As an evolutionary biologist, I have developed a sort-of obsession with viewing the entire world in evolutionary terms.  I see religion as a consequence of natural selection, languages evolve, change over time and are related to one another and I see adaptation as an intrinsic feature of humanity.
So, right now we are in a time […]

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I see in the news today that Louis Vuitton has recorded a staggering 11% jump in sales for the first quarter of this year.  Also in news today, the Restaurants Association of Ireland has appealed for the minimum wage to be lowered so that poorly-paid people can be paid less.
What does this mean?  Well, for […]

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The nation is tearing itself apart right now.  There is anger on the part of the teachers who have been hit by the govenment levies, the pay cut and the paycut-by-another-name, the pension levy.  There is anger on the part of the private sector people who, by virtue of the fact that they don’t have […]

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I took a look at the news online today and my eye was drawn to an item that seemed to be a bit of good news.
Good news, you say? Well, we all need a bit of good news, what is it?
Well,  as I said, it looks like good news, but in fact it is a […]

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Let me first of all alert you to a quote from Monsignor Alex Stenson, who was Chancellor to three Bishops in the 80s and 90s.  In a recent interview for a Catholic newspaper he says:
What abusers did was wrong. It was dreadful, but was it always sinful? It was always wrong. Sinful? I am not […]

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This morning on Pat Kenny’s radio programme there was a clinical psychologist and a homeopath discussing whether homeopathy had any validity.
First of all, it always galls me that the media, in the interest of ‘balance’ has a scientist and a quack on opposite sides of a debate.  They are not equivalent in any way.  One […]

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I have written before about the parlous state of mathematics achievements amoung our students in Ireland.  There is a pressing need to improve maths standards and there seems to be very little consensus on how to achieve improvements.  We have had suggestions of increasing the reward for studying maths at the highest levels - by […]

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Yesterday I was at a meeting where some of the results of an independent study of our research outcomes was presented.
I was told I couldn’t see all the results, but nobody told me I couldn’t talk about the results that I did see.
The study was carried out by a Dutch company who specialise in this […]

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Ferdinand von Prondzynski has been writing about Bat O’Keefe’s allegation that some university academics only work 4 hours per week, or at least teach only four hours per week.
It is not clear why this figure came out from Bat O’Keeffe’s mouth, but it smacks of a ’softening up’ of the third level sector in an effort to […]

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You might want to read this today about Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a scientist who caused much of the controversy about the MMR vaccine and his claim of a link with Autism.
The problem with this is that it comes 12 years after his initial publication (13 authors on the publication, the journal was the Lancet and […]

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