Ray Kurzweil and his acolytes strongly believe the Singularity is near. A lengthy profile in the Sunday New York Times business section of June 13 describes how Singularity proponents have even established a institution of putatively higher education, Singularity University, offering a ten-week "graduate" course and a nine-day...

Last Thursday, Craig Venter and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) published a paper in Science (online) that according to the senior author, J. Craig Venter, changed his view of life. Exactly how the new results changed Dr. Venter's view of life remains unclear, but that he...

Discussions about individuals with autism and related diagnoses are now pervaded by references to a putative "spectrum." Individual patients are said to be "on the spectrum." A range of developmental disabilities are referred to as "autism-spectrum disorders" or "ASD." The putative justification for this terminology is that there is great...

In the United States, April was National Autism Awareness month. Whether or not media coverage of autism increased over the past few weeks, there was already a great deal of coverage. Unfortunately, much of that coverage has been focused more on raising awareness than advancing understanding. A recent

Recently, a family friend updated my wife about her young adult son who has relatively high-functioning autism. His current situation is reasonably illustrative of the realities for many individuals with similar attributes. He lives alone, has no job, and limited social life. So while the media prefers to focus coverage...