Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
South Africa and other states must ignore the restrictive web of trade, investment and intellectual property rules hindering the rapid manufacturing of ventilators and other medical equipment. The Treatment Action Campaign showed what is possible when, with international support, they (...)
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru would never have won a popularity contest in Pakistan quite simply because he did his best to oppose the country’s creation. But nowhere is he reviled more than in India’s current ruling circles and among those whose loyalty they command. Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy asks why.
The accusations against Nehru are often breathtaking: that he was degenerate and dissolute; born in a brothel and eventually died of syphilis; impregnated a Catholic nun; claimed to be a (...)
The Taung child (foreground) was the first of a long series of human ancestors discovered in Africa. Julien Benoit
For nearly a century now the African root of human evolutionary theory has remained strong and unbowed. It is proved by a tremendous fossil record that documents the diversity of (...)
Othe impact of our species on the planet. Alan Thornett looks at current debates:
We are at a crossroads in terms of the impact of our species on the planet. The actions of modern human beings, ‘homo sapiens’—i.e. us—are set to determine, during the course of the 21st century, whether or not the (...)
Given its huge success in describing the natural world for the past 150 years, the theory of evolution is remarkably misunderstood. In a recent episode of the Australian series of “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here”, former cricket star Shane Warne questioned the theory – asking “if humans evolved (...)
Fossil Capital – the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming, by Andreas Malm. Verso 2016 at 488 pp £19.99 reviewed by Alan Thornett.
This book is a well researched, and well-written account, from a Marxist perspective, of the industrial revolution in Britain, the origins of fossil (...)
Richard Levins was a profound thinker who devoted his life to an emancipatory vision of science.
Richard Levins, the great radical and scientist, passed away on January 19. Levins was a profound thinker who made foundational contributions to scientific and intellectual fields ranging from (...)
Review of The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis edited by Clive Hamilton, Cristophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne published by the Routledge Environmental Humanities Series in 2015.
This book is a very good introduction to a very big subject that has only been on the radar for (...)
Experts agree: Changes since 1950 rival those that ended the last ice age. The Holocene is over, and the Anthropocene has begun.
Repeatedly, over hundreds of thousands of years, glaciers expanded south and north from the polar regions, covering much of the Earth with ice sheets several (...)
“In our time, understanding and responding to the Anthropocene must be at the top of the socialist agenda.”
The word Anthropocene, unknown twenty years ago, now appears in the titles of three academic journals, dozens of books, and hundreds of academic papers, not to mention innumerable articles (...)
Darwin’s Ghosts, by Rebecca Stott. Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2012, 416 pages, $17 paperback. REBECCA STOTT’S DARWIN’S Ghosts is structured as a collection of episodes in the history of biology. The episodes, labeled by the names of individuals and an associated date, are chapters in a (...)
THERE WAS a time when the Islamic world was at the forefront of scientific ideas and discoveries. Today, the narrative has been turned around to cast the religion as a hindrance to modernisation and free thought. In his new book Jihad or Ijtihad , historian of science S Irfan Habib, 59, (...)
Reviewed by Phil Gaspar: The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould . By: Richard York and Brett Clark. New York, Monthly Review Press, 2011, 223 pp. $16.95. It has been almost 10 years since the death of the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould at the (...)
Mohammad Abdus Salam (January 29, 1926-November 21, 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist, astrophysicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work in Electro-Weak Theory. Salam, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg shared the prize for this discovery. Salam is the first Pakistani and the (...)
STEPHEN JAY GOULD died on May 20, 2002 of cancer at the age of 60. He leaves behind a vast scientific and literary legacy imbued indelibly with his unique humanist and socialist commitments.
For the last thirty-five years Gould was a faculty member at Harvard where he taught geology and the (...)
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