The Scientific Fundamentalist

The guest blogger and PT intern Jen Kim complains about the difficulties of dating in New York.  No wonder she finds it difficult.  Since 1966, it’s been mathematically proven that dating in New York is difficult.... Read More

My fellow PT blogger Dan Ariely is one of the most creative behavioral economists in the world today, one of the hotshots in currently the hottest academic field.  Ariely is to behavioral economics what Steven Levitt (coauthor of Freakonomics) is to standard economics, simultaneously a superb and mind-bogglingly creative scientist and excellent communicator of their science to the general audience.  As great as Dan Ariely is, however, he has one major flaw:  He is not an evolutionary psychologist. Read More

Contrary to popular belief (and what most social scientists think), all good science is reductionist. The particle physicist and Nobel laureate (and one of my intellectual heroes) Steven Weinberg expresses it best, when he says “The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because this is the way the world works.” Read More

Douglas T. Kenrick of the Arizona State University is one of the leading evolutionary psychologists in the world. He's also widely regarded as the funniest evolutionary psychologist alive. Among Kenrick's numerous scientific achievements are a series of experiments he conducted with his ASU colleagues in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which indirectly launched my career in evolutionary psychology, and led to their discovery of a significant phenomenon known as the contrast effect. Read More