I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Woody, your remark has a good point - that markets can help to close externalities - but of course that doesn't really make them go completely away, because much of the land and most of the wildlife are "public" and thus ineffectively owned.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of something I've seen recently about the bushtailed possums that are wreaking havok in NZ (which has no native mammalian predators other than a few bats): http://www.perc.org/articles/article1066.php