{"id":83874,"date":"2015-12-30T11:51:49","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T19:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83874"},"modified":"2015-12-30T11:51:49","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T19:51:49","slug":"the-hard-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83874","title":{"rendered":"The Hard Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In The Hard Problem<\/em>, set in England in the first decade of the new century, his similarly old-fashioned heroine is beset instead by the self-confidence of her neo-Darwinian colleagues. The left is intellectually nugatory, and all the energy resides with the disciples of the late biologist William D. Hamilton<\/a>, such as Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley. Stoppard explains that the play grew out of an argument he started with Dawkins<\/a> over his 1976 book The Selfish Gene<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the two young men the heroine strives to out-argue sound rather like my pals at the classic blog Gene Expression<\/a> circa 2005. In his \u201cAuthor\u2019s Note,\u201d Stoppard cites Imperial College evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi, an expert on human genetic variety<\/a>, as his chief guide to the science. (Here\u2019s Razib\u2019s<\/a> interview with Dr. Leroi at GNXP<\/a> ten years ago.)<\/p>\n

This surprisingly short play references a remarkable number of concepts utilized by 21st-century right-of-center intellectuals\u2014the story opens, for example, with the heroine\u2019s tutor explaining the Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma, the standard introduction to theories of how altruism could evolve.<\/p>\n

Other longtime fascinations of the Edge.org<\/a> crowd featured in The Hard Problem<\/em> are the replication crisis<\/a> in psychology, the larger implications of the financial crisis of 2008, and adoption. The nature-nurture implications of adoption are of natural interest to Stoppard, who only discovered in his 50s that he wasn\u2019t roughly a quarter Jewish as he had assumed, but was entirely Jewish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes: In The Hard Problem, set in England in the first decade of the new century, his similarly old-fashioned heroine is beset instead by the self-confidence of her neo-Darwinian colleagues. The left is intellectually nugatory, and all the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29700],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t