Groucho Marxism
Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics
Category: Science
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Last summer I entered a competition run by the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The competition involved forecasting the incidence of Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted to humans via bites from ticks. The way the competition worked was that the Alan Turing Institute provided data on…
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A ‘magnetosphere’ is a region of space surrounding an astronomical object, such as a planet, in which charged particles are affected by that object’s magnetic field. A geomagnetic storm is a temporary disturbance of the Earth’s magnetosphere driven by interactions between it and magnetic field structures that originate from the Sun. In September 1859, the…
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The American physicist Richard Feynman once famously remarked: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” The point Feynman was making is that quantum mechanics is strange, weird, counter-intuitive, and that some questions about it cannot or should not be asked. However, this strangeness disappears if we are willing to accept…
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In the last few years there has been a rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across all sectors of society. This has been driven largely by the development if so-called ‘generative AI’ technology. Generative AI is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, audio, software code, and other forms…
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Scientific socialism is a term popularized by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe their socio-political approach, which aims to apply the scientific method to the analysis of society. It contrasts with utopian socialism by basing itself upon material conditions instead of conceptions and ideas. Thus, scientific socialism takes a materialist approach to the analysis…
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The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, will be held in Brazil from 10 to 21 November. In this context, COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and refers to the annual meeting of the nearly 200 countries that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At…
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The term ‘climate change’ refers to both global warming – the ongoing increase in global average temperature – and its wider effects on Earth’s climate system. It is generally accepted now that climate change is happening and that it is already having an impact on the environment. Many such impacts have been observed in the…
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The standard account of human history runs as follows. First, modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Then, for a long time nothing much happened, until about 11,000 years ago when somebody invented agriculture. After that, human civilization took off – and the rest, as they say, is history. There is a glaring…
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Which came first, the chicken or the egg? As we all know, this question has no answer, but it is instructive to think about why it has no answer. The reason, as we all intuitively understand, is that there isn’t a linear relationship between chickens and eggs; rather, there is a feedback loop between the…
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