author Matt Ridley investigates the nature of progress by documenting the stories behind some of the developments that make our modern lives possible. Early …

In Celebration of Errors

Published by Logan Chipkin

Making mistakes is out of fashion. To utter the wrong phrase or entertain an uncomfortable hypothesis is to risk both personal and professional ostracism. You might express an idea that is false, such as that the Earth is flat. Or you might say something that is true but nonetheless violates some taboo. A historical example is the assertion that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which once upon a time would have landed a person in hot water with the Catholic Church, as scientist Galileo Galilei learned the hard way in the 1600s. The content of what is unspeakable ebbs and flows over time as culture evolves and our understanding of reality improves. While defending Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection would once have elicited mockery, today, the opposite is (mostly) true. It is irrelevant whether or not someone is correct when he initially expresses an idea. What matters is how others respond to an idea that they find unpalatable, as solving problems always requires correcting errors. Civilization has been in the game of …

Origins and Exploration—An Interview with Dr. Lewis Dartnell

Published by Logan Chipkin

Dr. Lewis Dartnell is an award-winning research scientist in the field of astrobiology. In his most recent book, the Sunday Times bestseller Origins: How the Earth Made Us, Dartnell tells the story of how cosmic and geological forces have directed the evolution of humans and their civilizations. The following is an interview with Dr. Dartnell about Origins, as well as his field of expertise, astrobiology—the search for life in the universe. *     *     *  Logan Chipkin: Early in Origins, you describe a fascinating hypothesis which causally links the cosmic movements of Earth with the evolution of human intelligence. What is this hypothesis, in detail? Lewis Dartnell: One of the big questions in evolutionary biology is: what drove our evolution from tree-swinging apes to bipedal, highly intelligent homonins that went on to build civilization and inherit the world? Primarily, what needs to happen is that the land around you needs to dry out, the forests need to be replaced by grasslands, by savannah. And what was driving that process over 5–6 million years since …

Memes, Genes, and Sex Differences—An Interview with Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams

Published by Logan Chipkin

Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham, researching the evolution of altruism and human sex differences. The philosophical implications of evolutionary theory was the focus of his first book, Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life. The following is an interview with Stewart-Williams about his new book, The Ape that Understood the Universe. Logan Chipkin: Your book begins with an alien’s perspective on modern humanity. This alien has apparently never encountered typical human behavior. How did you come up with this idea, and how did you subsequently decide which aspects of humanity to include in the alien’s report? Steve Stewart-Williams: Like you say, I kick off the book by looking at human beings through the eyes of an alien scientist: a hyper-intelligent alien scientist from a species that doesn’t have males and females, doesn’t fall in love, doesn’t have families, and doesn’t have music or art or reality TV or anything else like that. And I ask: What would such a being make of us? The short answer is …